OTHERWORLDS won A MAZE's Human Human Machine Award
Sophia Bulgakova's mixed-reality ritual, drawn from Ukrainian pagan practice, took the Berlin festival's prize for collective presence.
You stand in darkness with strangers, a soft voice describing the world you are about to enter. Then reality slips: abstract color fields in virtual and mixed reality, spatial sound pressing in, the group moving together in shared choreography. OTHERWORLDS, the participatory performance by Ukrainian artist Sophia Bulgakova, rebuilds the communal ritual as a technology—the project Ukrainian traditions and pagan practices into what Bulgakova calls "tools for personal and communal transformation."
In May, at the 15th A MAZE. / Berlin festival, the jury picked it out of 435 submissions from 78 countries and handed it the Human Human Machine Award, writing that the work "takes something so ancient and leaves it not diminished, but amplified." That is the precise thing to say about it. The machine here is not simulating a ritual for a single headset-wearer; it is hosting one for a room, which is why the award's doubled "Human Human" fits so well. The piece was also a Lumen Prize Experiential Award finalist in 2025.
Bulgakova, born in Odesa and based in The Hague, made the piece with creative development by Leonardo Scarin and Harm van de Ven and sound design by Mark IJzerman; it is produced and distributed by the Amsterdam platform FIBER. The through-line is one this publication keeps finding: virtual reality reaching past novelty toward the sacred, the same current we traced in Uzoma Orji's spiritual undertones of virtual reality. Pre-Christian ritual bound communities through shared movement and altered perception. OTHERWORLDS makes the argument that a render engine can do the same work, together, in a dark room.
