Lex Rütten and Jana Kerima Stolzer are an artist duo working together since 4 years. The starting point of their installations and performances is often shaped by the link between human being, its technological environment and the resulting emotional challenges. In the past the duo realized scenic installations and performances at the interface between exhibition space and theatre space.

https://www.thisisinternet.de/

Lex Rütten

'Pawāaraibu - filling the vacuum' tells the story of an artificial intelligence in several episodes, which travels around in the body of a small drone as one of the last living beings on the post-human earth. 'Episode 02 - wandering the archive', which was created at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality, travels to an environment without time-space mapping. We are inside the drone's head, wandering through its archive of processed data, which consists of fragments of the previous world. These remaining excerpts stand as a proxy for that forgotten history lost in brutal landscape inscriptions caused by exploitation of earthly resources.

Pawāaraibu - filling the vacuum

Max Schweder is a digitalist, musician, performer and producer.

He works as a creative coder for the Koproduktionslabor Dortmund (

) and as a freelance digital artist, realizing a variety of projects such as the ARD cultural production Einklang (ARD Mediathek - Einklang).

As a member of the inclusive Un-Label Performing Arts Company (

), he creates accessible stage projects and gives workshops in accessibility and inclusion.

Schweder releases his music as a solo artist under the pseudonym Strange Attractor and together with Tobias Hartmann in the duo CYLVESTER (

). With CYLVESTER he also realizes digital art projects (see e.g. 

Max Schweder is a fellowship alumnus of the Academy for Theater and Digital Dortmund, the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp (BEL) and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. As an artistic researcher at the Conservatoire Antwerp (BEL), he developed interactive performances such as EMPTY MIND (

Schweder studied music production at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln (MA) and jazz saxophone at the ArtEZ Conservatorium in Arnhem (NL) (BE).

Website

Max Schweder

As a researcher at the Academy for Theater and Digitality in Dortmund, Max Schweder is developing SOUNDVISION, the open source successor of CYLvision.

SOUNDVISION is being developed as an opensource Unity and PureData based artistic toolset for reactive real-time-visualizations of sound, music and movement with the goal of making performances more visually perceivable, also for example for a deaf audience.

Visualization of sound is always interpretation, translation, transformation from one sense to another. Can we generalize this translation? Can we shorten the necessary steps that have to be taken? Or is the absolute subjective, artistic interpretation the key factor to make visuals tangible?

SOUNDVISION

(b. 1987, Fuzhou, China) studied audio-visual techniques, media production, theatre, and literature at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing. She is strongly committed to explorations of the mediated lives of our contemporaries, and her works often walk on the boundaries between collective and private memories, fiction and reality. In addition to her role as a director within the framework of conventional theatre, she is also a performance and sound maker, arts writer, while curating and convening live art events as part of her practice.

In recent years, her works have been performed in various cities in China and abroad, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Suzhou, Hong Kong, and Yokohama. She has received commissions from Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center, Times Museum (Guangzhou), Beijing International Fringe Festival, etc, and has been selected as a resident artist at the Akademie für Theater und Digitalität (2020) and the A4 Artist in Residence International Exchange Program (2022). In 2021, she was nominated for Emerging Director of the Year at the One Drama Awards in Shanghai.

Ran CHEN is founding member and artistic director of Beijing-based theatre collective StageNoMore (2014-), co-curator and resident director of Sound and Fury Play Reading Festival (2019-), co-founder of Open Field Arts Fund (2021-).

Instagram

YouTube

Ran Chen

What is the real connection? What are we looking at when we are looking at a screen? Is it a mirror image of us? Is it alienating us from ourselves? How is it reshaping us in an imperceptible way? “Gānbēi” (work-in-progress) is about connection and disconnection, in this fragile moment of the world. “It’s all in the wine”, a Chinese slang, meaning that with the help of alcohol, everything indescribable can be expressed and understood.  In the pandemic era we are all experiencing, individuals are forced to cut connections with society at different levels. An individual, in front of a lit screen, cheers with people on the screen. This performance is performed by a human and an intelligent robot produced by DJI.

Gānbēi

Laura Waltz is a Berlin-based performer with a focus on movement research and puppetry/object theatre. 

