Morning fog settling along the treeline of the Swannanoa Valley, Western North Carolina
Swannanoa Valley

Mountainchase Studio sits in the post-Helene Swannanoa Valley of Western North Carolina, ten miles from the original campus of Black Mountain College. The valley holds centuries of land use — Cherokee stewardship, timber, agriculture, rail — and now the slow work of recovery after Hurricane Helene reshaped its watersheds, roads, and daily life. Virtual Field Lab is a residency for artists working in immersive media who treat this place as a field site: not backdrop, but collaborator.

02 The Lab

Interior of a barn studio in the Swannanoa Valley — field lab workspace for immersive media
The Lab — barn interior

The Lab organizes practice around four pipelines and a set of recurring field exercises. Residents move between studio and site, building worlds from what the valley offers.

Live-Capture World Building

Real-time capture of light, sound, and movement in the field, assembled into navigable environments.

Cyber-Physical Storytelling

Narratives that cross physical installation and virtual space — objects in the valley triggering scenes elsewhere.

Body as Instrument

Performance and somatic practice as input: gesture, breath, and presence translated into immersive form.

XR

Extended reality as field notation — augmented, virtual, and mixed modalities for documenting and reimagining place.

Field exercises

Field exercises return each season. Residents document, respond, and build from direct observation.

  • fireflies
  • drought
  • tree life cycles
  • mushrooms
  • cattle paths
  • valley train

03 Lineage

Exterior of a barn in the Swannanoa Valley — land and structure carrying the valley's art history forward
Lineage — barn exterior

Lake Eden Retreat lies at the center of this valley's modern art history. Black Mountain College gathered poets, painters, composers, and dancers who treated education as experiment — interdisciplinary, site-responsive, skeptical of the market. The college closed in 1957; the land remains.

Mountainchase Studio draws a through-line from that experiment to immersive media as the new field. Not nostalgia, but continuity: artists working at the edge of form, in conversation with place and with each other. The tools have changed. The question — what can art do here? — has not.

04 Cohort

The inaugural cohort brings together resident collaborators and a framework of ten local voices. Names below are placeholders for the public site.

Resident collaborators

  • Jakob Kudsk Steensen
  • Leo Castaneda
  • Niko Koppel
  • Carla Gannis

Ten local voices

Each residency cycle engages ten practitioners rooted in the valley and its histories.

  • rangers
  • EBCI tradition bearers
  • Penland
  • watershed keepers
  • BMC historian

Additional voice categories to be named with community partners.

05 Contact

For residency inquiries and correspondence:

mountainchase81@gmail.com