Where There’s Smoke is an immersive storytelling experience about life, loss, and memory that reveals itself to be both deeply personal and universally resonant. Writer/director Lance Weiler unravels the secrets of his enigmatic father—a volunteer firefighter and amateur fire scene photographer—and two devastating fires that struck the Weiler family in the early 1980s. In the final months of his battle with colon cancer, his father invited Lance to interview him, and these conversations reignited 30 years of wondering... were those fires more than tragic accidents?

Where There’s Smoke as a project had its world premiere at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and was reimagined in 2023 for an exhibition at ArtYard in Frenchtown, NJ. For the 2023 version, Double Take Labs was brought in to reimagine the production to be a more individualized, intimate experience using various emerging technologies.

Guests carried a custom flashlight around a series of rooms within the experience and personalized audio would play based on their locations, actions, and other environmental factors. The audio score was completely generative, using 8 audio tracks that were live mixed on the device. Using a real time location system (RTLS) we were able to determine guests’ positions control various aspects of the room, the audio from the flashlight, as well as the light output.

Photography by Miana Jun