

>When my home was destroyed, I was shocked beyond words. The once-safe haven I had always believed 'home' to be, since childhood, revealed its fragility, susceptible to any change. Standing on the balcony one day, I realized the entire city was an illusionary, fickle organism, in a constant state of floating. 
>— Shu-Kai Lin

FuturePerfect is in the ideation and research phases of _City of Apparition_, a groundbreaking mixed reality experience. Building on a decade of research in immersive storytelling, this project combines visual art and sculpture with advanced game engines and interactive technologies. Central to the project is our collaboration with Taiwanese artist Shu-kai Lin, whose personal experiences and artistic perspectives on urban displacement and the violence of un-homing deeply influence the thematic foundation of our work.	

Equipped with AR headsets, audience members will navigate a hybrid physical-digital environment where the visual narrative unfolds across multiple realms: the fictive digital space, the actual physical venue, and a constructed artistic world complete with physical objects, lighting, and sound. At certain moments, audiences will be completely enveloped by a VR environment that dominates their senses. Occasionally, they will engage with live physical environment that is devoid of technological enhancements. And at other times, audiences will navigate both the physical and digital simultaneously. We anticipate that this dynamic interplay among alternate realities will create compelling tension, strategically utilizing each modality to enrich the narrative and deepen thematic exploration.


**Synopsis**: Amid the chaos of urban upheaval and the devastating loss of his home, Mr. Yang-Tai (陽台先生), an office worker, begins to question the monotony of his daily routine and grapples with the haunting question: "Is this all there is to my life?" Seeking both answers and adventure, Yang-Tai escapes to a parallel universe where he undergoes a remarkable transformation into a fearless intergalactic traveler.

Venturing aboard a space capsule crafted of his own imagination, Yang-Tai embarks on a challenging journey—at times a dream voyage to the future, at times a science fiction odyssey, at times a quest to find home, and occasionally a mythical journey into the past.

Exploring the farthest corners of the universe and its enigmatic uncharted territories—from the celestial metropolis of Manjusaka (曼珠沙華) to the weathered industrial landscapes of Hua-Chin City (華慶之都), and the abandoned underwater multiverse of Vidunas (維度娜斯)—Yang-Tai's whirlwind odyssey forces him to confront the fundamental question: what truly defines his existence?

Prepare for a journey that will challenge everything you thought you knew!

_City of Apparition_ is a collabortaion between FuturePerfect and visual artist Shu-Kai Lin and set to premiere in 2026.

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City of Apparition

Climb to the top of a collapsing universe in this parkour platformer with roguelike elements. As an interstellar scout, you are sent to probe a cosmic anomaly that has left the world shattered and chaotic. Space fractures, time crumbles, and fragments of a broken world—eroded rocks, rusted machinery, ancient ruins—drift together in a strange, unstable mix. Past and future blur. With each failed attempt to escape, the realm shifts and reassembles. Navigate this ever-changing landscape, where every fall sends you back to the beginning. Conquer the void as fast as you can before it consumes everything.

Inspired by the rise and fall of civilizations, the speculative wonders of science fiction, and the existential questions posed by the nature of the universe, Void Climber challenges players to confront the impermanence of all things and ponder their own legacy.

**Wishlist us on Steam:** [_here_](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2568730/Deep_Time/)

**Merciless Platforming**. 
Jump, dash and grapple through disintegrating cosmic chaos. Deploy your platform spawner to save a fall or forge your own path to the summit.

**Balance Vital Resources**.
Every action drains energy, from leaping between rock formations to executing strategic parkour moves. Replenish your life force by landing on rocky outcrops or collecting scattered matter and minerals. Energy management is crucial in this dynamic struggle for survival. 

**Obtain Game-Changing Upgrades**.
Harness energy at tuning stations to obtain powerful upgrades that turn the tide in your favor. Slow the onslaught of disintegration, dramatically increase your speed, extend dash distance, amplify jump height, and gain access to new types of spawnable platforms.

**Conquer Ever-Changing Chaos**.
Each run reshuffles the cosmos, crafting a uniquely volatile environment. Navigate through ever-shifting pathways as you strive to gather energy, ensuring no two ascents are the same. Speedrun to the summit and compete for a spot atop the leaderboard. 

