QUEUE

A playful XR experience

„Hell is just a place, where everything means something”.

(Timothy Morton)

QUEUE is an interactive, audiovisual slow motion designed for XR reality and multiplayer VR. Inspired, among others, by Morton Feldman’s anti-opera Neither and Samuel Beckett’s prose text The Lost Ones, this hybrid work imagines a seemingly dystopian non-place — a shadow world in transition toward the unknown. Within a strange virtual cylinder, life is governed by the law of eternal queuing. The inhabitants of QUEUE — more or less animated avatars and AI-generated voices — search for an escape. Yet the origin and perspective of this longing seem to have been lost.

With the help of VR headsets, the audience can playfully explore the laws of QUEUE together and experiment with possibilities of cooperation. Will visitors be able to find an exit collectively? Or is the ability simply to remain also a solution?

QUEUE was developed by OBLIQUE SENSATIONS in collaboration with Theater an der Ruhr and the Academy for Theater and Digitality Dortmund. QUEUE is funded by the Neue Künste Ruhr program of the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Artistic direction, composition, look design, text: Christoph Wirth
Lead development and creative coding: Fehime Seven
Network programming and creative coding: Sarah Buser
VR, interaction, and shader design, consulting: Markus Wagner
Dramaturgical support: Michael Eickhoff
Production management: Annabell Blank
Network consulting: Ole Graf