On the Room
Touch is the embodiment of a sense that acquiesces to the unchartable qualities of a body in motion. Erin Manning wrote that. I've been thinking about it in relation to what those of us in experiential do and why it's so difficult to name.
I came to this field from fine art. Installation, film, gallery pieces. The phenomenological questions that drove my practice: how bodies move through space, how encounters register somatically, how meaning accrues not in the mind but in the flesh. These turned out to be the same questions at the heart of experiential production and design.
Most experiential folks arrive here laterally. Party promoters who became producers. Sculptors who became fabricators. Designers who became creative directors. Artists who became account managers. Journalists who became reps. We learn on the job, in the gap between the brief and the build, solving problems that didn't exist until we were standing inside them. What we share is not a credential but a practice. And a practice that is fundamentally cinesthetic: embodied, sensuous, irreducible to its documentation.
Experiential Producers Room gathering at Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY. May 4, 2026
We produce bodies moving in space. We set the conditions for encounters that register as lived memory: as wonder, as awe, as the particular charge that comes from being in a room where something real is happening. Laura U. Marks calls this haptic visuality: the way certain images and experiences invoke a tactile response, collapsing the distance between observer and event.
Experiential production, at its best, is that collapse.
I started the Experiential Producers Room because the field lacked a space where this could be spoken about directly. Not another industry platform where there's pressure to perform certainty, but a low-noise room that functions more like a threshold than a conference, where distinct practices and people overlap and something new becomes possible.
Last month, close to 200 experiential producers, creative operators, strategists, fabricators, cultural programmers, agency leads, artists, and makers gathered on a garden terrace at Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn as the sun went down over the city.
I stopped the party at its peak and asked everyone to breathe with me.
Because it's easy to forget what we actually do and what we actually are: bodies in space.
That's the Room. And it's growing delightfully — next up for the EPR—IRL: London.
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