_Porton Down

Porton Down is an experimental biography that uses virtual reality to enable audiences to descend into the unnerving zone of a government’s human experimentation program. The piece explores the disquieting experiences of Don Webb, who found himself entangled in Porton Down, a secret British Cold War program that involved testing possible chemical weapons—such as LSD—on human subjects. Hand-drawn in virtual reality and co-written with Webb, Porton Down examines Webb’s experiences as a military test subject and the after effects of the experiment that bewildered him for the next 50 years. During the experience, participants become subjects of another kind of testing as they are tracked and turned into data. In this way, Porton Down investigates its own medium with a critical eye.