DOUBLE – A Darkfield Radio Experience

As COVID-19 continues to disrupt the arts industry across the globe, innovative UK company Darkfield are launching with their visionary new audio experience DOUBLE in NZ on Tuesday 1 September. DOUBLE will allow Kiwis to take part in a critically-acclaimed, chilling, and immersive encounter within their bubbles, regardless of the country’s COVID alert level status.

“…unsettling audio that turns your home into a sci-fi dystopia” ★★★★
The Guardian (on Double)

All you need is a mobile device, headphones – and a friend…

Audiences will sit opposite each other on either side of a kitchen table. Pairs of participants will be replicated in hundreds of rooms across Aotearoa, listening to a simultaneous broadcast over 20 minutes. There is only one rule: everyone has to be who they say they are.

DOUBLE is the first show from the Darkfield Radio branch, a ground-breaking new project which brings the company’s inventive audio centred shows to audiences at home. Internationally acclaimed, DOUBLE is the first ever audio-only experience to be part of the official selection for the Venice International Film Festival. Selected as part of the 2020 ‘Venice VR Expanded’ category, DOUBLE will be showcased worldwide, making history as the world adapts to cross-genre interactive events that can be accessed from anywhere.

Part of the magic of DOUBLE is the ability for Darkfield Radio to deliver a powerfully riveting experience with just a pair of regular headphones, a mobile phone, and a kitchen table, situating each audience member at the centre of an intense evolving narrative. Sitting at the intersections of technology and theatre, the hallmark of all Darkfield creations is the use of 360-degree binaural (3D) sound to manipulate the audience’s sense of reality, with the impressive design creating an atmosphere that perplexes the senses and casts doubt from inside your own house. Tapping into psychology and the very nature of the human condition, Darkfield works are able to transport their audiences – without needing to go anywhere.

“If you’ve never experienced one of Darkfield’s shows, absolutely go: it is technically astonishing, completely uncanny, and deeply unnerving. You start to question your own senses. You may start to feel a rising panic. It’s not for faint-hearted.”
The Independent (on Coma)

DOUBLE explores the Capgras delusion, a condition in which the sufferer is convinced that a loved one has been replaced by an exact replica with malign intentions. DOUBLE blurs the lines of what is real and what is imagined, following the themes of Darkfield’s previous shows which explored ideas around drug placebos, the multiverse and the unknown beyond the veil.

Darkfield’s three shipping container based shows – Séance, Coma, and Flight – have been critically acclaimed in every centre they have toured to, including winning a 2020 Adelaide Fringe Weekly Award (for Coma), all noted for their sensory storytelling and incredibly immersive sound design. Welcoming over 160,000 audience members worldwide with tours in the UK, USA, Australia and Mexico, including three sold-out Edinburgh Festival runs, Darkfield Radio was the logical next step for UK Creators David Rosenberg and Glen Neath. These web-based sonic interactions allow more people around the globe to experience the chilling magic of Darkfield’s creativity – including audiences in Aotearoa for the very first time.