Bicoastal production partner m ss ng p eces has added augmented reality (AR) creator Asad J. Malik, multidisciplinary artist Ash Baccus-Clark, and creative collective Hexagram to its immersive roster.
Led by m ss ng p eces director of immersive and ECD Mike Woods, that roster is home to forward thinking, creative problem solvers who’ve created groundbreaking work that’s won assorted awards including the first ever Production Company of the Year honor from the 2020 Webby Awards.
Malik is a pioneering AR artist and director, known for crafting genre-pushing narrative projects that explore human connection, ethics, and culture. He was born and raised in Pakistan before emigrating to the U.S. for college. A self-taught programmer, as a college student he launched his own creative banner 1RIC to develop interactive AR projects–including Terminal 3, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, and A Jester’s Tale, which debuted at Sundance. Terminal 3 places viewers into an airport interrogation scene to explore themes of immigration and contemporary Muslim identity while A Jester’s Tale, starring internet phenom Poppy, is a subversive and surreal take on fairy tales. Both projects debuted to critical acclaim. A recent graduate, he continues to operate 1RIC and recently debuted a new AR mobile app Jadu that allows users to perform alongside holograms of their favorite musicians.
Baccus-Clark is a Los Angeles and Berlin-based molecular and cellular biologist and multidisciplinary artist who uses new media and storytelling to explore themes of deep learning, cognition, memory, race, trauma, and systems of belief. She was an Ida Ely Rubin Artist in Residence at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology, an RLabs XR Beta Resident, and a 2019 United States Artist fellow in Media. As part of the creative collective Hyphen-Labs, Baccus-Clark wrote and produced the award-winning immersive installation project NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism (NSAF), a three-part digital narrative that sits at the intersection of product design, virtual reality, and neuroscience. Inspired by the lack of multidimensional representations of Black women in technology, NSAF incorporates object-based design, virtual reality, and cognitive impact research that reimagines the future of Black women in STEM fields. NSAF first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017 and has been shown at SXSW, Tribeca Film Fest (Jury Honorable Mention), Gray Area Art & Technology Festival, Primer Speculative Futures Conference, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Stony Island Arts Bank & Rebuild Foundation, New Inc: Versions Festival, Refinery 29’s 29 Rooms, and more.
Hexagram is a collective of immersive experience creators, drawing from a diverse roster with expertise in gaming, ARGs, AI, theme parks, traditional filmmaking, user experience design, magic, and more to deliver experiences that span the digital and physical worlds. Since 2012, Hexagram has employed Saga, their in-house experience design platform, to create immersive campaigns and apps for storytelling, including the alternate reality game “Dispatches from Elsewhere” for AMC, the experiential Scoops Ahoy activation with Netflix and Baskin-Robbins for Stranger Things season 3, and the Meow Wolf Outside scavenger hunt at SXSW 2018.
