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Thu 15 Oct
|Royal Birmingham Conservatoire – The Lab
Traversing the Mist — Chou Tung-Yen (Taipei)
Taipei director Chou Tung-Yen brings Traversing the Mist to Fierce Festival for its UK premiere: a 45-minute VR piece where three participants share identical avatars inside a dreamlike gay sauna. Winner of the NewImages Festival Grand Jury Prize, it explores queer desire, intimacy and ageing in a space only virtual reality can create. Strictly 18+, for curious immersive-art fans and anyone open to something intimate and strange.
Time & Location
15 Oct 2026, 16:00 – 18 Oct 2026, 16:45
Royal Birmingham Conservatoire – The Lab, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire – The Lab, 200 Jennens Rd, Birmingham B4 7XR, UK
About the event
Traversing the Mist @yenniechou (Taipei) UK Premiere
Traversing the Mist is a multi-user virtual reality experience in which three participants inhabit the same virtual world simultaneously. Embodying identical avatars, they wander through a surreal gay sauna where fragments of memories, desires, and intimate encounters gradually emerge.
Expanding the universe first introduced in In the Mist (2020), the work shifts from solitary observation to collective experience. Participants become both witnesses and companions as they navigate spaces shaped by longing, intimacy, ageing, and connection. While multi-user VR presents significant technological challenges, Traversing the Mist is ultimately driven by a search for poetry within virtual space. Through shared movement, proximity, and presence, it explores forms of human encounter that can exist only in virtual reality.
Rarely addressed in immersive media, queer desire and intimacy become the starting point for a reflection on how technology reshapes the ways we see ourselves and one another. The work was presented in the Cannes Immersive Competition 2024 and received the Grand Jury Prize at NewImages Festival 2024, where the jury praised it as “a groundbreaking communal immersive experience.”
🎟️Thursday 15th October, every hour between 4-9pm; Friday 16th October, every hour between 12-4pm and 5-9pm; Saturday 17th October, every hour between 12-4pm and 5-9pm; Sunday 18th October, every hour between 1-5pm 📍@royalbirmcons
Presented with @queereast
📷@yenniechou
DURATION: approx. 45 mins
VENUE: Royal Birmingham Conservatoire – The Lab 200 Jennens Rd, Birmingham B4 7XR
UK PREMIERE 18+
CONTENT WARNINGS NUDITY SEXUAL CONTENT
Q&A with Artist: the artists will be available at Fierce Feasts on the 14th, 15th & 16th to chat to audiences about the work and how it was made. When you arrive at the Feast please let a member of our staff know if you’re interested in the Q&A.
Find out more info or book your tickets on https://www.tickettailor.com/events/fierce/2322323
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