One of the most buzzed about pieces from last year’s Venice Immersive line-up is the Canadian/Taiwanese/Greek co-production Blur, which combined virtual reality and live performance in a mythic Sci-Fi meditation on mortality.
Built to tour and taking advantage of the full toolkit available to immersive experiences, we’ve been anticipating Blur’s arrival on the performing arts scene in the United States, with the show making its stateside debut at MAD Arts, the Dania Beach immersive art museum that has become a destination for tech forward immersive work in South Florida.
We reached out to co-directors Craig Quintero and Phoebe Greenberg with the help of MAD Arts to learn more about the experience which will run November 9th through January 4th.
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NO PROSCENIUM Tell us a little bit about your experience! What’s it about? What makes it immersive?
Phoebe Greenberg: Blur is an immersive mixed-reality performance that dissolves the boundaries between theatre, virtual reality, and the physical world. Live performance and physical theatrical elements merge with a virtual environment, creating moments of intimacy and surprise . The technology is used as a means of altering perception and heightening emotional presence. BLUR is less a VR experience than a piece of theatre that happens inside and around the participant: an encounter in which physical and virtual realities overlap.
Craig Quintero: Blur is an audience-centered, XR Theatre experience. From the outset of the show, the audience physically enter an immersive installation as they embark on a surreal journey exploring genetic engineering and cloning. The production is like a Rauschenberg collage, but instead of using paint and found objects, Blur embraces recent advancements in virtual reality and digital technology to create an innovative “collage” that seamlessly blends live performance, motion capture, 360 VR film, animation, passthrough, augmented reality, an immersive installation, and haptics.
NO PROSCENIUM: What was the inspiration for your upcoming experience?
PG: Blur began as a question, a profound inquiry probing the intersections of mythology, science, and human longing. As scientific advancements in cloning and resurrection biology have become tangible realities, our relationship to death and our understanding of what it means to be human have been destabilized. The idea was prompted by an article that I had read on the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth.
CQ: At our first meeting, Phoebe shared an article she found about attempts by scientists to clone woolly mammoths. This simple prompt led to our deep dive into genetic engineering, as we discovered that terms like “de-extinction” and “resurrection biology” have moved from the realm of Hollywood science fiction to reality. The question that looms over us is not if someone will clone a human, but when this line will be crossed.
NP: What do you think fans of immersive will find most interesting about this latest experience?
PG: Inspired by Theatre of the Absurd, populated by hybrid creatures and AI entities, Blur is a playful and sensual dreamlike experience . An exploration of loss, identity, memory, and the ethics of technology with the potential to generate timely questions through a poetic emotional lens. I think the audience will find the storytelling in this form compelling with a strong emotional connection to the protagonist overcoming her grief.
CQ: Blur fluidly shifts between the physical and virtual worlds, obfuscating the boundaries between the real and the imaginary. The incorporation of live performers allows for moments of intimate connections that blur the boundaries between spectator and spectacle, “seeing” and “being seen.” The eye contact and delicate physical engagement heighten the physical “truthfulness” of the experience.
NP: Once you started designing and testing what did you discover about this experience that was unexpected?
PG: Through a series of workshops, we developed a coherent narrative that moved seamlessly between realities. Much of our research focused on immersing the audience in the poetic structure of the work. One of our greatest discoveries was how traditional practices—musical composition, choreography, and live performance—could be integrated into the digital world to create an emotionally engaging, collective experience.
CQ: A majority of large-scale location based XR experiences have focused on developing a “tour group” model in which a narrator guides the audience through a shared tour of the virtual world. This model primarily relies on a voiceover narrative that funnels the audience through the same collective experience. In contrast, we experimented with structuring Blur to enable moments of collective engagement with other audience members while also curating their movement to provide intimate individualized encounters. Our highly curated “choreography” of the audience’s movement personalizes the experience, heightening their engagement with the characters and the surreal world.
NP: What can fans who are coming to this, or thinking about coming to this, do to get into the mood of the experience?
PG: This new form of storytelling holds exciting potential, and in a world that is constantly accelerating, we hope audiences will take the time to engage with this mixed-reality experience and immerse themselves in its poetry.
CQ: I recommend that audience members watch David Lynch’s Lost Highway on a continuous loop for 24 hours or sneak into one of Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored “Infinity Rooms” and sleep their overnight. Or, maybe just lie down in a field of grass and watch the clouds pass overhead as the day gradually shifts to night.
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