Folly Feast Lab

Folly Feast Lab is a collaboration team, consisting of artists Yara Feghali and Viviane El Kmati, based in Santa Monica, California. Their goal is to “design immersive and interactive experiences to connect physical and virtual worlds.”

Viviane is a Lebanese designer and the technology director working with virtual reality, storytelling, and artificial intelligence technologies. Developed and built impactful end-to-end projects for Google R+D for the Built Environment, Alex McDowell, American Society of Civil Engineers, UCLA, Liam Young, USC, and Ford Motor Company.

Yara is a French-Lebanese architectural designer and the creative director working at the intersection of architecture pedagogy, transmedia, and immersive technologies. Viviane is a Lebanese designer and technology director working with virtual reality, storytelling, and artificial intelligence technologies. Through worldbuilding and storytelling, they design immersive and interactive experiences, applications, software, design tools and games around queer identity, sustainability, and technology.

In this project titled Be.Longing XR, Folly Feast Lab reconstructs the residential urban fabric of Los Angeles into a new streetscape of endless front porches into an immersive experience. This results in a filmic diary filled with subtle symbols of queer female-identifying subcultures on three-dimensional scanned point clouds of more than 28 existing houses from 12 different neighborhoods. It is the story of Amal, a woman driving through LA’s neighborhoods in search of her queer community.

These three tapestries are snapshots of Amal’s journey taken from the passenger car's point of view to make viewers into active protagonists and challenge their view of their city and look at it through a queer narrative point of view. In this work, they often explore innovative ways to design fantastic experiences as aesthetically engaging as they are technologically performing. The artist is always looking for new opportunities to push the boundaries of storytelling and worldbuilding, pushing participants to explore new territories.