DARUM goes digital. In Victoria Halper and Kai Krösche’s latest performative installation [EOL]. End of Life, the audience is sent on a journey into a fictional, decommissioned Metaverse 1.0 of the near future. An intense, immersive journey across a virtual ruinscape, confronting us with the question: what virtual traces will we leave behind once we are no longer here, and who will determine what to do with our digital legacy in the future.

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What do abandoned virtual worlds feel like? How much life remains in the digital reconstruction of a deceased person? Who am ‘I’ in the presence of the absent? And what will no longer have a place in the future, corporate-controlled Metaverse? Building on themes explored in their 2021 hyperlink installation 404-TOTLINK, created for Impulse Theater Festival (Germany), DARUM, in [EOL]. End of Life, allows audience to gaze into a not-so-distant future through the lens of a Meta Quest 3 virtual reality headset. The audience steps into the role of an ‘outsourced freelancer’ for the fictional multibillion-dollar corporation IRL (Imaginary Reality Landscapes). As freelancers, they must decide which abandoned worlds still deserve to exist in the virtual utopias of tomorrow’s metaverse– and which should be permanently erased. [EOL]. End of Life confronts these virtual travelers with a range of walkable, 3D environments, each containing remnants of their human creators. In this slowly decaying Metaverse 1.0, now disconnected from the online servers, the digital echoes of past existences persist – along with the question of how we will one day be remembered, and how we want to be remembered.