What happens when the audience becomes part of making the work?
Murmurs, or Walk Into the Wall Consciously, is IJAD’s new co-creative live hybrid performance, developed as part of the European Horizon project HAMLET.
It is our first collaboration with But Why? and it begins with a deceptively simple question:
What do we carry inside ourselves that we rarely say aloud?
Most performances meet their audiences at the end of the creative process. Murmurs begin somewhere else. It invites people in before the work has settled, while its form, language, and meaning are still being discovered.
Over six months, audiences will not simply witness the work. They will help make it.
Together with But Why?, we have chosen an Alternate Reality Game as the point of departure: an interactive story that moves through the real world, dissolving the distance between narrative and everyday life. You do not stand outside this story and observe it. You enter it.
And it has already begun.
Follow @themurmurinstitute on Instagram.
The journey unfolds in three stages.
First, the ARG.
Follow the clues. Play along. Allow yourself to be drawn into the strange and shifting world of Murmurs.
Then, the widgets.
Through a series of participatory activities across social media, you will be invited to share your own murmurs: reflections, confessions, dreams, frustrations, questions and visions of the future.
These contributions are not feedback. They are not responses to a finished artistic proposition. They are the material from which the proposition will be made.
Finally, interactive creative tools developed through HAMLET will let you encounter your contributions in new forms as image, sound, movement, and performance. What begins as a private thought may return transformed, becoming part of the living fabric of the work.
We do not yet know exactly what Murmurs will become.
That uncertainty is not something we are trying to eliminate. It is the space in which the work and our relationship with its audience can become genuinely alive.
We want you with us in that space: not after the questions have been answered, but while we are still learning how to ask them.
Follow @themurmurinstitute on Instagram.
More will be revealed soon. If your curiosity has already been stirred, register
https://themurmurinstitute.wordpress.com/2026/08/03/whats-the-murmur-institute/ and join us….
