What do abandoned virtual places feel like? How much life is there in the digital image of a deceased person? Who am ‘I’ in the presence of the absent? Who and what is displaced from the future corporate metaverse? Picking up on themes of their hyperlink installation 404-TOTLINK created for Impulse Theater Festival 2021, DARUM takes a look at a possible not-so-distant future using the fairly recent means of virtual reality. In [EOL]. End of Life, the audience assumes the role of an ‘outsourced freelancer’ for the fictional trillion-dollar corporation IRL (Imaginary Reality Landscapes). The participant’s task is to determine which pieces of content should be permitted to exist in tomorrow’s vivid virtual parallel universes – and which should be irretrievably deleted. [EOL]. End of Life confronts the virtual travellers with a multitude of three-dimensional walk-in worlds and a considerable number of human traces; because the 1.0 version of this already collapsing, abandoned ‘metaverse’, while not connected to the online servers, preserves the digital echo of past lives – and with it the question of how we will once be – or want to be – remembered.

Overview Timeslots

DARUM (Victoria Halper & Kai Krösche) creates performances, installations, films, sound, video and media art. Deliberately blurring the lines between fact and fiction, DARUM creates pieces that try to direct the audiences’ focus on the unappeased and the contradictory associated with exceptional states and phenomena in our society. DARUM’s first performance in Vienna, Ungebetene Gäste (2019), was invited to Impulse Theater Festival in 2020 and nominated for a NESTROY special award. The duo’s performance installation Ausgang: Offen (2020), turned into a film due to COVID restrictions, was nominated for a NESTROY special COVID award, and its third and so far most recent performance production in Vienna, Heimweh (2022), won DARUM the 2023 NESTROY special award. DARUM’s film and media art projects have been presented in Germany (Hofer Filmtage; die digitale, Düsseldorf), Austria (Diagonale, Graz) and the United States (Seattle International Film Festival, Brooklyn Film Festival), among other places. www.darum.at