A parkour platformer video game with roguelike elements

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Void Climber

From November 16-18, 2022 NORDWIND, FuturePerfect Studio and Denis Semionov in collaboration with Kampnagel and Hellerau - European Center for the Arts present _Cyber Attack: Digital Art and Activism_, an international online conference bringing together over 30 artists, producers and curators to discuss important issues of our time.  

In the last decade digital technologies have ushered in a proliferation of hybrid artistic practices, media forms, and discourses across communities all over the world. These technologies have not only shifted the ways audiences experience art in public spaces, they have enabled artists to expand and connect directly to their audiences, collaborate virtually, and interact remotely. The current global pandemic and the dangerously expanding warfare between Russia and Ukraine make understanding these shifts even more critical. Opportunities for artistic production are continuously threatened by restrictions on public gatherings, new forms of surveillance and censorship are increasingly deployed by autocratic regimes, forced migration due to conflict and violence has devastated entire artistic communities, and an information war has left us all more fragmented than when the twenty-first century began.

Cyber Attack: Digital Art and Activism investigates how and under what conditions artists are deploying technologies and online spaces to build impactful narratives and actions that respond to accelerating political, economic, and environmental crises, while forging new communities and alliances.

**Participants include:** Lev Manovich, Chico MacMurtrie, Luise Kaunert, Team Rolfes, Oleg Nikolaenko, LaJuné McMillian, Anna Shvets, Tosca Terán, Vladimir Storm, AES+F, Nikita Shokhov, Anna Evtiugina, Theo Triantafyllidis, Georgy Molodtsov, Arseniy Zhilyaev, Joshua Citarella, Ellina Gennadievna, Ira Konyukhova, Oksana Syhareva, Alina Mikhaleva, Olga Dvoretskaya, Allen Feldman, Sutu, Jiabao Li, Choy Ka Fai, Johanna Bruckner, Cécile B. Evans, Egor Kraft.

**More Information:** [_here_](https://cyberattack.nordwind-festival.de/)

**Purchase Tickets:** [_here_](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cyber-attack-digital-art-and-activism-tickets-432446879257?keep_tld=1)


Cyber Attack is funded by NEUSTART Kultur Fonds darstellende Künste and the Checkpoint Charlie Foundation

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Cyber Attack

[Will Ryman](https://www.willryman.com/) is a visual artist and playwright creating large-scale sculptures and public art installations. His ongoing interest in literature, philosophy, and the Theatre of the Absurd manifests in his playful investigation of the folly of existence and our shared search for meaning and resolve. Material and subject are of equal importance for his work—revealing his intuitive approach to sculpting diverse materials into expressive forms that examine essential aspects of the human experience.

FuturePerfect Studio is deploying the new tools and procedures of online gaming and immersive technologies to explore alternative ways of expanding Ryman's work and process.

The final project will be a series of episodes delivered online to personal computers and VR headsets, transporting audiences into a story-space that negotiates between Ryman's personal history, his childhood memories, and fiction. Situated in an enormous 3D digital model of his childhood home, audiences will move through a spatialized narrative that unfolds across multiple rooms embedded with video, 3D animation, sound, and digital puppeteering. 

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Studio Visit

Early mockup showing scanned virtual environment of Ryman's studio and sculptures

In 2020, FuturePerfect invited internationally acclaimed artist William Kentridge to collaborate on a new virtual work called "Starve the Alogorithm." After a series of workshops organized by FuturePerfect, the work grew into an experimental visual and spatial narrative inhabited by fragments and traces of Kentridge's ideas, materials and understanding of history.

In this 10 min exploration, participants encounter an architecture of interlocking rooms—the artist's studio, a kinetic theater, a hall of curiosity cabinets, and finally into an enormous amphitheater taken over by a dancing megaphone and fan puppet. Each audience's interactions form a horizon of meaningful connections—an arc of possibilities, but not necessarily a plot or story. 

The work was developed with financial support from Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) and Jacob’s Pillow.

A spatial VR narrative with puppets, video, and animation

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Starve the Algorithm

Early video showing experiments with bringing scanned physical models into our virtual environment

*Expanded Rolfes Rebuild* is a prototype for a head-spinning online multiplayer interactive performance by the acclaimed experimental design and performance studio Team Rolfes. The work features Rolfes's vertiginous 3-D fantasy landscapes and real-time choreography. Pushing the boundaries of digital expression through body-driven movement and digital puppeteering, *Expanded Rolfes Rebuild* exemplifies the team's high powered dive into the unrequited yearning that drives the messy, contradictory performance of identity online. 

