The Clouds are Two Thousand Meters Up

Venture to the cutting edge of XR in this haunting, reality-bending pilgrimage between digital worlds and a living forest.

A big screen overlooking a bustling intersection broadcasts the news of a terrible train accident, alerting protagonist Guan to the death of his wife. Discovering in the aftermath of this tragedy that she was working on a novel, Guan is inspired to follow its narrative, charting a path that shifts masterfully between the digital realm of her cloud storage and the fantasy-tinged real-life forest where the book is set, home to an endangered leopard and Taiwan’s Indigenous Rukai people.

Singing Chen’s staggering new immersive work – adapted from a short story by acclaimed Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi, and the winner of the Venice Immersive Grand Prize – poignantly expands on the theme of memory the artist explored in Afterimage for Tomorrow (MIFF 2019) while taking the medium of extended reality to new technological heights. Rather than adopting a first-person perspective, the user figures as Guan’s shadow: a ghostly presence moving freely through an eight-square-metre space. Co-presented by Now or Never, The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up unfolds a seamless new horizon of storytelling.