The Exploding Girl VR

Candice’s explosions are a constant threat right from the blood-spattered start, when limbs fly at you from all directions. As she explains in her despondent voice-over, she’s been exploding every day for the last three months. By the time this VR experience begins, she’s exploded 192 times.

Her body looks like it’s been pieced together from different worlds—with a bionic leg, a painted-on grin, and a heart dangling from her chest. Similarly, the figures surrounding her on the street look like avatars in all sorts of unrelated styles, from nightmarish monsters to sexy anime characters. Candice explodes again, obliterating everyone around her. “We can be anything,” she says, “So we are nothing.”

A series of psychedelic vignettes confronts us with Candice’s all-too-relatable depression, loneliness, anxieties, and outbursts of anger—manifesting in uninspired sex and unsettling, surreal violence (including animals of all species lining up for the guillotine and a puppy enthusiastically running itself to death against a wall of barbed wire). These forces destroy both her loved ones and herself.