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FEDORA
Digital Prize 2025
Winner
YUM! (landscape) © i
YUM! is a participatory XR music theater that blends immersive dining with grotesque beauty, dark humor, and pioneering tech-woven narratives. Step into a vivid, absurd universe where surreal storytelling and uncanny scenarios unfold. YUM! delves into climate change, food shortages, class, identity, and self-obsession, offering a multi-sensory spectacle that reflects on the human condition in exaggerated yet eerily familiar ways—all within a world of absurdism and authentic artificiality.
Presentation
YUM! is an innovative participatory XR (Extended Reality) music theater that immerses audiences in a satirical dining experience where grotesque beauty, dark humor, and tech-driven narratives intertwine. Created by Studio M.A.R.S., this production transports viewers to a parallel universe—vividly absurd and hauntingly familiar—where a sheen of opulence conceals a world plagued by climate catastrophe, food shortages, and societal decay.
Through exaggerated storytelling, YUM! delves into themes of class, identity, and self-obsession. XR technology serves as both a dramaturgical and metaphorical tool, revealing how digital media distorts perception and blurs the line between the authentic and the artificial.
In YUM!, digital illusion collides with physical reality as an XR app transforms revolting jelly dishes into sumptuous virtual feasts, symbolizing our daily interactions with digital devices. Here, technology questions its role in a dystopian society—do screens distort reality, or do they simply mirror our artificial lives?
At the core of YUM! is its pioneering use of AR and VR, seamlessly blending mixed reality with live performance to draw audiences into an uncanny, digital-woven experience. Over sixty surreal minutes, audiences are immersed in a distorted high-society world of grotesque, fake luxuries as the planet teeters on collapse. Dining with self-obsessed characters, they are pulled further into this fabricated reality with satirical ‘Advertisements,’ revealing how digital opulence masks environmental devastation, food shortages, and societal emptiness. In YUM!, devices aren’t just tools; they’re façades masking decay.
Performance Note: The show is designed for active participatory table audiences, with fourteen table viewers equipped with XR devices, as well as passive watcher audiences who can view from auditorium seats or walk around without XR devices.
Artistic Team
Studio M.A.R.S. exemplifies exceptional artistic quality and technological expertise through our multidisciplinary collective of international professionals. Our team includes experts in music composition, opera and theater dramaturgy, stage design, interaction design, immersive mapping, AR/VR/MR design, and AI. Our mission centers on innovating multimedia storytelling, immersive music theater, and new performance forms, creating boundary-crossing experiences that deeply engage audiences. A multicultural collective led by women, we are dedicated to minimizing the impact of patriarchal structures within our work. Recognizing the pervasive issues of dependency and power imbalances in our industry, we have intentionally designed our structures to foster a safer space for all participants and cultivate a diverse, discrimination-free environment. We leverage our collective skills, expertise, and networks to amplify each other's voices and advance our common goals. Our Yum! artistic team is carefully selected not only for their exceptional quality in every aspect of production but, more importantly, for their commitment to Studio M.A.R.S.'s policies and values.
Wen Liu
Composer
April Koyejo-Audiger
Librettist
Alexander Hackl
Designer/Engineer