Educated in dance, acting, and puppetry/object theatre, she explores the deep possibilities for meaning through/of movement and interdisciplinarity. She is interested in how these different forms can feed and influence each other within the creative process, and in their combination on stage as an extension of traditional expressive power. She experiments both with her own body as an instrument as well as the animation of external performative materials, the merging or the separation of those, and all the possibilities that lie in between. In doing so, she questions the resulting effects as echoes of dramaturgical choices.

This performative focus and creative process has become the core of her work. As such, she appeared in the leading role in the inclusive production "VOM UMTAUSCH AUSGESCHLOSSEN" (D. M. Couturier) at Thikwa Theatre (invited to PAF 2021), where she danced, acted, and used puppets. Furthermore, she continued guest performances as a dancer and choreography assistant at "SpeeDance Project" (curated by T. Zirkilevich and E. Starke) at Dock 11 in July 2022.

Laura wrestles with content that deals with feminism and inclusion, as well as experiments with and positions herself against hyper-sexualisation and objectification of the female body, patriarchal dynamics and their persecution, foreign appropriation of bodies, discrimination against women and FLINTA* individuals, and more. Through this work, she met artist Nora Amin and became a guest dancer at Sophiensaele in Amin's solo "My Dance" (Festival White Money by FLINN WORKS, 2021), as well as a performer/dancer in the creation "Re-Rooting" also by and with N. Amin, with duos and solo scenes (cofinanced by Tanzfabrik, supported by Prozessförderung, #TAKEHEART) at Theater Oyoun - Kultur NeuDenken in Sept. 2022. Diving deeper into these themes, and passionate about exploring the basis of feminist/sociological theses on witch-hunting and current social manifestations of it, she conducted her research project entitled "Own my Body?" in Autumn 2022 (Residency Funding for Graduates/NeuStartKultur/Fonds Darstellende Künste, as part of #TAKEHEART, supported by Kampnagel). This exploration became a physical research project on the freedom of the female body within a patriarchal society, translated into a stage context. Her main questions included: "Is the associative space on stage only an extension of social patriarchal attributions? Or can I ultimately determine the sexualisation or nonsexualisation of my body on stage?"

From August till December 2022, she collaborated as a dancer/performer in the residency 'AR Magic Loop' at Dock11 and performed during DOCKDigital's "OPEN LAB" in four different projects as a dancer/digital dancer ("Persona" and “Organism” by Baris Pekcağlıyan and Katrine Bregnum, as well as in the digital movement research "body parts {con}fusion" (performance + concept) with Nora Krahl and as visual artist, her mentor Beka Tcharbadze.

Most recently, Laura acted in the VR-Oper “Am Ende der Welt”, directed and composed by Nora Krahl, as well as danced in the inclusive production "Herzen. ZWISCHEN. Vulkanen" by Karina Suárez Bosche. This dance creation, which premiered in TAK in the frame of the "Special Olympics Berlin 2023” received the 3rd prize “Berlin Prevention Award 2023” from Berlin State Commission against Violence and the Berlin Senate. 

From September 2023 till March 2024, Laura was Fellow at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality with her movement research 'A_live'. This exploration led to a new body methodology for 3D avatars embodiment, and will be used a.o. for the theater production “Urban Legends” from the director Vidovszky György, (Premiere: May 24, Kolibri Theater, Budapest, co-produced by 'Play On!' and the Academy for Theater and Digitality). 

Laura Waltz

My fellowship project 'A_live' is an artistic/methodological movement research, and the use of MoCap technology to explore the possible 'organicness' and feeling of 'aliveness' of avatars through animation fundamentals from puppetry.


The aim of this research is to take core principles of (analogue) puppetry animation and to translate them on the moving/dancing human body using motion capture techniques, in order to explore how this movement method can increase the experience of aliveness of 3D avatars, by making their movements more organic and establishing them as breathing/alive creatures.

A_live

Hanna Rode is an artist working in theater, opera & film.

Her work is based on the idea of using the face and the body as a living canvas to make emotions visible, thus depicting the human being in a radical interpenetration of interiority and exteriority. The figures that emerge are "Frankenstein's characters" - often crudely composed and suspended between digital and analog being.


Hanna Rode

How can we tell about human abysses without reproducing or trivializing violence? This question is the starting point for an experiment with a handmade puppet and its digital face double.

Researching Violence

I am a trained puppeteer with a background in electrical engineering. In my artistic practice, I like to combine these seemingly separate domains of knowledge into engaging theatrical work. 

