Uncanny Alley * 2024
Venice Immersive - 81st Venice International Film Festival (2024): World premiere / Official Selection (Venice, Italy)

Uncanny Alley: A New Day is a live, intimate VR theatrical experience set inside the Uncanny Alley universe in VRChat, co-produced by Ferryman Collective and Virtual Worlds Company, premiered at Venice Immersive - 81st Venice International Film Festival (2024). Blending interactive storytelling, game-like agency, and real-time performance, it places audiences inside a cyberpunk narrative where choices are not decorative, they actively shape pacing, relationships, and the felt meaning of “escape,” “home,” and resistance.

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Set in a dystopian city governed by Adaptive Learning Industries (A.L.I.), the piece follows the hacker Gh0st, a group of escaped detainees, and the increasingly sentient service-bot Atom, as they race toward a hacked portal before the regime can erase memory through weaponized radio-frequency technology. The experience asks participants to confront a core dilemma with emotional weight: leave the city behind and start a new life in the open metaverse, or stay and fight for a place that shaped them.

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Within the project, António Baía Reis contributes as a Creative Researcher, operating at the intersection of dramaturgy, interaction design, and arts-based inquiry. His role combines conceptual input into the experience’s interactive and narrative design, helping articulate how agency, presence, and improvisational performance can function as a coherent “living dramaturgy”, with ongoing arts-based research that tracks the wider implications of emergent VR theatre practices: what kinds of attention, embodiment, authorship, and social relationality become possible when theatre is performed through avatars, distributed casts, and audience co-presence in networked worlds.

 

A key achievement of Uncanny Alley: A New Day is that it advances VR performance as a new cultural form rather than a technical gimmick: a participatory theatre language where the “stage” is the world, performers inhabit multiple roles fluidly, and spectators become situated participants. Its production history also reflects the field’s real constraints and breakthroughs, especially the drive to deliver a high-fidelity live show on standalone headsets while retaining cinematic atmosphere, responsive interactivity, and coherent storytelling across platforms.

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Festivals, selections, and awards (as featured on the project’s poster and press materials):

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• Venice Immersive - 81st Venice International Film Festival (2024): World premiere / Official Selection

• Fanheart3 Awards (2024): Winner - XR Fan Experience Award

• Imagine Fantastic Film Festival (2024): Official Selection

• XR Must Awards (2024): Best Interactivity/Performance (Winner) + Best Sound Design (2nd place)

• SXSW Film & TV Festival (2025): Official Selection

• NewImages Festival (2025): XR Competition - Selected (including a French-language version presentation)

• Raindance Immersive (2025): Best Immersive Theatre - Nominee

• FIVARS (2025): Official Selection

• Auggie Awards: Nominee

• NoHo CineFest (2025): Official Selection

• Kaohsiung Film Festival (2025): XR Immersive Award (as highlighted in the project materials/poster circuit)

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In curatorial terms, Uncanny Alley: A New Day belongs to a fast-emerging category of live XR performance that collapses boundaries between theatre, cinema, and social VR, while also opening urgent questions about digital citizenship, collective agency, and the politics of “staying” versus “leaving” in worlds that feel increasingly real. Through both creative development and embedded arts-based research, Reis’s contribution supports the project’s ambition to be experienced not simply as entertainment, but as a cultural prototype for how immersive performance can generate new publics, new dramaturgies, and new ethical stakes for presence in virtual worlds.​​​​