Voidspace confirms line-up for online festival Surfing the Void
- Immersive Rumours
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Image: Voidspace
Voidspace has announced the full line-up for Surfing the Void, an online festival showcasing interactive digital work from creators including Chronic Insanity, cirqueSaw and Seth Kriebel. Surfing the Void will run from 14th to 27th September 2026.
Speaking on the line-up announcement, Voidspace's Katy Naylor said:
We are chuffed to our boots to be bringing the Voidspace live experience online for the first time. Online interactive is for life, not just for lockdown. There are so many incredible experiences out there, and it's a thrill to bring some of them to our community. It's an exciting opportunity to open the Void to all of you outside of London (and even the UK!) and to show the scope and breadth of how we can play together from the comfort of our own homes.
Founded in 2021, Voidspace platforms interactive arts that invite their audience to participate in some way, from interactive theatre, fiction and poetry, to performance art, arthouse games, audio-visual work and LARP.
Surfing the Void follows on from Voidspace Live, the organisation's annual festival dedicated to grassroots interactive arts of all kinds, which ran at Theatre Deli from 6th to 7th June 2026. You can read our review of Voidspace Live 2026 here.
labRats by cirqueSaw (20 participants)
Despite all your rage, you are still just a rat in a cage. Luckily, you’re also a rat who’s been outfitted with a neural implant that allows you to communicate telepathically with the other rats in your cage. Maybe that’ll help.
labRats is a digitally native interactive performance for 20 people by the award-winning duo cirqueSaw. Pulling equally from classic games, silent films, and a generous helping of Lewis Carroll, the piece seeks to blur the line between reality and unreality, between wonder and horror. Straddling the line between theatre and game, the audience plays as rats in a lab outfitted with neural transmitters, and interact through a bespoke browser-based platform. A researcher performed by a live actor subjects them to a capricious experiment. Later, the rats are set free from their cage, and explore the lab which is full of mysteries, puzzles, stories, and mini-games. Finally, the researcher ups the ante and the rats have to decide how to respond together.
Audiences play as lab rats in an experiment beyond their control, who have to work together to take control of their lives. Whether they choose to escape, take over the lab, or deconstruct the fabric of the reality of their experience itself is entirely up to them. Co-created live with the audience, every show is different.
🗓️ 17th and 20th September 2026, 19:30
💰 Free to attend, with donations encouraged
🕒 75-85 minutes
The Map and The Echo by Seth Kriebel (15 participants)
The Map and the Echo is a new edition in Seth Kriebel’s acclaimed series of interactive Exploration Games (including The Unbuilt Room and A House Repeated). Inspired by early text-adventure computer games, each performance is unique, shaped by your choices. Using simple instructions like ‘Go North’ or ‘Pick up the lamp’, work with your fellow explorers to overcome obstacles, navigating – and creating – an imagined world of secret maps and second chances.
🗓️ 19th September (18:00/20:00), 22nd & 25th September 2026 (20:00), 27th September (18:00/20:00)
💰 From £12.50
🕒 40 minutes
Call of Cthulu: Carver’s Greed by C. Hakan Akgül (6 participants)
The year is 1923, the place is Arkham. As mysterious figures go, Edgar Carver was as closeted and odd as any. However, when he realized he was about to reach the end of his life, he decided to invite six different people from all over the country to share his fortune.
These people may seem randomly selected to most, but Edgar knew them all by heart. Lured by the promise of money, what mysteries and horrors await our adventurers? Will they be able to make it out alive to spend their share, or will they meet a dark and horrible end?
🗓️ 18th September 2026, 19:30
💰 From £12.50
🕒 2 hours
HACKTECTIVE: Goddard Solutions by But why? (1 participant)
At Goddard Solutions, we provide a service no search engine, background check, or private investigator can offer. We answer the question our clients can’t. “Who is this person, really?”
As a newly hired HACKTECTIVE, you’ll be granted temporary access to a client’s chosen subject’s computer. Your role is not to solve crimes or recover data. It is to deduce and report. Every folder, message, photo, draft, and search history is a clue. Some clients are considering hiring someone. Others are deciding whether to trust a business partner, reconnect with an estranged family member, or hand over something valuable. They don’t want facts alone; they need your professional judgement.
Your report will answer a single question: Is this a good person? There are no right answers. Only evidence. At Goddard Solutions, we don’t tell clients what someone has done. We tell them who they are.
🗓️ 14th, 15th, 16th, 26th September 2026 (Various times from 12:00 to 20:40)
💰 From £25.00
🕒 60 minutes
52 Souls by Chronic Insanity (On Demand)
Humanity has both a morbid curiosity and an instinctual repulsion when it comes to death. Over the next 50 minutes, we’ll find out which is stronger. Although it’s something we’ll all go through, death is one of the least understood parts of the human experience, so Chronic Insanity is diving into the deep end.
52 Souls is an open and fun examination of death and our reactions to this terrifying inevitability. Using a pack of cards, the audience randomly generates a performance to understand humanity’s obsession with – and ignorance about– death.
🗓️ On Demand
💰 TBC
🕒 50 minutes
Flavour Text by Chronic Insanity (On Demand)
“This restaurant is now a Tex-Mex place. Food fine but owner not as polite as the previous (I wonder what happened to him?)”
Flavour Text is the term used to describe the environmental storytelling that gives an audience extra insight into a fictional world. The written equivalent of a found footage film, Flavour Text is an internet-wide, narrative treasure hunt You find yourself looking for the number for your favourite takeaway online, when you realise that the restaurant has closed down suddenly. While looking for the reason, the audience falls into a rabbit hole of lies and deceit that they discover through review and comment sections across a variety of websites.
🗓️ On Demand
💰 TBC
🕒 1-3 hours
Surfing the Void (Voidspace Online 2026) runs from 14th to 27th September. For more information, visit voidspacezine.com
