On 9 Dec 2025, Andreea and I gave a “talk” about our journey and lessons learned in creating The Forbidden Question. Rather than a talk, it was a performance about the performance. The talk also includes a speaking lamb from Van Eyck’s famous 1432 Ghent Altarpiece. See the lamb in the video of our talk below. At the end, you will also see a strange character running away with the stolen 12th panel of the Altarpiece.

With this piece, we are proposing a choreographed yet spontaneous play between multiple dreams and dreamers. All the actors on stage come from the audience except one: Paul. An Eastern European architect who moved to Brussels in hopes of one day building the city of the future, he has fallen asleep with his shoes on after a long day of waiting tables. This is the moment our universe is born. As participants are encouraged to chase connection and fulfillment, our cosmology cycles their souls and dreams through several layers of reality. The more assiduous the search, the more wondrous and intense the connections they make, the more oblivious and unrelenting the fleeting and cyclical nature of the game becomes. The “forbidden question” in the title is the question no one will ever find an answer to: Whose dream is this? Are my desires really mine? Am I even able to stop wanting?

The room is set up with nine physical beds (8 for the audience encircling the one bed for Paul). The performance is designed for a full 360° experience (visuals, audio, tracking), and we work with award-winning 3D artist Ozark Henry, award-winning cinematographer and DoP Arthur Moelants, and award-winning maker Thomas Mc Leish.

I would like to give some background on this project, a sort of making-of. The project started as the New New Babylon performance, at that time designed for a speaker on stage wearing a VR headset, and the audience seeing the VR rendering on a big screen behind the speaker. Here is a very, very early version of the tower of the New New Babylon:

Then, we pivoted to a version called “Dream my Dream”

This time, the audience would witness a sleeping performer with a VR headset, and follow the dream through some sort of transparent screen:

After submitting our project to both the Venice Biennale College Cinema and the Cannes Immersive 2025 competition, without being selected, we took the opportunity to critically reevaluate the core premises of the performance.

Then, as part of my end-project for the Howest course XR in Industry, we created a very early version of The Forbidden Question, which began with the story of an Eastern European waiter and the concept of central and surrounding beds. The video below is an early MVP of what we had in mind.

During this period of reassessment, Andreea came across an open call for immersive projects at the Salzburg Mozarteum X-Reality Lab. Salzburg is currently developing a state-of-the-art 360° immersive venue featuring stereoscopic projection, a 60+ channel spatial audio system, and integrated LiDAR and high-definition camera infrastructure. The lab was seeking artistic performances for the venue’s inaugural program, scheduled for March 2026.

For this project, we completely re-wrote the performance into an XR “game of life” unfolding across multiple realities, with both an actor and the audience as performers. From its earliest concept through multiple iterations, the project transformed from a one-person headset performance into an immersive XR experience designed for stereoscopic projection, 3D tracking, and 360° spatial sound. Here is an extract from our submission document. The biggest change was to move the whole New New Babylon narrative from the foreground to the background, and to let the audience experience crossing realities (from dream reality to awake-reality). We made it to the shortlist (out of 150 international candidates), but did not get selected in the end.

In preparation for our talk at UnitedXR, Andreea and I had many online sessions on the mood and conceptual flow of our presentation (Mural extract below). We wanted to present a coherent journey from New New Babylon to The Forbidden Question to The Third Council.

An aha moment emerged during these sessions: neither Homo sapiens, ludens, nor faber is capable of evaluating the validity of these new structures of reality. Their meaning cannot be assessed intellectually—they must be experienced.

Hence Homo Experiens. With an “s” to differentiate from the words “Narrative” and “Experience” that have become catch-all words.

So we like to call ourselves “Experiens Explorers” and “Designed Conspiracy” would better describe what we have in mind. See also https://petervanstudios.com/2025/12/21/the-orphic-experience-we-are-all-argonauts-again/

Kent Bye, who runs the Voices of VR Podcast, was in the room, and he invited us for an interview right after (quite an honor, if you ask me). As soon as the interview is published, the link will be added to this post.

Use the barcode above to follow the discoveries of Douglas Spar (aka The Holy Lamb). Doug is the one investigating The Third Council. And “The Forbidden Question” is now positioned as a training protocol for crossing realities and the main priority of our team right now.

We are now complementing the team with technology partners to build a pop-up 360 infrastructure for artistic performances. We are contacting immersive spaces to be on their program. We also consider a subsidy for a technology prototype for this immersive performance.

May the lamb be with you in 2026!

With deep gratitude to Andreea, TJ, Arthur, Joost, and Ozark for staying motivated during this whole process. And thanks to UnitedXR for having us.