Unreal State by Marcos Kripocivach is an app-guided immersive walking performance set in Budapest’s urban environment. Participants use a smartphone app that overlays a speculative digital territory onto real city streets, buildings, and public spaces around Gutenberg tér. Through intimate audio narration, the experience reveals an alternate layer of the city—a reconfiguration that prompts reflection on the pervasive influence of surveillance, digital mediation, and the paradoxes of agency in contemporary urban life. The performance moves between speculative fiction, critical inquiry, and a game-like interaction with the city, encouraging walkers to perceive familiar environments anew, noticing both visible infrastructures and the invisible systems shaping social and political conditions.
The event lasts approximately 60 to 80 minutes and invites participants to navigate this “unreal state” using GPS and audio guidance, fostering an embodied awareness of how digital technologies both connect and control urban populations. Rather than immersing in the screen, the performance directs attention outward, to the city’s surfaces and structures. It situates itself within a broader artistic and cultural discourse on the impact of digital surveillance on democratic life and individual autonomy. The project is presented by the PLACCC Festival and Centro culturale mobilità delle arti as part of the IN SITU Platform 2025–28.
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