en
With QUEUE, the collective OBLIQUE SENSATIONS developed a participatory XR experience for multiple players. The starting point is Samuel Beckett's prose text ‘The Lost Ones,’ which describes an enigmatic world in which everything revolves around endless queuing. In QUEUE, this is condensed into a virtual landscape that is both a game and an echo of a decaying reality. Six people can enter simultaneously with VR glasses and take on the role of avatars trapped in an oversized, eerie cylinder. It remains unclear what is real and what is a memory of a vanished past. Individually, in pairs or in groups, different ways of leaving the cylinder can be tried out – if it can be left at all. QUEUE combines elements of a multiplayer game with the atmosphere of a radio play, a drone concert and an immersive environment. The result is a space in which the audience can playfully question possibilities for action, cooperation and the logic of hybrid environments.
Sarah Buser (creative coding), Fehime Seven (lead developer), Markus Wagner (XR spatial design, look design, creative coding), Christoph Wirth (concept and art direction, look and sound design).
OBLIQUE SENSATIONS is a Berlin-based label for media art, performance and sound art, as well as experimental music theatre. Under the artistic direction of Christoph Wirth, interdisciplinary works are created in changing collaborations at the interface between analogue and digital, as well as scenic, social and virtual space. OBLIQUE SENSATIONS develops immersive XR and VR experiences as well as hybrid performative installations, interactive sound installations, staged concerts and concept art pieces for stage and exhibition contexts. A particular thematic focus is placed on the examination of technological history, politics of perception and attention, and forms of collectivity and affect.
QUEUE was developed by OBLIQUE SENSATIONS in collaboration with the Theater an der Ruhr and the Academy for Theatre and Digitality in Dortmund. Funded by the Neue Künste Ruhr programme of the Ministeriums für Kultur und Wissenschaft NRW.