Works

Photo: You-Wei Chen

Blur

A Promise of Immortality

Experience

Mixed Realities

From

Release year: 2025
Location

Presented in Montreal
Soon in Germany
What we did

Co-production
Partners

Riverbed Theatre
Onassis Culture

A creation by Craig Quintero and Phoebe Greenberg

Blur is a mixed-reality theatre experience that explores this liminal state between life and death, fact and fiction. The production immerses ten audience members in a surreal world, where a performer interacts live with the digital environment of virtual reality. The audience journeys through an unfolding landscape, encountering firsthand the magical possibilities and terrifying consequences of these scientific advancements. The future is present. Step into the unknown.

About the experience

PHI Studio Projet Blur IMG3 — Photo: PHI Studio

Blur announces a new myth for the modern age, where science has changed how we think about life and death. With the advent of cloning and advancements in resurrection biology, we’re dissolving the boundaries separating the living from the dead—the natural from the artificial.

Blur is an interplay between the embodied and the ethereal, where a live actor, through motion capture, interacts seamlessly with the audience. Their gestures and expressions are transmitted in real-time to the virtual world. Participants, as avatars, are free to move within a virtual set, experiencing both collective and individual moments. Featuring augmented reality, this piece bridges the gap between physical and digital worlds.

Blur unfolds as a dreamscape, which brings new ways to think about loss, remembrance and what it might mean to live forever. In this age of resurrection, how do we reconcile our understanding of the frontier between loss and morality?

PHI Studio Projet Blur IMG5 — Photo: You-Wei Chen

Awards and recognitions

Official Selection - Biennale de Venise 2025
Best Experience 2025 - XR Must
HUB Immersive Prize - HUB Montréal 2025

Gallery

Partners

Riverbed Theatre was founded in 1998 in Taipei, Taiwan. The company's image-based, Total Theatre productions blur the boundaries between visual and performing arts. Critics have praised the organic, sculptural quality of Riverbed's "subconscious" theatre, comparing the performances to the best works of Samuel Beckett and David Lynch. Riverbed has staged over fifty original productions, including works at the Taiwan National Theatre, National Taichung Theater, Asia Culture Center (Korea), Esplanade Studio Theatre (Singapore), Theatre de la Condition de Soies (France), Imaginale Figurentheater Festival (Germany), Kobe Arts Village Center (Japan), and Robert Wilson's Watermill Center (USA). In 2022, the company established Riverbed Theatre Ltd. to focus on producing VR and XR productions. Riverbed's virtual reality films have been selected for the Venice Film Festival for three consecutive years (2022-2024) and have won the Best Immersive Experience Award at the Luxembourg City Film Festival, the Panorama Award at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema, and the Best VR360 Award at the Kaohsiung Film Festival.

Onassis Culture, centered around the iconic Onassis Stegi venue—the leading organization in contemporary culture in Greece—connects with Athens through a range of initiatives and works set across the city and beyond. It fosters dialogue on democracy, social justice, gender equality, and the human rights of the LGBTQIA+ community through a series of talks and events. Supporting artistic development, creation, and experimentation, Onassis Culture produces performances, films, and hybrid works while offering fellowships and residencies to both emerging and established artists. With a constant online presence, it creates content that speaks to the present moment. This is culture in sync with the here and now, embracing the local and the global as intertwined aspects of life.