'The Black Mirror Experience' review — reality and AI blur in immersive event inspired by the TV series

Read our review of The Black Mirror Experience, a part-live, part virtual-reality experience set in the universe of the dystopian sci-fi Netflix show Black Mirror.

Summary

• The Black Mirror Experience is an interactive experience inspired by the world of the Netflix series Black Mirror
• Attendees visit a fictional tech company that creates idealized digital clones of themselves
• The experience blends live and virtual-reality elements and is partly experienced through a headset
• The experience is recommended for fans of Black Mirror and other dystopian; tech-centered; and sci-fi media

An interactive, partially virtual-reality experience built around Black Mirror may seem like a hat on a hat. The sci-fi show, which premiered in the U.K. in 2011 and moved to Netflix in 2016, has earned acclaim for its gallows humor, imaginative production design, and perverse examination of society’s relationship to technology. It’s covered violence in video games, dead loved ones reanimated by AI, life-or-death game shows, killer robot canines, the overwhelming subscription-ification of basic resources, surveillance, and the severe existential dread that’s paired with all of it. If its later seasons have sagged in quality, it’s only because the distance between Black Mirror's near-future dystopia and now is shortening each day. So why pay for The Black Mirror Experience at The Shed in order to experience the horrors of big tech and data mining, when you can log into your Google account or buy groceries at Whole Foods and basically get the same thing?

Creator David Bardos seems just enough in on this joke, as the premise of The Black Mirror Experience is window shopping for a new product from a fictional company called Phaeton, the name taken from Greek mythology, which has created robotic clones called LifeAgents. After you’ve had your picture taken and your body “scanned,” and you've signed away your likeness, your voice, and neural impulses (no, really), you walk through the experience with a headset, training Phaeton’s technologies to recreate, and essentially take over, your emotional and intellectual responses to create a LifeAgent that will create the best version of you imaginable. All that makes you you can be reduced to data points and brain scans that can be recreated and improved upon, says AI-generated Phaeton founder Cody.

As you walk through the experience's minigames, including being trapped in an old TV camera talking to a computer-generated Sigmund Freud, it is momentarily disorienting to have lo-fi animations speak back at you with a surprising amount of responsiveness. When your LifeAgent is finally revealed, it’s even stranger to see the photo/scan applied to this bizarre animated figure speaking in “your” voice.

The back quarter of The Black Mirror Experience, in which the clones rebel, both causes the thing to go off the rails and is arguably the most enjoyable part, partially because it devolves into an amusement park cart shooting game mixed with the plot of I, Robot. It’s a little bit bombastic even for Black Mirror, but the architectural structures and factory backrooms that attendees have to navigate are relatively impressive, even if they still fall short of a video game cut scene graphics-wise.

For a majority of The Black Mirror Experience, I found myself thinking it was merely a cutesy and occasionally charming use of VR technology. But, to its credit, I found myself relatively unsettled at how quickly my face could be slapped onto these digital objects and how dead-eyed my AI doppelgänger looked in certain shots. Although a similar effect can be achieved via the numerous real-life platforms that happily create deepfakes (and maybe already have), it’s not every day you become the face of a robot uprising.

The Black Mirror Experience summary

In The Black Mirror Experience, visitors are brought in to explore the Phaeton store, where they can look at products like home scanning devices and contact lenses that record everything you see. Visitors then get to test out the company’s new customizable LifeAgents. They’re scanned and their biometric data is taken, and when they put on the VR headsets, they train their LifeAgents to make a true replica of their emotional and intellectual impulses and responses.

The Black Mirror Experience is not a live recreation of a specific episode or plot from the Black Mirror TV series; instead, it features a new, original storyline set within the series's universe.

What to expect at The Black Mirror Experience

The first part of the experience, where visitors explore the Apple-like store, is cute but a little dinky. In its current installation at The Shed, there’s not much hiding that this is a temporary setup; the walls fall a foot or so short of the ceiling, and the venue’s real room, so to speak (as opposed to the pop-up construction), is visible at the edges. Glasses wearers will be able to participate, but the headset gets a bit tight after about a half hour. Visitors go in groups of six, and you are required to digitally authorize the rights to your likeness and voice for the experience's use.

What audiences are saying about The Black Mirror Experience

Attendees at The Black Mirror Experience have shared mixed responses on online forums like Reddit.

• “I think it's fun and worth going if you're a fan of VR/AI/scifi. The whole experience is pretty well fleshed out and well put together. My critique is that the black mirror theme isn't that relevant. It feels like a bunch of ideas thrown together from the 'best of' of VR experiences.” - Reddit user u/Spacetravel
• “Insanely dumb. Ai slop. Horrible experience. Thank god I didn't pay. Story made zero sense.” - Reddit user u/CanadaStonks
• “much better than I expected. This is not a simple VR demo, and it is not just a “Black Mirror room” with screens. It sits somewhere between immersive theatre, social experiment, virtual reality and video game logic.” - Reddit user u/Planhub

Who should see The Black Mirror Experience

• The scale of The Black Mirror Experience's virtual-reality world is fairly impressive, which should intrigue fans of immersive shows and attractions.
• Although there are times in which the Black Mirror branding seems tangential, there’s enough uncanniness in the whole experience to make it worthwhile for superfans of the series.
• If you want to know what it's like for your likeness to be used on a virtual clone, you'll enjoy the experience of finding out.

Learn more about The Black Mirror Experience

Anyone who’s seen Black Mirror may not necessarily be clamoring to enter that world because, well, just look around. There are a handful of moments in which its fractured reflection of our reality is intriguingly put to use in The Black Mirror Experience, but as a whole, it isn’t consistent or polished enough to necessarily warrant signing away your data (if only for a few weeks) to another thing.

Photo credit: The Black Mirror Experience. (Photos courtesy of production)