We're excited to announce that Kevin Cunningham and Chuck Mee will be developing and mounting Not Knowing,  the long awaited follow up to their 2007 immersive theater and media collaboration Fire Island.

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Not-Knowing is an immersive performance, media and creative technology work conceived by writer/director/designer Kevin Cunningham, based on texts provided by the award-winning American Playwright Chuck Mee.

 

Mee is famous for bringing the technique of collage and assemblage to theater making and Cunningham is following this methodology for all aspects of the development of the work.

 

Using a technology platform called the 3LD Mixed Reality Bridge, built and tested over the last five years at 3LD and featured at Sundance 2019, Cunningham will facilitate a collaboratively devised performance experience from the script which itself is a blend of 13 source scripts. The 3LD MR Bridge incorporates a powerful mix of affordable technologies to create a bridge between cinematic, performed and everyday reality, creating an experiential field in which fiction and reality blend seamlessly. This platform allows for deep exploration, improvisation and interdisciplinary mixing within a technically complex intermodal creative environment.

 

Blending cutting edge holographic techniques with large-scale digital video, tracked mapping, audio, gestural and lidar interactive and innovative digital audio techniques with augmented reality techniques, figures can emerge fully formed from the cinematic surround, leaving the screen entirely to float among the audience or to walk up and hug them. As the line between truth and illusion - or simulated vs. lived reality becomes increasingly blurred, so too traditional markers of difference will be exposed or rendered ambiguous, with performers and a design team from diverse backgrounds and identities melding and changing themselves and the environment in surprising and provocative ways. By creating a bridge-state between cinematic, staged and lived reality, “Not-Knowing” examines the possibility of connection and authentic intimacy in a world of technologically driven solipsism and digital fakery.