My work spans from classical, analog puppetry to little autonomous cardboard robots arranged in a puppet-installation. Beyond theater, I like to explore textile art and its possibilities when combined with technology. In 2020, I produced several woven speakers that were shown at Kunstmuseum Bochum in 2021 and the Art Space festival in Bremerhaven.

Yvonne Dicketmüller

Yvonne Dicketmüller's fellowship project focuses on 3D-printed theatrical costumes. The goal is to explore modern manufacturing techniques, including 3D-printing, new materials and design software, to generate new aesthetics for the field of costume design.

3D-Printed Theatre Costumes

Florencia Alonso

GlitchMe3D pushes the limit of live-coding by applying it to the entire creative process: visuals, sounds, kinetic motor movements and lights are live-coded, and the practice bleeds into drawing, weaving, printing, and cutting. The practice manifests decolonization from the productive and design-centered process of technology, namely, hacker witchcraft.

GlitchMe3D

Jiayun Zhuang is a writer and dramaturg currently based in the United States and the Netherlands. 

Edwin van Steenbergen is a light designer, set designer, and theatre technician based in the Netherlands.

Together, they are interested in exploring storytelling/storyliving techniques and technological possibilities in theatre and performance. In their research project at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality, entitled 

, they developed a real-time, algorithm-driven, and rewards-optimized installation performance to simulate a post-truth media-political sphere.

Jiayun Zhuang and Edwin van Steenbergen

Our project, entitled FXKE, is a performance about the post-truth digital environment active in our current attention economy, an economy that stimulates and prioritizes eyeball-grabbing content to keep users engaged. Through FXKE, we want to reflect upon the compulsive undermining of the infrastructure of truth (a post-truth symptom), and our modern-day condition of information overload. 

FXKE: Post-Truth Storytelling

Joel de Giovanni

Telemersive Theatre - Distributed Performances in Augmented Stage Realities

Samuel received his MFA from Yale School of Drama, whereas he majors in Design. His work on Twelfth Night was nominated for the Outstanding Lighting Design in the Connecticut Critics Circle Awards. His media art work Aesthetics and Freedom of Human Beings is one of the finalists of IFVA (Incubator for Film and Visual media in Asia) in 2020.

https://www.samuelcvlx.com/

Samuel Chan

From text to music, from picture to video, different tools of Artificial Intelligence have already been used in art making. Could AI also be applied to theatre making, particularly theatrical design, which is a more complex “problem” for the machine?

Coming from a theatrical design background, the research team (Elena Tilli and Samuel Chan) would like to explore if these AI tools could “assist” in theatrical design.

AI Assisted Theatrical Design

Markus Wagner is a scenographer, 3D designer and VR developer based in Berlin. He studied philosophy and theater studies in Mainz and Leipzig. From 2010 to 2016 he worked at the Staatstheater Mainz, the Oldenburg State Theater, the Centraltheater Leipzig and the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna.

Since 2015, he has been conceiving and designing real and virtual spaces for exhibitions, trade fairs and brand worlds. In doing so, he deals both affirmatively and critically with topics such as digitalization, automation, virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence.

Since 2019 he has been developing interactive scenographies for digital theater and performances, mainly in the artist group oblique-sensations. In 2021 he was a fellow at the Academy for Theater and Digitality Dortmund. In the Digital Lab he explored the technical challenges and potentials of VR.

LA MACHINE A GLOIRE*2022 | obliquesensations (oblique-sensations.net)

DER EINBEINIGE LÄUFER 2022 | obliquesensations (oblique-sensations.net)

Markus Wagner

AUTO_NOMOS is a research on cars, crashes and VRs. Starting from the piece 'The One-Legged Runner' by playwright Katharina Schmitt, it investigates transmissions between performative environments as well as theatrical tools of staging and VR-technology with a strong focus on sound and (choreographic) interaction design.

AUTO_NOMOS critically revisits the dispositives of western history of technological progress, its phantasms, desires and catastrophes, and takes the car as an complex allegory of the latter. Within the virtual environments AUTO_NOMOS suggests, the car becomes a vehicle for an aesthetical and poetic reflection on proxy desires and phantasies of self- optimization induced by modern technology as well as the infrastructures and ecologies of life, phantasy and drive connected to them.

