project quantum heart
Project Quantum Heart is a play-game that reimagines healing through
participatory storytelling, XR and community ritual.
Plot Summary
Rising star assistant professor Emily Wong is on the verge of a mental health breakdown. She has just been denied tenure after years of sacrificing everything and everyone for this illusive dream.
In a desperate leap, she applies to become a video game designer—only to slip into the game itself, entering a shadow realm.
Em is suddenly thrust into an intergenerational battle between her grandmother Phoenix and the Goddess Kali, helps an ancient Daoist tree of uselessness find his purpose, and meets a dragon who knows all her secrets.
Project Quantum Heart is a playable story: Live audiences are cast as the role of Em’s spirit guides. Together they rock out in an intergenerational dance-off, solve a roomscale merkabah puzzle to unlock Em’s rite of passage, and use their mobile phones as game controllers to escape a virtual maze.
Em discovers that healing and transformation can’t be done on her own. It’s her community that helps her rebuild and remember who she really is after the system and institutions have failed her.
accolades and Development
Project Quantum Heart (formerly Out of the Box) has been collaboratively built with a vibrant community of artists, funders, and organizations since 2019.
Our first table read was held over Zoom during Covid-19 (2021), led by director M. Graham Smith and a diverse cast of theater actors across the U.S.
In 2022, we tested the concept of a VR game play through a staged reading at Magic Theater with TigerBear producer and director Jerome Gentes and a team of Bay Area and NYC actors in-person and online.
In 2024, Project Quantum Heart was selected as one of three plays for SFSU AA CARES’ Narrative Change Portfolio to shed light on hidden stories in the Asian American community.
With the support of SFSU AA CARES, KCCEB, and Z Space’s technical residency program, in 2024 we assembled a core team of interdisciplinary artists led by director Scarlett Kim. The practices of these women and non-binary artists span theatrical storytelling and worldbuilding, immersive experience design, Extended Reality (XR), game design, and ritual.
The project has received funding from Theater Bay Area (2019), San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant (2021), SFSU AA CARES (2024), and Kenneth Rainin New and Experimental Works (2025).
Project Quantum Heart is a unique independent artist-driven production bringing together theaters, community-based organizations, and institutions to address community healing.
Audience member playtesting the underworld at the Project Quantum Heart Tech Residency, Z Space, SF July 2024.
discover
read an excerpt
GRANDMA PHOENIX: Emily, we are blessed, so lucky to be here in America.
EM: Pau Pau, they don’t care about us. They just want us to make them orange chicken, do their nails and their dry cleaning!
GRANDMA PHOENIX: What do you mean, you’re a successful professor. I’m so proud of you!
EM: Assistant professor, and they just fired me unfairly!
GRANDMA PHOENIX: What do you mean you got fired? Did you not do a good job? Did you make your boss mad, Emily?
EM: Pau Pau, I did everything they asked. Even things they don’t ask other professors to do!
GRANDMA PHOENIX: Why didn’t you fight back then? They think they can treat you like that just because you’re Chinese?!
watch A CLIP
Quantum Heart’s
origin story
Jan 2019 Artistic Inquiry Corazon Collective Retreat
Aug 2021 Community Reading, Hungry Ghost Festival
Jan 2019 Paper Cutting Web of Life
