What remains: DARUM's [EOL] End of Life

On a virtual reality installation exploring grief, memory and the digital afterlife.

Hello from Belgrade, where the still-ongoing protests are now very much in their civil disobedience phase with road blockades - and arrests - now a feature of daily life. If you’re keen to read more, this Substack by Natasha Cica is one of the clearest accounts I’ve read of the current situation, but this week I’ll stick to talking about theatre and a fascinating virtual reality piece I experienced back in Berlin in May.

(With everything that’s been going on I completely forget to link to one of the most enjoyable things I’ve written recently, this BBC Culture look-back at the nightmare-generator that is Return to Oz on the 40th anniversary of its release, for which I got to interview the legendary editor and sound designer Walter Murch).

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[EOL]. End of Life by Victoria Halper & Kai Krösche © DARUM

You have a job to do. Billed as “a virtual ruinscape”, [EOL] End of Life, by Vienna-based company DARUM, casts its participants as recruits of a big tech organisation, IRL. Your assignment is to explore and assess digital realms which have been dormant for over a decade to see whether they are worth migrating to the company’s shiny new IRL 2.0 platform, or whether they should be permanently deleted.

You are given a set of criteria. Worlds must be beautiful and orderly. Ugly and broken worlds are not worth saving. You are told to be particularly vigilant for “legacy avatars”, digital versions of the deceased. These are a breach of privacy protocol and need to be removed from the system. You are given a series of test runs, in order to get your bearings and make sure you understand the assignment. You are given a short space of time to explore your surroundings and then asked to make a choice. To delete or not delete? The fact that these instructions are delivered by a perky corporate avatar adds a layer of unease. The urge to resist is strong. (I followed the instructions initially, but didn’t always feel good doing so). From the beginning the moral weight of what you’re being asked to do hangs over you. Some of the digital spaces you encounter might not be aesthetically pleasing, they might even be quite forbidding, but what if they carry meaning for someone? Should they still be consigned to the dustbin? If someone has left behind a trace of themselves, do we have a right to erase it?

After a few test scenarios you are let loose to explore on your own, transported from scene to scene by an elevator which pops up in front of you. Even though your brain knows you are moving around a relatively small floor space, the design creates a sense of motion and space, that the world we’re exploring is vast. (However, at the same time the world has been cleverly designed to stop you straying beyond your allotted play-space and colliding with your fellow assessors). There are times during some of the earlier puzzle-oriented moments when players of a certain vintage may find themselves recalling iconic UK children’s show Knightmare (“Sidestep to your left, Simon”), but increasingly the task we’re being asked the carry out becomes complicated, despite the presence of a 3D version of Microsoft’s Clippy to lead the way. Again and again we come into contact with remnants of the dead, figures trapped in a digital limbo, and as the experience becomes more narrative-driven, we are asked to consider what it might mean to be created solely for the purpose of providing solace to living?

[EOL]. End of Life by Victoria Halper & Kai Krösche © DARUM

I experienced [EOL] End of Life (the trailer’s here if you’re interested) in Berlin as part of Theatertreffen – here’s my review in The Stage of the work I saw this year - where it had been selected as one of the 10-best performances of the year in the German-speaking theatre scene. (Is performance the right word for what this is? I’m not sure. VR experience? Interactive installation?). Audience members are given an allotted time slot and enter the experience one by one. You wait in a kind of anteroom before watching a short introductory video and being kitted out with a VR headset (a Meta Quest 3). You are given a primer in the use of the equipment – the headsets allow you to ‘see’ your own hands and even pick objects up - and how to navigate the digital space by a real-life human attendant before entering the world of IRL.

[EOL] End of Life is the creation of Victoria Halper and Kai Krösche, whose company, DARUM, makes boundary-blurring performance and installations, a company that, as Halper explains, “seeks out topics and themes that keep us up at night.”