AUTO_NOMOS

Andrea Familari lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Having worked with theatre, music, contemporary art, especially in the live act audio/visual scene, Familari is a new media artist whose research derives from the investigation on generative processes, analysed through the lens of the noise and expressed via different media: video screenings, interactive installations, prints.

Since 2011, he has been experimenting and has established his practice within the international new media and art scenes. His repertoire is regularly showcased in theaters, concert halls, festivals, and museums. In 2013 he moved to Berlin.

, a multidisciplinary studio curating audio-visual performances, light design, scenography, videoclip production.

, a video-research channel focused on weekly interviews of artists whose practices relate to the audio/visual field.

, an artistic group, together with Marco Donnarumma and Margherita Pevere.

Vimeo

Andrea Familari

Humane Methods (2019-present) is an ongoing project by Fronte Vacuo (Marco Donnarumma, Margherita Pevere, Andrea Familari) that reflects on the new forms of violence emerging in algorithmic societies. The technological research for ℧R and ΣXHALE have been conducted at the Academy for Theater and Digitality and this page describes our research questions, workflow and findings in relation to these projects. Please note that this page does not discuss the theatre pieces we created in their entirety, but focuses only on the technological research that underpins those pieces. For further information about the aesthetic, conceptual and dramaturgical research behind these works please visit our website.

Humane Methods

Roman Senkl

Hubs Theatre Tools are currently developed by Nils Corte (Coding) and Roman Senkl. Their purpose is to expand Mozilla Hubs with an easy to use motion capturing and playback tool for hubs avatars.

Hubs Theatre Tools

 is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer whose work has been produced in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Berlin, Edinburgh, and elsewhere. Together with the director 

, he founded the narrative technology company 

The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Grace B Matthias

 (Playwrights Realm at The Duke on 42nd Street); 

Song of a Convalescent Ayn Rand Giving Thanks to the Godhead 

(American Repertory Theater, Joe’s Pub); 

 (O’Neill Playwrights Conference selection); 

 (published by S. Fischer Verlag; filmed by HBO); and 

, which has been performed over 1,000 times at venues including Lincoln Center, American Repertory Theater, and three sold-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. 

He is a former NYFA Playwriting fellow and member of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, Ars Nova’s Play Group, and a graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwrights Program at Juilliard.

Hearth Gods

Michael Yates Crowley

HAMLET.AI is a project of two parts. The first investigates the use of generative AI technologies in performance, using Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a starting point. We are developing deep fake video and audio technologies, close-to-real time image generation based on video inputs, and a tool that generates a script and delivers it via headsets to actors on stage. The second considers the questions and concerns that this technology raises for us aesthetically, ethically and philosophically: Do we even want to use these technologies? And will it shift our idea of what it means to be human? Or not!

HAMLET.AI

, director, actress, since 2024 artistic director of Teatro Fontana, home of Elsinor Centro di Produzione Teatrale di Innovazione. She graduated in Medieval Philology at the Federico II University in Naples, continued her second degree in Bologna in Theatre, graduating in History of Directing with Claudio Longhi, trained with Pierpaolo Sepe, Carlo Cerciello, Antonio Latella, Michele Monetta, Yves le Breton, developing a vision of experimental, iconic and innovative theater. Since 2013, he has directed in Bologna together with Micol Vighi the theater company and the training and theatrical research center Sblocco5. Her works are characterized by the use of immersive technologies and technological experimentation (such as Binaural Dummy Head, holograms, video interactions, robotic arms and artificial intelligence).
Since 2022 she has been the artistic director of 

Ivonne Capece | Sblocco5

Ivonne Capece

A natural science student decides to create a human being. The experiment is an unexpected success. Its creator, however, despairs. We discover that the author, Mary Godwin Shelley, is not entirely comfortable with it either. Throughout her life she denies and downplays the literary scope of her work. Between wireless headsets, virtual settings, real actors and holographic avatars, the show is a dreamlike journey into the novel and, at the same time, into the lived experience of its author who confuses herself with Dr.Frankenstein, the Creature with the Work and the characters with memories. 

Frankenstein

Ariane Trümper is a scenographer, artist and researcher living in Rotterdam. She works on the interfaces between media art, performance and spatial design and researches performative processes and perception filtered through bodies and technologies. Her work deals with the transitions between physical and non-physical spaces and the experience of those. Ariane has an MFA in scenography, is a member of the editorial team of the Dutch group Platform-Scenography, pre-PhD candidate and lecturer of the MA Scenography at the University of the Arts in Utrecht.

