QUEUE
completedCooperation
SummaryQUEUE is a slow-motion, audiovisual multiplayer XR experience for up to 8 people. Inspired by Morton Feldman’s anti-opera Neither and Samuel Beckett’s novella The Lost Ones, QUEUE constructs a seemingly dystopian non-place: a strange, virtual cylinder in which all living beings are governed by the law of an eternal queue. Participants try out different methods of escaping—if the cylinder can even be escaped at all. Combining elements of an adventure game with a drone concert, all within an immersive environment that reacts to audience movement, QUEUE asks its visitors to question their actions, collaborations and the logic of hybrid environments.
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QUEUE was developed by OBLIQUE SENSATIONS in collaboration with the Theater an der Ruhr and the Academy for Theatre and Digitality. Funded by the Neue Künste Ruhr programme of the Ministeriums für Kultur und Wissenschaft NRW.
"Hell is just a place, where everything means something"
-- Timothy Morton
In QUEUE, up to eight audience members at a time can enter an enigmatic virtual space through VR headsets. Inside a huge, abstract cylinder, strange avatars crawl, move and queue seemingly at random and without a clear purpose. The audience can choose simply to listen and explore the soundscapes, whispers, tools and clues that emerge from this world, like fragments of lost memories. Or they can interact with the cylinder and work together to develop strategies for finding a way out.
Is there a way out? Or could staying together ultimately be the better solution?
During the 45-minute experience, the cylinder in QUEUE changes its appearance quite drastically, much like the unpredictable weather we experience today. At times, it appears as a luminous abstract space with metal walls. At other times, a storm is approaching, bodies fall from the sky, and it becomes unclear whether the cylinder is actually of organic origin—perhaps even an appendage of a much larger creature.
For some, it might feel almost relieving that the faster the audience moves together, the more the physical world becomes visible through the passthrough mode of the VR headsets. Others seem to enjoy getting lost in the virtual environment, and do not want to return to the real world for quite some time. Collectively, some audiences are eager to develop strategies together, climbing ladders and exploring the tools around them. Others withdraw into themselves. They remain still, listening or hiding as if afraid of being found.
It remains unclear whether an escape actually exists, or whether the collective process of searching for one is itself the decisive experience.
QUEUE premiered at NEXT LEVEL Festival, November 2025 at Theater Dortmund with further showings at Festival “RAUSCH” 2025 at Theater Mülheim an der Ruhr.
QUEUE CREDITS
Artistic Direction, Composition, Visual 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 Guidance: Michael Eickhoff
Production Manager: Annabell Blank
Network Consulting: Ole Graf
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.