“Aesthetically, we are always searching for new forms within the performing and media arts,” she says. “Since we aim not to repeat ourselves, we’re in constant pursuit of new ways to explore the boundaries of theatre, film, and digital art—often resulting in inter- and multidisciplinary works. A central aspect of much of our work has become a multifaceted exploration of immersion.”

Their work includes All Delight, a meditation on immortality and a world in which natural death no longer exists, and Homesick, an installation about the long covered-up abuse of thousands of children within Austria’s church and its children's homes.

[EOL]. End of Life by Victoria Halper & Kai Krösche © DARUM

In 2023, they had the opportunity to develop [EOL]. End of Life during a residency at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. Here they found themselves surrounded by digital media and the opportunity to interview experts specializing in its preservation and research digital preservation practices, the complex decision-making involved in archiving and the "right to be forgotten."

It was in Karlsruhe that they developed the dramaturgical outline of the production, most of the characters, and the onboarding AR sequence. Together with architect Mark Surges, they began developing the physical rooms, building environments they would find compelling to explore as audience members. “Many of us have visited museums like the K21 in Düsseldorf, and one way or another, immersive spaces have influenced our creative process—Gregor Schneider is the name that came up most often. That said, we weren’t aiming to imitate his style directly, but were instead inspired by the atmosphere he’s able to create.”

With a show like this, there are many elements involved that are similar to immersive theatre, says Halper, they are just approached differently. “You still need sets, props, lights, sound, actors, and movement. But in our case, all of these are created digitally.”

Architect Mark Surges used Blender to design the architecture of the rooms in which participants enter. These rooms were then furnished with 3D objects—some licensed from asset libraries, others created from scratch in Blender. The interactive objects in the show function like props or furniture. (We are informed at the start not to sit on the furniture, however tempting). They scanned real-life objects - like a cupcake - using photogrammetry. These scans were then cleaned and optimized in Blender and imported into Unity, which is the game-engine powering the entire experience.

The characters, says Halper, were “deliberately designed to appear both authentic and slightly uncanny. This is particularly true of the young girl you encounter during the experience who forces you to think about what it might be like to be a repository of someone else’s memories, created to aid in the grieving process. (The eyes are particularly unnerving).

Their animations were either created using performance capture (via a motion capture suit and a live actor) or manually animated using iClone. The voice recordings were handled similarly to those of an animated film production, with facial and lip movements later animated to match the articulation of the speech.”

In many ways, says Halper, working in VR felt like a relief. “Compared to physical theatre, the possibilities are endless and are primarily limited only by your own creativity and your ability to build in 3D. If you want to move from the Wild West to outer space and then to the depths of hell in a single sequence—it’s entirely feasible in VR. On a traditional stage—especially without the use of video projections—that kind of transformation would be technically complex, require large teams of stage technicians, and, in most cases, be financially unfeasible.”

However, they did eventually encounter the limits of what was technically possible: “file sizes, object complexity (polygon counts), project duration, headset weight, and the ever-present, painstaking task of identifying and fixing bugs. But with enough time, most of these challenges can be solved or worked around. I suppose the bottom line is: you can’t have it all—but in VR, you can get surprisingly close.”

One of the key considerations was space and how the audience members would navigate it. Each playing area is just 2.75 m by 3.5 m. “Early in the process, we sketched layouts indicating where audience members could move—and, most importantly, where the elevator would “spawn” to bring them into and out of the space.”

She describes the different rooms you visit as “being stacked like layers in a multi-storey shopping mall—each one confined to the same physical footprint, with the elevator transporting the audience between them.” However, as you go deeper into the experience, the sense of space expands, the world grows. “For more complex transitions, we played with the illusion of distance: for example, audience members might turn a corner, and while their back is turned, the floor plan behind them loads a new configuration. This creates the feeling of having travelled far, when in reality they’ve never left their 9-square-meter space.”

