Meiro Koizumi is an artist who blends reality and fiction in experimental videos and performances that explore the relationships between the state, the collective, and the individual, as well as the human body and its emotions. Prometheus Bound, his highly-acclaimed virtual reality (VR) theater piece that premiered at Aichi Triennale 2019, created an experience that tore the audience between polarities: virtuality and reality, intoxication and awareness, transcendence and the limitations of physical bodies.
With this new VR piece, Koizumi presents something of a sequel to his previous work. No copy of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Unbound, a follow-up to his play Prometheus Bound written about 2,500 years ago, has survived; we have no way of knowing how it ends, how Prometheus reconciled with Zeus and how he was freed. Koizumi connects this lost play to our pandemic era and reconstructs it as a ritualistic performance that allows multiple audience members to participate in both virtual and physical spaces. How will the participants, sharing a ceremonial experience on the cusp of life and non life, either distance themselves from or conspire with a real-time “dream unbound”?