A prototype for a head-spinning online interactive performance

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Expanded Rolfes Rebuild

With Bridge Over Mud, the Oslo-based art collective Verdensteatret transforms the theater into a complex, multi-channel electro-acoustic space and visual instrument, played and manipulated by a team of artists, software developers, and musicians. Part music concert, part installation, and part performance, Bridge Over Mud features a vast delivery system that includes 195 feet of elevated tracks, 11 motorized vehicles, 60 speakers, and 30 micro-controlled motors. Throughout the hour-long work, the company uses these tracks to literally transport video, sculptures, shadows, screens, and sounds to create a dazzling open-ended story space of immense proportion.

Bridge Over Mud evokes the prehistory and beginnings of cinema with strong metaphorical connections to locomotion and trains. Train travel provided the prototypical experience of looking at a framed moving image, as well as the mechanical double of the cinematic apparatus. Both were means of transporting a passenger to totally different places, and both were highly charged vehicles of narrative events, stories, and chance encounters. While Bridge Over Mud is NOT about cinema, nor is it about trains, the work’s featured miniature vehicles do function in the capacity of both camera and projector. They travel amongst an array of lenses to create much of the work’s sumptuous light-refracted images. Verdensteatret has often built its pieces from “raw” materials collected during journeys and encounters with foreign landscapes and cultural “others.” For example, the company created Tsalal (2001-2002) from a trip to Odessa and Istanbul, Concert for Greenland (2003) engaged the harsh and majestic landscapes of Greenland and other north-Atlantic islands, and Louder (2007) was created after a journey to Vietnam and the Mekong-river.

Bridge Over Mud continues the company’s preoccupation with travel with its tropes of discovery, chance, disorientation, and altered states of consciousness.

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Bridge Over Mud

How is music composed underwater? What are the physics of sound in water? What kinds of instruments can sustain melody in these aquatic environments ? These were some of the questions that Between Music asked us to solve for their latest and most ambitious work AquaSonic.

Over the next two years, FuturePerfect designed and implemented a multi-phase plan for solving numerous acoustic, technical and aesthetic problems in order to complete the work. This involved assembling and managing a team of scientists, artists and inventors including the Danish artistic director and stage designer Kirsten Dehlholm, MIT engineer and artist Andy Cavatorta, UK-based electronic engineer and cymbalsmith Matt Nolan, and University of Texas, Austin aquatic acoustic engineer Preston Wilson. We also located artist-in-residencies, generated marketing and communication materials, found additional funding and sponsorship, and created numerous opportunities for presentation.

After securing a world premiere at the Operadagen Festival in Rotterdam in 2016, we organized a world tour to France, Lithuania, Scotland, Russia, Hong Kong, Sweden, and Australia. AquaSonic was one of the 10 winners of the Music Theater Now competition in 2018.

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AquaSonic

FuturePerfect worked with director and choreographer Alan Øyen to develop his company’s intercultural masterpiece—Simulacrum / Natsue, a striking visual narrative and dance that weaves together the real and fictional journeys, histories and desires of two dancers from Japan and Argentina.

We traveled to Tokyo and Shikoku Island to conduct primary research that became part of the production; and we devised the project proposal and preliminary dramaturgical structure.

We assembled a pool of artists and engineers to conceptualize scenographic approaches and new projection systems for the final work. After an extensive search and interview process we brought MIT artist and engineer Andy Cavatorta and his associates Marina Litvinskaya and Yvette King into the design and building phase.

A striking visual narrative with electromechanical projections

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Simulacrum / Natsue

Brazilian filmmaker Caio Ribeiro brought FuturePerfect in as a creative consultant to devise his latest production *Borges Virtualis*. The work is based on *The Intruder*, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that tells of two brothers who fall obsessively in love with a young drifter who they eventually murder after failed attempts to share her.

FuturePerfect worked with Ribeiro to transform the story into a platform for interrogating both his own history of trauma and the state sanctioned terrorism perpetrated by the Argentine junta during the Dirty War from 1976 to 1983. We worked with Ribeiro to open up and expand *The Intruder* into a immersive experience that will be part film, speculative fiction, installation and virtual reality.

