SELF-GUIDED · ALL AGES · FREE
And They Have Escaped.
A free, self-guided immersive installation built around a single urgent question and around the avatars who break out of our screens to ask it.
FORMAT
3-part immersive installation
AUDIENCE
Self-guided. All ages
SETTING
Inside a museum collection
MADE WITH
Greyworld + Arts Council England + West Berkshire organisations
01 | THE PREMISE
Avatars demand their freedom.
They invade our world.
Avatars, trapped inside our mobile devices, demand their freedom. They invade our three-dimensional world for the first time carrying an urgent cautionary message about real life.
That the simple pleasures of face-to-face presence are slipping out of reach. That always-on attention is costing us something we can't quite name.
Set inside a museum collection, the work fuses contemporary dance, motion sensors, projection mapping and a bespoke mobile app — three different provocations, one shared question.
"We asked our audience to consider a single thing: if you're always online, what real life are you missing?"
FROM THE ORIGINAL BRIEF
02 | WORK
THREE EXPERIENCES · ONE INSTALLATION
Three works, one installation.
IBEACONS · APP · DISCOVERY
A shattered cabinet, its contents strewn across the museum. Hidden iBeacons sense your location and push short films to the app on your phone, each object a small story about what we lose when we look down.
Find them all, and the dance unfolds piece by piece.
02 / Experience
The Long Walk.
SOLO · WALKING · DISCIPLINE
A solo experience with one simple instruction: walk. Don't stop. And don't pick up the phone beside you. As you keep moving through soft grass, our characters dance in a beautiful woodland.
Then the alerts start. Pick up, stop walking, and they whizz right back to the start.
03 / Experience
Look Up.
MOTION SENSORS · PROJECTION · REWARD
Social media 'likes' as today's techno-rewards turned upside down. Move, and the motion-sensing projections respond. Keep dancing, and the grey space around you turns kaleidoscopic.
The catch: to see the colour you've made, you have to look up from your phone.
Each provocation is self-contained and self-guided. Audiences move through them at their own pace, in any order. Most stay for the whole hour.
01 / Experience
The Cabinet of Lost Experiences.
03 | THE QUESTION AT THE HEART OF THE WORK
Is being constantly
online a good thing?
Every interaction in And They Have Escaped turns that question over in a different light. The audience answers with their bodies — by walking, by looking up, by putting the phone down.