Ariane Trümper

Marco Donnarumma (DE) is an artist, performer, stage director and scholar weaving together contemporary performance, new media art and interactive computer music since the early 2000s. He manipulates bodies, creates choreographies, engineers machines and composes sounds, thus combining disciplines, media and technology into an oneiric, sensual, uncompromising aesthetics. He is internationally acknowledged for solo performances, stage productions and installations that defy genres, and where the body becomes a morphing language to speak critically of ritual, power and technology.

The 7 Configurations cycle, his latest project, includes dancetheater productions, performances and robotic installations. By experimenting with the corporeal and psychological relationships of four human performers and six AI prostheses, the pieces attempt to dissect the conflicts between AI and body politics. In 2019, he co-founded the performance artists group Fronte Vacuo with Margherita Pevere and Andrea Familari. Their ongoing saga, Humane Methods, consists of hybrid live art events as social experiments, where human performers and audiences, non-human organisms and AI-driven machines expose the violence of today’s algorithmic societies. During the seasons 2022-24, they are artists in residence at Volkstheater Wien.

Touring consistently for the past fifteen years across major and independent theaters, concert halls, parking lots, squats, festivals and museums worldwide, Donnarumma’s work has been shown, among others, at Volkstheater Wien (AT), Münchner Kammerspiele (DE), Romaeuropa Festival (IT), Ming Contemporary Art Museum (CN), Chronus Art Center (CN), Ars Electronica (AT), Donaufestival (AT), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (DE), NRW Forum (DE), Nemo Biennale/HeK Basel (FR), LABoral (ES), musikprotokoll (AT), CTM Festival (DE), tanzhaus nrw (DE), Laznia Center for Contemporary Art (PL), and Kontejner (HR).

His repertoire received numerous acknowledgements, most notably the Autonom Grant 2020-22 by Fonds Darstellende Künste and Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe for ∑XHALE; the Digital Award at Romaeuropa Festival 2018 for Eingeweide; two awards at the Bains Numériques Biennial 2018, as well as the Award of Distinction (2nd prize) in Sound Art at Prix Ars Electronica 2017 for Corpus Nil; the nomination of Artist of the Science Year 2018 by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education for Amygdala; and the first prize in the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition 2012 for the XTH Sense.

Donnarumma holds a Ph.D. in performing arts, computing and body theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. He is currently a Medienkunst Fellow at medienwerk.nrw and an Associate Researcher at the Intelligent Instruments Lab, Reykjavik. In 2020-21 he was a Research Fellow at the Akademie­ für Theater ­und Digitalität, Dortmund. Previously, in 2016-18, he was Research Fellow at Berlin University of the Arts in partnership with the Neurorobotics Research Laboratory. He was funded by European Commission, Goethe-Institut, Berlin Senate, Fonds Darstellende Künste, Rockefeller Foundation, British Council and New Media Scotland. His writings are published by MIT Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge, ACM and Springer.

https://frontevacuo.com/

Facebook

https://assemblag.es/@Body_sound_machine/

Marco Donnarumma

Rahel Spöhrer

Mixed feelings in immersive post-digital spaces, Hybriden Identitäten, politischen Haltungen, ebenso wie Emotionen, Beziehungen und Momente von Intimität konstituieren sich heute zwischen Facebook-Chats, Instagram-Likes, Dating-Apps, in Onlineforen und Gaming-Communities, in dem Konsum von Videos on demand und den Algorithmen unserer Filterblasen. In meiner Recherche an der Akademie für Theater und Digitalität beschäftigt mich die Frage, wie sich Affekte, Gefühle, Begehren in einer postdigitalen, zunehmend ästhetisierten Gesellschaft bilden und verändern. Im Rahmen der Akademie möchte ich herausarbeiten, wie sich Nähe und Intimität in virtuellen und immersiv theatralen Settings herstellt, wie sich die theatrale Immersion von der digitalen unterscheidet bzw. gleicht und was das Potential ihrer Verschränkung ist.

