You’re lying down, looking up at the underwater. You’re watching a volcano cascade electric lava onto a grayscale mountain range. You’re living four lives at once. Also, you haven’t left Park City, and it’s not even 10 o’clock in the morning.

This year’s iteration of New Frontier, Sundance’s annual showcase for vanguard works of new, immersive and interactive media, was unveiled on Friday morning at The Yard, a nondescript warehouse complex that has been turned into the grooviest crib in Park City. Seven installations are spread out over a space liberally outfitted with couches, chairs, floor mats and beanbags. According to curator and senior programmer Shari Frilot, there’s a method to the chillness. “The venue is designed to engage and relax the body—as is the work,” she said. “It’s a physical cinema that is intended to bring the body along.”

That is certainly the case with Lynette Wallworth’s Coral: Rekindling Venus, where you can slip into what looks like a canvas igloo and drift into the sea. But instead of looking down at the wonders of DP David Hannan’s footage of the ancient and endangered coral reef, the work unfolds overhead via full-dome projection. Being that it’s a format normally employed by planetariums to evoke outer space, your prone body feels simultaneously below and above the water, cocooned and disoriented.

In two works from the European collaborative AntiVJ, flat gallery walls are transformed into three-dimensional environments via processes that at once dizzyingly complex and as simple as proto-cinematic shadows on the wall. Both pieces start not with video but with (deceptively) simple drawings, which are then animated and transformed by projected digital imagery. In Cityscape 2095, you look through hotel-like windows at a futuristic urban tableau, the surface of which is constantly vibrating and shifting, with pixilated clouds casting drifting shadows on the rippling river below. And in the two-wall installation Eyjafjallajokull, named after the Icelandic volcano that erupted in 2010, a mapping grid mountainscape becomes a surprisingly transporting environment, with the frisson between static and active lines creating illusions of space and movement.

With the four-wall projection installation North of South, West of East, filmmaker Meredith Danluck puts you in the center of four feature-length narratives that coalesce into one symphonic experience. Consistent with this year’s theme of physicality, Danluck said she came up with the idea when laid up with a broken leg. Duly trapped and newly addicted to episodic television, she wondered what would happen if TV’s narrative momentum were paired with durational cinema, such as the avant garde experiments of Maya Deren and Chantal Akerman, where quotidian tasks take precedence over drama. “I tried to combine this idea of these archetypical characters—the cowboy, the actress, the underdog, the immigrant—into a narrative that was very conventional,” said Danluck, “in order to make this otherwise unapproachable, and sometimes insufferable cinema, digestible.” To various degrees, it’s a strategy employed by each of the New Frontier artists: transfer ideas and technologies from the theoretical realm to the experiential one—connecting mind and body via new mutations in cinema.

round ups from day 2