The collider
The Collider is an interactive story about a machine built to decode the mysteries of human relationships. It uses one VR headset for two people - and takes you on a journey through an elaborate built set.
WInner of Best Immersive Artwork at Sandbox Immersive in China (2019) and selected for the Digital Dozen breakthroughs in digital storytelling by Columbia University.
Created for pairs of people to navigate together, The Collider guides you on a narrative journey that explores your personal relationship with power.
This machine is on a mission: to identify and understand the invisible material that passes between people – the corrosive, delightful and mysterious matter that keeps us together and pulls us apart.
Each participant enters the machine separately before their journeys converge. One enters a virtual world revealing the inner vision of the machine, the other can manipulate the visions and actions inside that virtual world. The story ends in a small comfortable room on some armchairs - where the pair work out, together, what has happened.
The Collider builds the real choreography of going in and out of VR, and the dynamic between the person watching and the person inside, into a theatrical experience which creates its own spectacle – a dance between two limited humans failing and failing again to see the other’s experience and then, finally, the rush of connection when they do.
When you meet someone else – do you dominate, surrender or create something beautiful together?
** NEWSFLASH ** THE COLLIDER is on tour!
Showing from 10th to 27th June 2021 at STUK (in Leuven, Belgium) as part of the art exhibition "Wired for Empathy".
Through the artworks of +/- 20 international artists, Wired for Empathy explores the contemporary role and meaning of empathy: How can we understand empathy today? Who asks empathy from whom and what does that say about contemporary power relations? Which evolutions within society strengthen or undermine our capacity for empathy? How can we relearn/train empathetic strategies and behaviors? And is the concept of empathy limited to human relations, or can we expand the notion to involve relations to other living creatures?
See here for more details about the works in the exhibition.
“Anagram’s new project is one big mindfuck of vulnerability, dancing lines and chocolate bars.”
VICE
AWARDS
Best immersive artwork
Sandbox Immersive, Qingdao, China
June 2019
Selected for the Digital Dozen breakthroughs in immersive storytelling by Columbia University
2019
PRESS
“No two people will enter The Collider and do exactly the same things we did. It is an encounter that can never be recreated. I entered the machine with a stranger. And I left the machine with a ____. But what to fill in that blank? A new friend, compatriot, ally, something else? We’ve gone through an experience together that few people will understand. And that’s the point. We’ve been transformed, forever, by the machine.”
noproscenium.com
“One of the most wonderfully unusual experiences I’ve had in VR. This was all about the baryons, protons, neurons, mesons, pions and kaons of others, a deeper party talk, a percussion of scientific and social ideas.”
nygamecritics.com
‘The experience has moved something inside me. I can’t tell you what, I can’t tell you why. Maybe it has been the collision with the other girl. I can’t tell you what has changed inside me, but I will take this with me for the rest of my life. The experiment has been successful'
skarredghost.com
“Anagram manage to find ways to push each participant beyond their everyday comfy places, without ever making them feel exposed, uncomfortable, or like they might be doing it wrong. The languid and searching narratives that play out for each of us elicit magical moments… I am certain this piece will never be experienced the same way twice.”
MEDIUM
TEAM
Producer / director / writer team:
Amy Rose, May Abdalla
Developers:
Clarice Hilton, Mike Golembewski
Set design:
Synnove Fredericks
Animation:
Barry Gene Murphy
Interactive set detail:
Pete Bennett
Sound and music:
Aaron Cupples, Brigitte Hart
SUPPORTED BY
National Film Board of Canada Interactive, the Digital Catapult Creative XR Fund
Arts Council England
National Theatre Immersive Storytelling Studio.