Revival Roadshow

In a speculative future, the appraisal of a mysterious artwork spirals into a surreal VR journey through fake news, rampant consumerism, pollution, and irreversible climate change - revealing how myths shape the stories we choose to believe.

Revival Roadshow (2025)

VR 3-DoF, 8K, 17:00, 4-channel interactive audio.

A 17th-century artwork of the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman becomes the starting point for a darkly absurd vision of the future - one shaped by fake news, rampant consumerism, neo-colonialism, and irreversible climate change. In the 360-view VR film Revival Roadshow, Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy weave together sharp critiques of media consumption, legacies, and their continuing impact on a future that feels both speculative and alarmingly plausible.

Framed as a futuristic spin on an art appraisal show (imagine Antiques Roadshow gone off the rails), the work introduces a young woman who brings in a painting inherited from her grandmother. Sentimental value quickly gives way to financial desire when it turns out the work holds special significance: it depicts Abel Tasman, the 17th-century Dutch explorer known for being the first European to reach Tasmania and New Zealand, reanimated after a catastrophic flood has submerged large parts of the Netherlands. His new mission? To discover fresh land for a displaced Dutch population. The viewer steps into a fictional museum where this speculative future begins to unfold, but there’s little time to engage. The show is frequently interrupted by pop-up advertisements, which dangle hollow promises of consumer comfort in the face of impending ecological disaster. Fehres and Conroy deliberately embrace these visual intrusions as familiar, absurd, and strikingly effective storytelling tools.

As the work unfolds, its dense, maximalist world continues to expand, mirroring the velocity and excess of narrative in today’s hyperreality. Stories overlap, perspectives collide, and the viewer is placed at a crossroads: What do you choose to focus on? What do you leave unseen? Conroy and Fehres heighten this tension between freedom and unease through the immersive use of 360-degree virtual reality. The direction you look shapes the story you receive - no two experiences are alike. In this swirling field of images and meanings, eachglance becomes a choice. And in those choices lie deeper questions: How do we relate to the past, the present, and the future that barrels toward us - wrapped in an impenetrable, suffocating layer of plastic?