“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Blaise Pascal

Our philosopher disagrees, quarantine isolation is not all about the families spending time together, cooking and posting smiling pictures on social networks. Rather, it is a time of monsters…
Leaving the bottle where we had lived our lives during the never ending lock downs did not go easy. We needed to reacquaint with the space, with freedom, with the other.

Anxious Arrivals stages that disorientation of re-entry. Picking up from Delirious Departures, each immersant moves through 3 scenes on their own trajectory, encountering a live performer and system-driven figures — never entirely sure which is which. A “revealing scenography” of tracked screens and projection mapping surrounds this passage, exposing the machinery alongside the illusion it produces. The seam between what is real and what is rendered is visible, but never fully legible.

Making that uncertainty work across multiple immersants moving simultaneously, rather than for a single isolated headset-wearer, was the technical problem the piece set for us. Built on CREW’s research within the Max-R Horizon Europe project, the system supports VR participants across areas up to 2000m², with high-fidelity graphics and spatial sound, while a motion-captured performer moves through the space as a fully present virtual body alongside the NPCs. An AI-driven camera system animates the surrounding screens, watching and reacting to the unfolding scenes.

Anxious Arrivals moves each immersant along a trajectory through 3 scenes, encountering a live performer and system-driven figures – never entirely sure which is which. A “revealing scenography” of tracked screens and projection mapping surrounds this passage, exposing the machinery alongside the illusion it produces. The seam between what is real and what is rendered is visible, but never fully legible.

The scale of the work makes something possible that most XR performance cannot offer: you actually enter the virtual world and move freely within it. CREW’s custom motion capture and streaming system — built to cover hundreds of square metres — turns the entire space into a canvas for XR, one the performers and immersants share simultaneously, with high-fidelity graphics and spatial sound responding to every step. The AI-driven camera system that animates the surrounding screens is part of that same world, watching and reacting alongside everyone inside it.

Press article in french Fisheye


Concept: Eric Joris & Isjtar Vandebroeck
With: Jerry Killick, Booi Kluiving, Wieke Van Rosmalen, Shelbatra Jashari
3D-Design: Isjtar Vandebroeck, Eric Joris, Haryo Sukmawanto
Composition and sound design: Isjtar Vandebroeck
Text: Mia Vaerman, Eric Joris
Voice: Jerry Killick
Technological research: Isjtar Vandebroeck, Haryo Sukmawanto

Supported by Horizon Europe Max-R