Feelings on Demand

 is a live performance director specializing in new plays, opera, and digital media projects. He has directed projects internationally in Germany, the UK, Brazil, Ireland, Denmark, Mexico, Canada, Australia and the Czech Republic. Together with 

 he founded the narrative technology company 

He has created work in New York City at Lincoln Center, The Public Theater, PS122, HERE Arts Center, Ars Nova, The Bushwick Starr, The Brick, 59E59, 3LD, and Dixon Place. Regionally, his work has been seen at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, and the Humana Festival at Actors Theater of Louisville.

His work with composer Kate Soper has been performed at the Seattle Symphony, Smith College, and The New York Festival of Song at the Dimenna Center. He has developed new plays at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Playwrights Realm and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. His production of "temping" was selected by the Guardian and the Telegraph as one of the best productions of the 2022 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the piece was featured twice in New York Times.

He is a recipient of a 2021 Artists + Machine Intelligence Research Award from Google, as well as fellowships from the Likhachev Foundation, the Kennedy Center, and the National New Play Network. He has been a resident artist at the Orchard Project, E|MERGE, and the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. Rau is a Forward/Story fellow and a speaker at Books in Browsers, Performing Robots and StoryCode. He has been an assistant director for Francesca Zambello, John Turturro, Robert Woodruff and associate director for Anne Bogart, Les Waters, and Ivo Van Hove. He is a New York Theater Workshop Usual Suspect and a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab. He is an assistant professor at Stanford University, where he teaches Directing and Devising in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies and serves as the head for the Theater-Making Concentration as well as the Artistic Director for the department. Also at Stanford, he is an affiliate faculty member at the Stanford Institute for Human Centered AI.

Michael Rau

Hauke Berheide and Amy Stebbins are an artist duo working in contemporary opera and adjacent forms. Since 2016, they have created two evening-length operas, a children’s concert, and a short silent film with live chamber orchestra score. Their first opera 

 (Bavarian State Opera, 2016) received the Munich Festival Prize. One year later, conductor Oksana Lyniv produced and conducted the opera for the inaugural season of the LvivMozArt Festival in Lviv, Ukraine. Since then, Berheide and Stebbins have received commissions from the Oper Frankfurt, the Augsburg State Theater, and the Düsseldorf Tonhalle. In spite of the disciplinary diversity of their work, Berheide and Stebbins consistently approach their projects from a materialist perspective, oftentimes positioning ostensibly “new” issues—such as influencer culture or “Fake News”—in constellation with similar, historical events.

Berheide and Stebbins also advocate for contemporary opera beyond the stage. They have taught seminars on contemporary opera at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. As writers, they have authored several texts about opera aesthetics and new work development in trade magazines and academic journals. In 2018, the duo co-founded New Opera Dialogues, an international platform focused on contemporary opera aesthetics and best institutional practices.

For the 2024 season, they are creating a site-specific chamber opera with virtual reality components for the Augsburg State Theater. This project is made possible with the support of the MacDowell Colony and the Liz Mohn Culture and Music Foundation.

http://www.amystebbins.net/

Amy Stebbins

What can projection and virtual reality technologies bring to the opera genre? 

New Opera Technologies

Alexander Nham is an audio and game designer as well as a performance artist.


As a cofounder of DrownTown he is currently working on 

LinkedIn

Audio and Game Designer, Performance Artist

https://drowntown.itch.io/light-of-atlantis

Alexander Nham

This is a tool to dissolve the singularity of virtual reality. It has two components. The first one is an app that helps calibrate and connect multiple virtual reality headsets of a constrained physical area to a shared virtual environment. The second one is a supportive software for managing and monitoring of the devices used.

multiVRse

Fabian Raith

'Digitalizing Narrative Spaces' is a project by Fabian Raith which uses AR, video mapping and physical computing to creative a performative event that responds to the activities and curiosities of its visitors, and combines fantasy and reality. Depending on their interactions, visitors experience different narratives of the same story. 

Digitalizing Narrative Spaces

http://www.andreawinkler.org/

Andrea Winkler

Our project 'They Call Us Users' deals with one of the most significant technological advances in consumer electronics in recent years; the booming area of A.I. supported text, chatbots and ‘virtual assistants’. 'If You Tell Me When Your Birthday Is' serves as a text for a piece that combines the possibilities and aesthetic qualities of virtual reality technology with those of the theatre and is also to be realised as an installation in future exhibitions.

