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TDIQ begins in a disused shopping centre, and leads participants to multiple sites across Footscray, giving audiences an interactive, groundbreaking psychological experience of psychosis through cross reality (XR) technologies.
TDIQ is the brainchild of producer Troy Rainbow, who created the show based on his real-life experiences living with mental illness: The Door In Question comes from a deeply personal place. My mother had a diagnosis of schizophrenia, so the show aims to demonstrate how love can be expressed in a very fragmented state. The narratives are a combination of childhood experience and written notes, including remarkable birthday presents and cards I received from my mother. The VR content is an illustration of a childhood story she wrote for me. I hope audiences can come away from the work with a greater understanding of the impact of living within an unreliable world.
Q1. The Door in Question has been described as immersive and intentionally disorienting. What inspired you to create something so bold and unconventional?
Disorientation is the point.
Mental illness, especially psychosis, doesn’t unfold neatly. It loops, collapses, repeats. I didn’t want to portray madness from the outside, I wanted to collapse the observer’s distance. A lot of media invite us to watch someone unravel. I wanted people to feel it. To be implicated. The work’s immersive not to overwhelm, but to echo how psychosis actually feels: shifting, omnidirectional, logical in the moment, terrifying in hindsight. It’s a black box: you throw memories in and see what comes out changed.
Q2. This project is rooted in your personal experiences, particularly your relationship with your mother. How did her story shape the emotional tone and direction of the work?
Mum’s story is the emotional spine of the piece. Her schizophrenia shaped my entire understanding of language, love, perception. Her birthday cards would start with a normal message, then spiral – literally spiral, words wrapped around the paper’s edges – into pigeons, poisoned water, and conspiracies about our family being “inhuman.”
After she died, we found hundreds of these writings in her flat, beautiful, chaotic, terrifying. Pain pressed into every page. The work asks: What does love look like from within schizophrenia? The answer’s deeply bizarre, but also tender, intelligent, and, at times, incandescent.
Q3. You mention using VR and XR technologies to simulate aspects of psychosis. How did you ensure this experience remained respectful and truthful, rather than exploitative or sensational?
Psychosis is often flattened into horror tropes or danger narratives. I’ve lived with the reality. It’s terrifying, but not in the ways it’s usually depicted. It’s not about what you see, but what those visions mean to you.
I worked with psychologists and used my own experience to scaffold this. XR allows us to fragment perspective: first-person, second-person, god’s eye. You’re not watching; you’re inside the delusion. That’s what psychosis feels like: being handed a breath pattern and believing it’s sacred. It’s not spectacle, it’s entanglement.
Q4. What was it like turning deeply personal memories—like your mother’s birthday cards and stories—into public, performative experiences? Did you find it a healing experience or triggering?
Both. Definitely both. Translating those memories, her spiralling letters, her salvaged gifts of rubbish, into something public means revisiting a grief that never quite resolves. There’s beauty in her logic, if you learn to read it.
But it’s a heavy thing to carry. Some days, working on this is cathartic. Others, it’s paralysing. Like standing behind a cave wall, knowing what’s on the other side but not ready to face it. Healing doesn’t mean closure. It means keeping the door ajar.
Q5. One of the goals of the show is to destigmatise mental illness. What has the audience response been like in previous showings, and have there been any reactions that stayed with you? Do you think there is enough conversation about mental health or is it still stigmatised?
Psychosis is still the unspoken edge of mental health discourse. People will talk about anxiety, maybe depression, but psychosis? That’s where the conversation stops.
After shows, people often say, “I need a week to process this.” For me that’s the highest praise, it means they didn’t just understand, they felt something. One man told me it reminded him of his sister’s breakdown – he hadn’t known how to talk about it before.
There’s progress, but we’re not there yet. This show doesn’t preach. It opens a door and says: Come in. It’s weird in here. But it’s not wrong.
Q6. What can audiences expect from the experience? Do you hope they will understand a bit more about schizophrenia and its impact?
They can expect to get lost. Genuinely. The piece asks you to step into someone else’s logic. You’ll be followed. Or think you’re doing the following. You’ll get a phone call that might be from yourself.
But they’ll also find levity. Grace. Moments of uncomfortable laughter. Schizophrenia isn’t one-note. It’s messy, painful, ecstatic, mundane. I hope people come out a little less afraid of madness, a little more curious about what it’s like to believe in something no one else sees.
Q7. You collaborated with institutions like UNSW, RMIT, and various arts councils. What role did these partnerships play in shaping the final production?
These partnerships were crucial. UNSW provided academic scaffolding, especially around ethics and the use of technology in research-based art. RMIT offered access to tech and performance networks, which shaped our staging. The arts councils gave us space to take creative risks without needing to water down the content.
But more than anything, they gave legitimacy to a project that could easily be seen as too weird or too raw. They backed a piece that doesn’t resolve neatly, and that trust gave us room to make something truthful.
Q8. This work straddles both personal narrative and social commentary. How do you balance those two elements when writing and producing?
They’re interwoven. The personal is political. The way my mother was treated, by hospitals, welfare, and housing, wasn’t just personal tragedy, it was systemic neglect. But I don’t want to write a lecture.
The work invites people into a sensory experience first. The social critique is embedded in the architecture. You feel the weight of being surveilled. The dread of being misunderstood. The ache of being too loud, or too silent. The commentary emerges through the experience itself.
Q9. What was the most challenging part of bringing this project to life—creatively, technically, or emotionally?
Emotionally, it was revisiting the grief in real time. Creatively, it was resisting the urge to tidy things up. Letting the experience stay strange, unresolved, contradictory – that was hard but necessary.
Technically? Making live performance, VR, AI voice cloning, and spatial sound all work together without frying someone’s brain. There were nights where we genuinely thought the tech was possessed.
Q10. What do you hope people take away from The Door in Question, and how do you hope it changes public conversations around mental illness?
I want them to walk out changed but not alienated. I want them to pause next time they hear someone muttering on the tram, and think: What if what they’re saying makes perfect sense, if you knew their story?
This is the children’s book my mother once asked me to illustrate. Her stories never made it to the shelves. So I made this. It’s strange. It’s difficult. But it’s full of love. I just had to learn how to read it first.
THE DOOR IN QUESTION will play at various locations throughout Footscray from 8 to 18 May, as part of after-dark music and arts festival, SLEEPLESS FESTIVAL. The festival is set to take over Melbourne’s inner west this May with a vibrant showcase of music, performance, art and installation.
For tickets and more information visit www.sleeplessfestival.com.
