A funeral for the internet went to market at Venice
Samantha Gorman, Scarlett Kim and Danny Cannizzaro staged a smartglass ritual where the mourners co-write the eulogy with an AI.
The mourners wear smartglasses. A Funeral for the Internet, a participatory theatre piece by Samantha Gorman, Scarlett Kim and Danny Cannizzaro, seats its audience inside a fictional Silicon Valley consciousness startup, where an earpiece whispers personalized prompts, listens to what each person says and does, and steers the room through a collective ritual mourning "the internet as we knew it—messy, intimate, human." The team took the work to the Venice Immersive Market at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, which ran Sept. 2–12, and announced the selection alongside playtest photographs; the next step, in their words, is assembling a "producing village" toward a premiere and tour.
Gorman and Cannizzaro founded Tender Claws, the studio whose The Under Presents put live performers inside a VR stage night after night, and whose Virtual Virtual Reality made a comedy out of AI middle management. Kim directs at the seam of live performance and immersive technology, with work developed at the Royal Shakespeare Company. The piece was developed over two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company and UC Santa Cruz, and Kim describes the underlying tool as "a new live playwriting platform for co-authorship between directors, audiences, and LLMs."
The opening 21 seconds of the launch trailer for The Under Presents, Tender Claws’ earlier live-theatre VR work, via Steam. Watch the full trailer with sound. No public video of A Funeral for the Internet exists yet.
Killscreen profiled Gorman in 2019, on bringing the present moment into VR, and the theatre-game crossover has been on our radar since Punchdrunk and MIT ran experiments on Sleep No More in 2012.
Theatre keeps borrowing from games, and games keep returning the favor—Killscreen has covered that exchange since 2012. The free newsletter tracks it three times a week.
