Project Immerse Mozfest 2021 - a review

1 min read

Never before have I found a more creative use of productivity tools than Project Immerse. Weiler and co have succeeded in creating something that I didn't believe was possible: an immersive theatre experience, 100% virtually. It had all the main elements of immersive theatre: confusion, paranoia, absurdity - I say this with great affection. In me, they've gained a loyal groupie.

5 min read

Spoilers

Project Immerse premiered at the Mozilla festival this year. It uses two tools: the collaborative whiteboard software Miro and the video conferencing software Zoom. We the audience arrive into the Zoom waiting room, and after an anticipation-building 5 minutes, we are thrown into the call. Immediately we are listening to a robotic voice, supported by eerie ambient sounds, telling us something about our actions being tracked in a simulation. We obediently follow the Miro link that is given via the chat.

The first 5 frames of the Miro board is a tutorial on how to use the tool, but it is anything but mundane. Already we see the dark mode aesthetic adopted by the team - classic 'hacker'/underground vibes, which never fail to warm my nerdy heart. We are taught to zoom into trippy AI-generated images and move Rorschach-like puzzle pieces to form a larger image. We are taught to create post-it notes, during which time I unintentionally get in a fight with another flying cursor after I wrote in my red post-it "I'm red, fight me". After running circles around "Guest Visionary", I was ready to graduate from our training program.

This group does not mess around. We are presented with the question "On the post it notes provided, share a time that you were manipulated, deceived and/or alienated...". So not exactly easy viewing. The post-its came slowly at first, and then, once we felt sheltered by other notes, more quickly and with more vulnerability. I noticed a note "I bought a bodycam off ebay and there was still footage on it". It stood out for it's mysteriousness, but I didn't think too much of it.

Back in the Zoom chat we were briefly kicked into breakout rooms, only to have the time to say hello to our fellow audience members when we were pulled back into the main room once more. I still can't say whether this was an accident or not but it certainly fit in the theme of unease and powerlessness. We were booted back into the breakout rooms when the Miro board moved again. We are left to make sense of the ensuing mass of images, gifs, videos, memes, text, that was thrown at us - in the rubble we found instructions for each breakout group: discover what happened to MR and what was on the bodycam footage by piecing together the evidence presented to us.

As we sifted through the content, things started to get weird in Zoom. First off, only half of us in the room had our cameras on. I'm not a stickler for asking people I'm speaking with to have their videos running but in this context this raised my suspicions, more and more so the longer one person continued to stay silent. Then, I spotted a message in the chat "Can you help me". And another, and another. It was sent from someone who had taken on the name of another one of the breakout room members, except it was underscored. A few minutes later, one of our members cut out suddenly, only to return to announce that he had been pulled into the main room and shown a video which revealed that "MR was radicalised" and "MR is the leader of a extremist group called Maximum Rage". I don't know who is part of the facilitation of the event and who is innocent, so I trust no one.

We continue to sift through the content on the Miro board, which is getting weirder and weirder. There are videos of snippets that mention Maximum Rage, one has translated some text into Russian, thus immediately gaining it spooky bonus points of course. I get the feeling that we are on the cusp of understanding, never quite reaching our eureka moment. We are prompted to come up with our theories and prepare to share them on Twitter, to try to make them go viral.

The session ends without much of a conclusion from my group, as we are plucked from our room and dropped back into the main Zoom call, although I suspect others may have been more creative with theories, judging from snippets of conversation. We are played an outro video to (somewhat) close off the story.

For the theatre director in me, my favourite moment comes next, when Weiler and co generously take the time to explain their vision and answer our questions. He explains how the majority of the content was generated by an AI trained on conspiracy-theory-rich material such as 4chan and WikiLeaks. That explains the absurd memes. The team mentions how it draws on education theory, and adds to the body of entertaining work that motivates people to pick up on what they found intriguing and investigate it for themselves beyond this experience. We discuss how this piece explores human nature in the face of an overwhelming amount of data - how we compulsively make connections to try and transform it into information. I learn a new word:

Apophenia

the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things