The Collider

An immersive experience that explores your own personal relationship with power

The Collider is a machine, built to decode the mysteries of human relationships. Created for two people at a time and using VR within an elaborate built set, this is an immersive experience that explores your own personal relationship with power.

The machine at the heart of The Collider is on a mission: to identify and understand the invisible material that passes between people – the corrosive, delightful and mysterious matter that keeps us together and pulls us apart.

“Anagram’s new project is one big mindfuck of vulnerability, dancing lines and chocolate bars.”

VICE

“Anagram manages to find ways to push each participant beyond their everyday comfy places, without ever making them feel exposed, uncomfortable, or like they might be doing it wrong. The languid and searching narratives that play out for each of us elicit magical moments… I am certain this piece will never be experienced the same way twice.”

Medium

“One of the most wonderfully unusual experiences I’ve had in VR. This was all about the baryons, protons, neurons, mesons, pions and kaons of others, a deeper party talk, a percussion of scientific and social ideas.”

Harold Goldberg - New York Videogame Critics Circle

Created for pairs of people to navigate together, the narrative guides each person on a journey through the machine.

Each participant enters the machine separately – finding themselves in a waiting room, where, following audio instructions, they are asked to they re-build delicate memories of dominance and submission. Deeper into the machine, their journeys converge. One enters a virtual world revealing the inner vision of the machine, the other can manipulate the visions and actions inside that virtual world. The experience culminates in an unmediated encounter where the pair work out, together, what has happened.

The Collider builds the real choreography of going in and out of VR, and the dynamic between the person watching and the person inside, into a theatrical experience which creates its own spectacle – a dance between two limited humans failing and failing again to see the other’s experience and then, finally, the rush of connection when they do.

Forever trapped inside our own heads, can we travel across the cracks that separate us?

And if you make it across – do you dominate, surrender or create something beautiful together?

Presented at:

Film Criticism Conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | Nov 2023

STUK in Leuven, Belgium | Jun 2021

Venice International Film Festival, Best of VR | Sep 2019

Sandbox Immersive in Qingdao, China | Jun 2019

Storyscapes, Tribeca Film Festival in New York, USA | Apr 2019

IDFA Doclab R&D showcase in Amsterdam, Netherlands | Nov 2018

Gallery

Events

Upcoming

No events scheduled.

Past

No events in the archive.

Awards

2019

Best immersive artwork, Sandbox Immersive, Qingdao, China

, 2019

The Digital Dozen breakthroughs in immersive storytelling by Columbia University (Selected)

, 2019

Best of VR, Venice International Film Festival

Team

Co-Producer, Co-Director, Co-writer

Amy Rose & May Abdalla

Developers

Clarice Hilton & Mike Golembewski

Set Designer

Synnove Fredericks

Animation

Barry Gene Murphy

Interactive Set Detail

Pete Bennett

Sound & Music

Aaron Cupples & Brigitte Hart

Credits

Supported by

Arts Council England, Digital Catapult, National Theatre Storytelling Studio, IDFA Doclab, Lesley Silvester & Ely Jacques Kahn III, Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio UK, Digital Cultures Research Centre At UWE Bristol, and HP