A transmedia retelling of a Borges short story

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Borges Virtualis

BAM’s education department approached us in 2016 to develop a multi-phase strategy for creating new experiences and knowledge around the shifting status of the body in media, performance and design. For this first exploratory phase, the Director n asked us to focus on a new program called Teknopolis, four floors of interactive digital works in the Fishman space that explored new horizons of virtual reality.

Throughout this process we critically read through texts and material provided by BAM including curatorial and mission statements, and video and teaching materials. We met with staff from the marketing, programming, and operations teams to hear debates and gather perspectives about their understanding of technology and the arts at BAM. From this research we generated arguments and positions resulting in an interactive map that visualized opportunities for new digital programming and pedagogy.

Wayne Ashley was the original architect of BAM’s new media initiatives in 1999 and bringing our team into this project gave staff a deeper insight into the various ways that technology had figured into past BAM artistic programming and infrastructure.

Creative strategy for an experiential and interactive exhibition

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Teknopolis

French director Jean Lambert-wild and Théâtre de l’Union invited FuturePerfect to develop the technical processes and systems for a new adaptation of Shakespeares's *Richard III* titled _Richard III, Loyalty Binds Me_. This involved centralizing software, face and body tracking, computer vision, and live-animation as an important strategy for conveying narrative, creating emotional impact, and constructing the mise-en-scene. 

We assembled a team conversant in real time processing and animation pipelines, and initiated and managed a two-week residency in partnership with Fusebox Festival and the University of Texas.

Finally, we represented the show for touring throughout the US and Canada.



Shakespeare driven by live animation and computer vision

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Richard III

From 2011 to 2019, FuturePerfect worked with with Performing Arts Hub Norway to develop Norway Now, a long-term strategy for positioning Norwegian Performing Arts in North America and expanding opportunties for Norwegian artists to perform and develop work in the US and Canada. These efforts were incredibly fruitful—bringing North American presenters to Norway to see work and meet artists, as well as touring Norwegian companies throughout North America.

Over the past 7 years we have developed successful pitch sessions, curated numerous panels organized during the Association of Performing Arts Professionals meetings in January, workshops featuring talks from top expertise in the performing arts field, venue tours to the most provocative spaces of cultural production and presentation in NYC, and a specially curated luncheon designed to launch a brand new program for young audiences.

The number of artists coming to the US has increased exponentially. Some of these have included Jo Strømgren, Verdensteatret, Findlay/Sandsmark, NIE Company, Ingri Fiksdal, Heine Avdal, Wakka Wakka, Alan Øyen / winter guests, Ingun Bjørnsgaard, Verk Produksjoner, Grusomhetens Teater, the Krumple, Panta Rei Danseteater, Mia Habib, Plexus Polaire and many others. Participating venues have included BAM, EMPAC, The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland, Watermill Center, New York Theater Workshop, Abrons Art Center, Movement Research, New York Live Arts, Philadelphia FringeArts, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, La Mama, the Kennedy Center, PICA, Fusebox Festival, The Wexner Center, Seattle’s On the Boards, The Schimmel Center and others.

Expanding audiences for Norwegian arts and culture

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Norway Now

FuturePerfect created the blueprint for initiating a new art and technology platform at Austin's Fusebox Festival that would augment and enhance its city-wide annual event and build new audiences.

The blueprint included a new mission statement, goals, objectives and timeline suggesting ways to engage both the local Austin community and select art and technology hubs in the US and Europe. FuturePerfect emphasized the importance of engaging its Spanish-speaking neighbors in Mexico and South America and to foreground potential cultural links around technology initiatives emerging in those countries as well.

As part of this process, we participated in several brainstorming sessions including a public presentation that examined different ways Fusebox might foster a more meaningful interaction between the art world and the technology world. We explored what shape this could take on for Fusebox. What its function could be (i.e., a lab for artists and technology professionals? Or a showcase? etc.) If so, what sorts of parameters might be interesting? Who were potential players? Were there other models (nationally and internationally they could be looking at)?

City of Apparition

Void Climber

Cyber Attack

Studio Visit

Starve the Algorithm

Expanded Rolfes Rebuild

Bridge Over Mud

AquaSonic

Simulacrum / Natsue

Borges Virtualis

Teknopolis

Richard III

Norway Now

Art and Tech at Fusebox

And All the Question Marks

Zee

Shuffle

Breaking the Game

Spectropolis

Future of War

NikeLab