Anti-Gone
A Mixed Reality Performance by Theo Triantafyllidis
Based on the original comic book by Connor Willumsen
Format: Proscenium Stage, Immersive Projection
Venue Type: Black Box Theater OR Gallery Space
Duration: 75mins, no intermission
Seating: 50-300
In a post-climate change world, environmental catastrophe has become normalized. Cities are sunken, yet the vestiges of late-capitalist culture – consumerism, inequality, social unrest – live on, clinging like barnacles to the ruins of civilization. Spyda and Lynxa are a couple navigating this world frictionlessly. On their sailboat, they glide from shopping to movies to psychedelic drugs. In a damaged world where you can have anything you want, what’s the cost?
Video Excerpt@SundanceFestival - "It's Nice That" Interview - Press Kit
Artist Tour with Fabbula - Interview for Voices of VR - Project PDF
Past Performances
2021
ONX Studio Showcase, NYC
Mediterranea 19 Biennale, San Marino (interactive livestream with live audience)
2020
Sundance New Frontier, Park City, UT
BFI London Film Festival, UK (interactive livestream)
Pop Montreal X Fondation PHI, CA (interactive livestream)
Gray Area Festival, US (interactive livestream)
2019
Human Resources, Los Angeles, US
Part theatre, part Twitch.tv, this groundbreaking play is a feature-length livestream game telecast, whose central characters, Spyda and Lynxa, are avatars powered by the VR headset and mocap suit worn by stage actors who game the sprawling virtual world fresh with each performance. Set in a post–climate change world raging with late-capitalist rebellion and excess, Anti-Gone is a quest for happiness in the sunken city, where the characters shop, score drugs, and hotbox cinema.
Anti-Gone is a new mixed reality performance by artist Theo Triantafyllidis, inspired by the comic book of the same name by Connor Willumsen. Anti-Gone incorporates live performance with real time simulation to explore the social impacts of technology, privilege and the beginnings and ends of worlds.
Adapting the mechanics of open world video games, Triantafyllidis revises traditional narrative into a continuous simulation, taking place in a meticulously crafted 3D world, full of visual signifiers of paradise: a bright blue ocean, lush multicolored vegetation, a sunken city lit by glowing sunsets. This world is also riddled with social unrest and mutation, a post-climate change world where environmental catastrophe has become normalized. The vestiges of late-capitalist culture - consumerism, inequality, social unrest - live on, clinging like barnacles to the ruins of civilization. This work features Spyda and Lynxa on their sailboat, as they glide from shopping to movies to psychedelic drugs, and social unrest. Using a motion capture suit and virtual reality headset as embodied interfaces, actors perform both onstage and in the virtual world. Performing alongside them on-stage, Triantafyllidis and his team of game engineers direct and shape the world in real-time.
Triantafyllidis’ hybrid theater becomes a mirror of the demands made by the hyperactive disorientation and confusion of our mediated “real” lives and class gap tensions. The virtual world Triantafyllidis has created is a portrait of the complexities of our world, consumed by the game-logic of the virtual worlds we’d like to inhabit. As the fourth wall becomes merged with the audience’s perception, Anti-Gone proposes an alternate perspective of universal concerns for the present and future, which may very well already be our past.
Credits
Director: Theo Triantafyllidis
Writer (Original Comic Book): Connor Willumsen
Key Collaborator: Matthew Doyle
Production Manager, Set and Costume Design: Polina Miliou
Curator: Mari Spirito
Live Performance Team
Cast: Lindsey Normington, Zana Gankhuyag, Matthew Doyle
Game Engine Performer: Theo Triantafyllidis
Composer and Live Music Performance: Cameron Stallones
Lighting Engineer: Connor Childs
Motion Capture and Movement Coach: Rachel Ho
Live Stream Team
Cast: Lindsey Normington, Zana Gankhuyag, Sam Congdon
Composer and Live Music Performance: Cameron Stallones
Game Engine Performer: Rachel Ho
Game Engine Team
Lead Artist: Theo Triantafylldis
Lead Programmer: Stalgia Grigg
Lead 3D Character Designer: Joseph Melhuish
3D Artists:
Sara Drake
Ryan Decker
Siyao Zheng
Commissioned and Produced by Onassis Culture
Motion Capture technology provided by Noitom MoCap.
Special thanks to:
The Breeder, Athens, GR
Meredith Rosen Gallery, NY
Human Resources, Los Angeles
Sundance New Frontier
UCLA Design Media Arts
Barco Projectors
