Dialog through art

Stories
surface here.

We build the tools that let communities — ours, and the ones we work with — hold their own stories on every surface that’s open. Phone in a pocket. Wall of a youth center. Library projector. Dome ceiling. Museum CAVE. Same piece, every room. Voices that carry. Knowledge that stays put.

Community-authored K through college Open-source toolkit Sept 9 · 2026
Add your voice → Step into a story
HOLDING · LIVE
N 28.542 · W 81.396
Parramore
Orlando · FL · NIYC · a corner the kids carry
What Lit Fuse Studios is

A fuse catches when a story finally finds its room. We're a community making the rooms ourselves — and the tools to keep lighting them.

We make immersive pieces with our own communities and put them on whichever surface is open — a phone in your pocket, a classroom screen, a community-center wall, a planetarium ceiling, a museum CAVE, a wall-side projection on a Tuesday night. The surface is whatever's already there. The story is what we bring. Then we open the toolkit so others can do the same.

01 · OUR STORIES, FIRST

The voices the medium kept missing.

Voice testimony. Lived-experience documentary. Neighborhood capture. Held inside a 360° space anyone can step into. Free voices from a Berlin table in 2006. A juke joint in Clarksdale. A mercado in Puebla. A youth center in Orlando. Held with consent and citation, not extracted.

02 · ACCESSIBLE BY DESIGN

Built to live wherever it needs to.

The same piece plays in a fifth-grader's browser, on the wall of a community center, inside a pop-up dome a teacher unfurls in a gym, on a museum's CAVE, on a planetarium ceiling. Phone is one surface among many. We design for whichever room a person actually has.

03 · OUR OWN TOOLKIT

We open the tools we made.

Surface Forge ships content to any room. The 360 Developers App lets us build the room together in real time. Chasing the Light surfaces voices on our phones. Spectral Signature is the research keeping stories tied to the places they came from. Open-source. Free for community use. See the toolkit →

Meet Terry · he’s playing
Mr. Terry Green on the harmonica.
A voice from the Delta. Hover to listen — every voice here knows the room it came from.
Three doors · pick yours

Same voices. Three doors in.

Education & Civic — our 360° curriculums, workshops, and civic engagement loops in classrooms K through college. Immersive — the installations we build with our communities, in the spaces we already meet in. Surface Forge — the open toolkit we made: the pipeline, the live-collab 360° world builder, the mobile light-chase app, the spectral-anchor research.

01
DOOREducation
& Civic
Community gathering in Mexico From Puebla · community workshop
Curriculums
that talk back.
360° pieces our students step into, sit with, and add their own voice to. K through college. Workshops on building your own space. A growing library — free for community use.
Step in →
02
DOORImmersive
& Audio
Inside the immersive piece — voices in the room In the room · voices in motion
Voices that
fill the room.
Sound and image holding a story together. Our communities build their own installations with our open toolkit — in the spaces we already meet in. Audio that knows where you're standing.
Step in →
03
DOORSurface
Forge
Inside the open toolkit — Surface Forge in use Open toolkit · built and shared
Our open
toolkit.
Surface Forge. 360 Developers App. Chasing the Light. Spectral Signature. Tools we built because no one was building them for us — opened up so others can too. Always more on the way.
Step in →
Live demo · mobile
Bring your phone · play our game

Each voice surfaces
when you find its light.

A web app you walk through with your phone. Voices from our archives surface when you reach the places they came from. Pokémon-Go for stories. No install. No account. Built on the research we’re doing under Spectral Signature.

4 archives · 66 voices Browser only iPhone · Android
Play it now → Read how it works
Chasing the Light — hero art
Maya · Parramore “We used to walk past that corner every day after school…” unlocked · warm light
Mr. Cleveland · Clarksdale “The blues didn’t start in a studio. It started right here.” unlocked · flicker match
Doña Rosa · Puebla “Aquí el mercado nunca duerme — siempre hay una voz.” unlocked · chromatic
A.A. · TOFV “What if the question is the answer we’ve been chasing?” unlocked · archive 2006
By the numbers · the work, plain

What we're already holding.

0
Voices held · TOFV
0
Countries represented
0
Communities live
0
Year TOFV anniversary · 2026
0
Grades · K → college
free· always
For community use
Follow one fuse · 06 frames

From the phone
to the dome.

