Every day during Shaping Bonds, an installation view of Symbiosis is free to visit between 18:45 - 19:45. Meet the team behind this unique performative, multiuser and multisensory VR installation and have a close look at all the different elements that this project brings together. This is a free behind the scenes view that can be combined with the film program. For the full experience, book a 45-minute time-slot here. 

Inspired by science philosopher Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, this virtual reality experience for multiple users and multiple senses transports you to about 200 years in the future. On the ruins of the Anthropocene, humanity has made way for a rich biotope teeming with mixed life-forms: human, animal, and machine hybrids. There is no competition, only symbiosis.

This performative VR experience allows participants to embody one of these symbiotic, human-animal, human-plant, or human-technological life forms. How do a slime mold, a monarch butterfly, a Colorado toad, an orchid, or an AI “think” or experience life? By overcoming our anthropocentric perspective, can we actually start thinking-with, living-with, and being-with other planetary organisms in a world that does not ignore how much ecological trouble it is in?

SYMBIOSIS is designed and produced by Polymorf in collaboration with Studio Biarritz. Find the full credits here.