Heisenberg is an immersive, audio augmented reality game intended for enormous groups in open public spaces. Participants start at the beginning of the universe as fundamental particles and then play as a variety of human and nonhuman characters across spacetime. Heisenberg emphasizes limits on personal understanding—a cue from particle physics and the game’s namesake, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The work also references the narrative and dramaturgical structure of Italo Calvino’s science fiction fable collection Cosmicomics. In Heisenberg, there are five divergent tracks an audience member might hear. Toward the beginning of the game, all participants hear the same audio, to ease them in, before the playful chaos that follows. Heisenberg includes text-based, spoken, and kinetic game play.

The piece bridges contemporary particle physics with sociopolitical implications of uncertainty. Developed following the 2016 presidential election, Heisenberg investigates what happens when we assume others occupy the same realities and motivations that we do. The game asks: if we don’t know what’s coming, how do we live? And: if we don’t know each other, how do we live together?