One story moves through every surface we have. Capture · shape it · ship it · let it land. A wall, a dome, a phone, a CAVE — whichever room is open. Same signal.

REC · 360°
01 · CAPTUREParramore · NIYC
A youth opens the room.
A phone-as-rig records the corner she grew up on. 360° equirect, ambient stereo, GPS, consent record. Ten minutes that become the source.
EQUIRECT · 4096×2048 · 30fps → 360° detected → horizon: 0.71 → 3 subjects · 1 voice → ambient L/R · spatial cues
02 · ANALYZEanalyze_for_surface()
The forge reads the source.
360° detected, horizon found, three subjects bounded, ambient stereo classified. A content fingerprint that every venue downstream understands.
MPCDI v2 · ANCHORED 5 anchor markers · sub-cm
03 · ANCHORwrite_mpcdi()
Lock to the surface.
VESA MPCDI v2 anchors written. Per-projector geometry, edge-blend, color calibration. The story knows where it sits on the dome.
forge apache 2.0 MPCDI IMERSA DIGISTAR ADM BW64 AMBIX WEBXR
04 · SHIPship_to_venue()
Six formats. One call.
IMERSA fulldome master, MPCDI tiles, ADM BW64 objects, Ambisonic FOA, Digistar script, WebXR preview. Out the door.
SIGNAL · LIVE
05 · SURFACErender_to_dome()
Lands on the dome ceiling.
It opens where it's needed. A wall in a community center. A dome at a community college. A CAVE at a science museum. A phone on a school bus. The corner from Parramore lands. Someone in the room says: I know that block.
she sees herself. DENVER · WED · 7PM · 64 SEATS
06 · LANDSThe room is held.
Same signal. Different surface.
Sixty-four people in a planetarium 1,800 miles away. Same voice, same horizon, same sound — now load-bearing in a room that holds it.
Drag · scroll · arrow keys06 frames · one story
Content library · growing

The voices we're
already holding.

A growing library of community-authored 360° pieces. Hover any one to hear what it sounds like — the place, the people, the sound of the room. Each piece consents-on, citations-in, free for educators and community use.

Hover · listen 2025 · live
Orlando · FL
Parramore
NIYC youth · the corner they carry
Hover · listen heritage · MS
Clarksdale · MS
The Crossroads
Delta sound · sounds of knowledge
Hover · listen TOFV · partner
Puebla · México
El Mercado Vive
The market speaks · TOFV partner
Hover · listen 2006 / 2026
Berlin · 2006 / 2026
Table of Free Voices
112 voices · 20th anniversary
From the archive · sealed 2006 · Our Voices Unbound

Will it ever be possible to connect machines directly to the human brain?

In 2006, 112 thinkers from 48 countries gathered at one table in Berlin — the Table of Free Voices — to answer humanity’s most pressing questions, on democracy, art, faith, conflict, and the future. Here’s one. The answers have been holding their breath for twenty years. Press to unveil.

A note from inside the work

The spatial web is being built right now — mostly without us.

Apple, Meta, and Google scan every street and every room to build their version of spatial reality. Our neighborhoods become the backdrop. Our blocks become someone else’s infrastructure. The voices we carry — the ones that have already been extracted from us once — flow out of our hands a second time.

So we built the tools we needed. Surface Forge. The 360 Developers App. Chasing the Light. Spectral Signature. And we keep building — always something new on the way.

Digital sovereignty, for us, is plainer than a slogan. It’s whose hand holds the microphone when the recording starts. Whose consent is on file when the piece ships. Whose neighborhood gets to own the archive after it’s made — not just sit inside it. Voices have been extracted from our communities for generations. The digital age shouldn’t be one more round of that. If you’re building your own tools for the same reason — we want to know you. The work is more interesting together.

— Lit Fuse Studios · with Civic Designers
Add your voice · or just say hi

What question
do you carry?

2026 is the 20th anniversary of the original Table of Free Voices. We’re holding a new circle — and the work isn’t ours to finish. As people step into the piece (a phone, a planetarium, a wall in a youth center), every visitor adds what they bring. Send a voice note. Record a quick video. Or just write us. Same form, your medium. We hold what arrives. The civic-engagement platform for all of it is Our Voices Unbound.

Visit Our Voices Unbound →

No spam. No marketing list. A real person reads it — usually within 48 hours.

Our Voices Unbound · 2026

"What question do you carry — for the world?"

Play