An online interactive system that transforms the concert into a dark-comedy game show, fusing AI and audience participation to critique social and climate collapse.
Wen Liu is a multi-award-winning composer and media artist celebrated for her ability to fuse music, performance, and technology into surreal, socially critical art forms. As the founder and artistic director of Studio M.A.R.S. and Festival M.A.R.S., she has established a singular artistic universe defined by a distinctive visual and musical language, interwoven with dark humor and absurdism.
Her internationally acclaimed productions, such as Yum! (winner of the prestigious European Opera award and the FEDORA Digital Prize 2025—an award celebrating innovation in opera and ballet through technology), exemplify a groundbreaking blend of participatory storytelling and real-time interactivity.
Uncanny Reverie is a theatrical concert that integrates a music ensemble with an online interactive system. The work leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to weave environmental and societal narratives that unfold through active audience participation.
Audiences are plunged into a twisted game show set in a society unraveling under climate collapse and moral decay. Each darkly satirical challenge exposes the distorted choices at the core of modern life, where the relentless pursuit of “progress” collides with crumbling values and a widening gap between illusion and reality.
The storyline evolves through live audience input: via a custom app, participants vote in real time to steer the action, triggering new questions and propelling the plot forward.
The show is a surreal descent that invites reflection on the paradoxes of urban existence, where cutting-edge technology collides with social and ecological disintegration. The central question posed by Uncanny Reverie is provocative: does progress truly serve humanity—or does it only reinforce the illusions we live by?
BIO
Wen Liu is driven by a deep passion for the intersection of science, technology, and storytelling. She has established a practice defined by the integration of digital technologies as dramaturgical tools. Her productions are internationally acclaimed for pushing the boundaries of music theater in the digital age through the use of Extended Reality (XR) and real-time interaction.
This project is part of ReSilence: Future Soundscapes & Affect Mining in Urban Ecosystems, the exhibition showcasing the outcomes of fifteen international art residencies supported by S+T+ARTS (the European Commission’s initiative for science, technology, and the arts). Through the artistic exploration of sound, RESILENCE redefines urban spaces, using the acoustic dimension to analyze the complex affective and ecological relations of future cities and promote collective awareness of what lies beyond mere noise. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with BASE, as part of the FAROUT Festival 2025 edition.