Victoria Halper and Kai Krösche (c) Apollonia Theresa Bitzan

It's a profoundly immersive experience – you’re in the world of [EOL] for 90 minutes, wading deeper and deeper into both the constructed reality and the moral implications of the narrative. No surprise that, as Halper reports, some audience members need a moment to reorient themselves after the experience — especially those encountering VR for the first time. “Some take a seat in silence, reflecting on the final decision they had to make during the performance. Others are immediately ready to engage in conversation about what they just experienced, or the broader questions and implications raised by the production. Some though don't make it through and need to stop the experience midway since the whole thing is too atmospherically or emotionally intense for them.”

The show leaves you – or certainly left me - with questions swirling around your head for days afterwards. “When we're dead, says Halper, “do we prefer to fade into the memories of those who knew us, or rather fade into code, written on into eternity, based on data - chats, videos, audio clips - that were meant to represent us, yet are nothing more than an incomplete facsimile of the vast domain, to quote Schnitzler, that makes us who we are?” It also poses the question of who “truly benefits from digital legacy avatars — the dead, the grieving, or the companies hosting these algorithmic doppelgängers?” This latter aspect, touching on how our data is stored, and by whom, made me think about Rimini Protokoll’s la danse d’Amazon which explored how the majority of Amazon’s profits actually derive from Amazon Web Services (AWS), from data essentially, but at the same time it also demonstrated how technology can make the dead feel present in ways that are both comforting and unsettling, sometimes simultaneously.

Nights at the circus: Rimini Protokoll's la danse d'amazon and an interview with Daniel Wetzel

Given the rise of “grief tech” and increasing numbers of people using AI to recreate a loved one’s voice or more, to hold on to some sense of their personality, the piece feels incredibly resonant, locating the perfect form to unpack these themes. It also makes you reflect on the way that big tech giants outsource content moderation to freelancers, or the way your social media accounts, your photos and, by extension, your memories are now susceptible to the whims of an algorithm. At the same time, the narrative is propulsive and compelling. Having been given your initial set of instructions, the show soon pulls you in a different direction. Once you meet the in-world protagonist, the early sense of exploration is traded for something more passive and you could also argue that some of the later story beats are very obviously in service to the central moral dilemma, but because I was so engrossed, I didn’t mind this overly.

I’ve seen pieces of VR theatre which have played with the narrative potential of the technology before - Ella Hickson’s Adult Children, a piece which dealt directly with the intense isolation of Covid lockdown, or Curious Directive’s hybrid play Frogman - but never felt more totally immersed in a piece than I did with [EOL] End of Life (admittedly, I’m not a gamer, so this was largely new terrain for me). It really felt like they were taking the interactive storytelling potential of the technology to the next level, making something that felt at once like an interactive Black Mirror episode and a Hamlet-like meditation on digital existence.

This week in European theatre

A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.

No President – One of the most exciting American companies around, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, make their long overdue London debut this week with a show that knits together ballet and cannibalism. This excellent Exeunt piece explores the company’s work in more detail. While this is their London debut, they made their first UK appearance way back in 2013 at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival with a marathon 12-hour performance of the first five instalments of their Life and Times project. I was there. It was wild. Novelist Sarah Perry was also there and wrote about the experience for Exeunt. You can catch No President at the Southbank Centre from 9-11 July.

Festival de Almada - The Portuguese festival features a wide programme encompassing Portuguese artists alongside renowned international theatre makers. Highlights of the 2025 line-up include A History of Violence by Thomas Ostermeier and the Schaubühne Berlin, and La Tempesta by the Italian puppet company Carlo Colla e Figli, a favourite with last year’s audience. It opened on 4 July and runs until 18 July.

Asphalt Festival - The banging line-up for this year’s edition of the Dusseldorf summer festival includes Florentina Holzinger’s Ophelia’s Got Talent, Miet Warlop’s One Song and Fix+Foxy’s A Doll’s House, a performance designed to be performed in a private apartment. The festival opened on 8 July and runs until 27 July.

Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, tips, or thoughts about this newsletter, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com