They Call Us Users

https://www.blutendefreischwimmer.de/

Gloria Schulz

Programmer, artist and curator, studied free art at HFBK and Critical Studies in Vienna. Research at the intersections of digital modelling, climate and social transformation, as well as artistic mediation. Concerned about how simulations of our world rub off into the reality of people’s lives, and to what extent this undermines aesthetic experiences.

Do Mayer

The performance and video installation Disco Planet: Letheia takes a philosophical 3D landscape as a backdrop to inquire into relations between plants, humans and animals, and their embeddedness in environment/society. 

An artistic twin of our symbolic mindscape meets the somatic practice of tuning into our senses to expand our capacity for change and adaptation. The common urge: To find new methods to situate ourselves in our time and reshape our habitual presentation of ourselves and the commonplace.


Disco Planet: Letheia

Christiane Hütter

We like to see technology as possible space, or making possible space, for participatory processes. During this fellowship, we will use theatre as a living space for encounters, with the research questions: How can we construct society together? And how can we make this process visible for audiences? 
We want to develop a sustainable format for collaborative discourse, in which people can together experiment with different forms of organisation for society. This could start on a small scale, with a family, and can become quite big: How to organise a country?

******

ludwig technique (a.k.a. Johannes Bereiter-Payr) is a cross-media concept and performance artist. A self-described media agnostic and generalist dilettante, he works in very diverse fields: software development for research laboratories, construction sites, art venues and theater productions (on and behind the stage), to name a few. He has an intense interest in almost everything and is not shy to take on unexpected offers. This has recently lead him on a wild adventure to obtain a degree in medical technologies and to work in a laboratory for robotics and industrial automation.

ludwig technique mostly works in collaborations with other artists, as this allows him to explore more modalities and create more faceted,
immersive experiences. Since 2020, he has teamed up with theater
director and performance artist Peter Lorenz to explore the delivery of
interactive theatrical performance machines. As modern production
techniques and distributed manufacturing become state of the art, ludwig
technique incorporates them into the creation of his works, making use
of the humane and production resources of local maker communities. Being transparent about the distributed production process and credit all
people involved is an important aspect of his art.

Common themes for ludwig technique are recursive systems (e.g. feedback-loops), and interactive installations. He sees art as a means of pushing the boundaries of collective human perception, an inherently
human endeavour of exploration and deeply related to scientific research.

Concept and Performance Artist, Software Developer

Johannes Bereiter-Payr

Invisible Cities: Performance Delivery & Robotic Performance Space is a project which develops a prototype of an interactive performance machine that can fit inside a pizza box. During the fellowship, Peter Lorenz and Johannes Bereiter-Payr refined its functionality, developed an open-source toolkit, and explored the "techno-dramaturgical" potential of this new performance format. Their work aims to make performance as easily accessible as ordering pizza. 

INVISIBLE CITIES

Born in Langenhagen in 1992, Caspar Bankert began his artistic career in the radio drama studios of MDR, progressively honing his skills to join the digital theater scene. He studied Contemporary Puppetry Arts at the HfS "Ernst Busch" in Berlin, and has performed in a variety of productions both nationally and internationally.


He has found interest in merging gaming elements with theater performances, an endeavour showcased in the interactive mini-series "Gulliver," which he developed with his theatre company "komplexbrigade". His current projects include "INBETWEEN," an immersive VR city tour with Academy Alumna Sarah Buser, and "Artificial Stupidity," a project where he engages with AI alignment and Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities, an area dealing with enhancing the interaction between humans and artificial intelligence.


Based in Berlin and Dresden, he remains dedicated to his passion for theater, aspiring to further evolve traditional theater through the incorporation of modern technologies.


http://www.casparbankert.com/

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Caspar Bankert

“Memory_of_things” is a walk-in installation where the audience explores objects in a room which are linked to historical fragments. These objects are equipped with sensors and can register interaction and trigger light, video and sound. The idea is to create a “performance of things”, telling stories about times when no people are left and only objects are the last witnesses. We want to use digital tools to make provenance research (the study of an object's history) tangible.

Memory of Things

Nils Corte, born in 1975, lives and works in Berlin, Dortmund and
Nürnberg. He is a programmer, playwright, musician and producer. His
artistic focus is on the development, visualisation and utilisation of
extended reality in performance contexts. Most recently he wrote "Murder
on the Holodeck" and "Symmetry". Since 2015 he has been the organiser of the music and culture festival "Klingt Gut".

