The anxiety of young people who have nowhere to go is sublimated into the anxiety of the avatars, who are trapped between existence and non-existence, and eventually unfolds as a collective nightmare in the VR space.

‘Prometheus Unbound’ is a VR installation which poses a question about how we visualize human beings beyond the experience of the pandemic. It invites the audiences into a pessimistic vision where humans, who are already tuned into digital, are treated as semi-humans and trapped in a nightmarish space between reality and virtual, life and non-life.

Although the story is only told in an abstract form, the audience will share the sense of failure and of a desperate attempt to recover from this failure. This dark vision of the new humanity is created with the help of a group of Vietnamese young workers in Japan, who were stuck between systems and left out of any social security during the pandemic, treated like non-humans in the social structure. The nightmares narrated by these workers are overlapped with the anxiety of technology’s failure.

‘Prometheus Unbound’ touches a social aspect of these themes and, despite the title, the real emancipation does not happen in this part of the trilogy. Here, Koizumi focus on bringing back a human dimension to the avatars, which were reduced to the status of mere images.

Each person will immerse themselves in the virtual reality experience independently through a Head-Mounted-Display. Six people can experience the work at the same time. 

Artist Meiro Koizumi also brings to Lisbon another part of this trilogy – ‘Prometheus The Fire Bringer‘ -, presented at the Gulbenkian Garden. You can purchase a pass that includes both parts of the trilogy for 10€ at the box office.

Engawa – A Season of Contemporary Art from Japan

‘Engawa’ is a programming that brings to Lisbon a set of creators from Japan and the Japanese diaspora, many of them for the first time in Portugal. More info