Body Proxy is the strangest thing on the floor at TIFF: The Market this week, and that’s the point. The interactive installation by Los Angeles studio Tender Claws is making its Canadian premiere inside TIFF’s brand-new Innovation Hub, the first time a major North American festival market has built a dedicated showcase for AI and immersive work into its official structure. Eight projects from nine countries were selected; Body Proxy is the one making festivalgoers act out becoming an AI’s employee.
What Body Proxy Actually Is
The premise is a fake startup onboarding. Participants put on AI smart glasses and enter what the piece frames as an “Initial Person Offering” — their body, not their labor in the abstract, becomes the asset being listed. An AI issues quickfire instructions through the glasses, directing recruits through choreographed tasks using ordinary props as what Tender Claws calls “test vectors,” while a screen behind them displays a mock stock ticker tracking their performance. Everything is optional, which is exactly what makes it uncomfortable: the piece is less interested in what an AI can make you do than in how readily you comply when nobody’s forcing you. Tender Claws describes the underlying premise directly: “AI’s coming instrumentalization of the world will necessitate human embodiment. Collapsing the gig economy and agentic tool-use, the piece questions a future in which the human is no longer a user, but an interface.”
Photo: Tender Claws, via Live for Film
Body Proxy already won an XR Experience Jury Award after debuting at SXSW 2026, and Live for Film’s Trevor Hogg, reviewing the Innovation Hub lineup, flagged the hardware itself as a rough edge — “the headsets still feel rather military grade” and need recalibration between sessions, a reminder that even the buzziest AI installations are still bottlenecked by clunky consumer gear.
Why TIFF Built the Hub At All
Body Proxy shares the Innovation Hub floor with seven other premieres, including Mekwâc: “Now Is Good,” an Indigenous-centered immersive piece from Quantum Wampum and James Monkman Studio, and Solwata, a 360 eco-documentary about Solomon Islands communities facing rising seas, narrated by Mark Ruffalo. Charles Tremblay, head of TIFF: The Market, framed the hub’s whole purpose around that mix of registers: “Their unique blend of cinema, contemporary art and emerging technology creates meaningful connection between audience and compelling characters and stories.” Putting these works on an actual market floor, alongside conventional film sales, is the real news here — it’s TIFF treating AI and immersive projects as inventory buyers assess, not a side attraction for the curious.
A few booths over, the AI tools angle gets less conceptual and more practical. Toronto-based Moonlite Labs is exhibiting its production platform at Booth A17, covering storyboarding and previs through cinematic image and video generation to VFX refinement and upscaling — the kind of software that’s less about interactive art and more about quietly showing up in an editor’s actual pipeline. Seeing it on the same market floor as Body Proxy’s stock-ticker satire is a useful snapshot of where AI-in-filmmaking actually sits right now: half genuine production tooling, half pointed commentary on what that tooling is asking of the people using it.
Whether or not the individual pieces land, the structural move is the one worth watching. A festival that used to treat this work as a side program just gave it a booth number next to the films buyers are actually there to acquire. That’s a faster way to normalize a technology than any single viral clip — and it’s happening a few blocks from where a lot of editors reading this actually work.
Sources:
Deadline — Jeremy Kay, “TIFF: The Market: Eight XR, VR & Mixed Reality Projects Set For The Inaugural Innovation Hub Lineup”
Live for Film — Trevor Hogg, “TIFF 2026 Review: Innovation Hub”
Tender Claws — “Body Proxy”
Moonlite Labs — “Moonlite Labs at TIFF: The Market 2026, Booth A17”