He is the developer of the award-winning visualisation software "Pepper's Holosuite", which enables actors and actresses to interact with holographically projected virtual objects on stage and make them simultaneously tangible for the audience.

He also programs on and for the social VR platform Mozilla Hubs and Neos
VR. He is an alumnus of the Academy for Theatre and Digitality, works as
a Digital Arts Officer at Theater Dortmund and is part of the collective
minus.eins. From the 2023/24 season, he will take over as Head of
Creative Technologies of the "Extended Reality Theatre - XRT" in the
Schauspiel at the Staatstheater Nürnberg.

Nils Corte

Creative Director and Somatic Coach with a background in dance, choreography and intermedia arts. 

Co-founder of 4 performance collectives, including Stratofyzika, with performance experiences inspired by computer science, technology, natural sciences, data privacy and the boundaries between humans and machines through a blend of new media, dance theatre and spatial soundscapes.

Stratofyzika

Hen/i

Birk Schmithüsen is a media artist based in Leipzig (DE). His work explores emerging technologies that affect our everyday lives. He is interested in the actual functionality hidden in a black box behind the simple user interface. In aesthetic experiments, Birk explores non-perceptible, abstract concepts such as Machine Learning (AI) and BigData as artistic media. The research results are staged in immersive new media installations. Between explanatory approaches through data visualization, abstract, aesthetic reuse of emerging technologies and speculative concepts, he opens up new perspectives on current topics of digitalization. Birk holds a diploma in fine art and got an EMAP/EMARE grant. His works were shown internationally at key media art festivals in France, the Netherlands, Austria, Spain and Germany, including re:public, Chaos Communication Congress, Ars Electronica and ZKM.

ArtesMobiles was founded by Nina Maria Stemberger (performance) and Birk Schmithüsen (media artist) and has been producing forward-looking performances since 2013. They are looking for ways to dissolve academic categories and break down the boundaries between conceptual art, theatre and technology. ArtesMobiles produces across genres and extends the performing arts with new media to create experiences, social experiments and performative installations.

Birk Schmithüsen

MergingEntities is a project which explored new technical-theatrical scenarios based on machine learning, motion-tracking, and light and sound. We explored three areas of interest: the sonification of movement; the embodiment of digital agents with light beams; and the development of choreography using a virtual environment as a rehearsal stage. As ArtesMobiles, Nina Maria Stemberger and Birk Schmithüsen produce across genres and extend the performing arts with new media to create experiences, social experiments and performative installations

Merging Entities

Luise Ehrenwerth (*1991 in Erfurt) is a costume designer, scenographer and passionate maker. A main interest in her artistic work lies in the versatile sensorial ways of perceiving scenic environments and their influence on the people who interact with them. Thus, in 2018, as part of her diploma at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, she developed the augmented audio reality project SCHRAPP SCHRAPP BUFF ZONG in collaboration with Nele Bühler, where they explored the narrative potential of acoustic spaces using binaural 3D audio recordings made with dummy head microphones. 

In 2020, within the Denkzeit-scholarship of the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony, Luise Ehrenwerth pursued the question of how Augmented Reality can be used to create virtual and at the same time haptically experienceable scenographies.

Among others, projects with her participation have been carried out at the DNT Weimar in 2019 (Co-stage design with Nurkan Erpulat for the Kunstfest's opening production "Reichtags-Reenactment"), for the documentary film ANMAßUNG (set design, directors: Stefan Kolbe and Chris Wright, Berlinale 2021) and in collaboration with the media theater collective machina eX the theatrical classroom game "setup.school(). - Die Lernmaschine" (Landesbühnen Sachsen/Theater Baden-Baden, 2021). 2021-22 Luise Ehrenwerth was a fellow at the Academy for Theater and Digitality Dortmund with her research project "connecting:stitches", in which she brings together costume design and digital technologies such as AR and microcontrolling.

Image: Noemi Sorgo

Luise Ehrenwerth

In “connecting:stitches” costume designer Luise Ehrenwerth explores the possibilities of bringing together costume making and digital technologies. Her focus lays on electronic textiles and sensors made of conductive materials that are connected to microcontrollers, as well as the implementation of textile AR markers in costumes. In addition to the question of what role costume design plays in the theater of digitality, the project is also about the search for changing body images in a digital (art-)world.

connecting:stitches

https://lukasrehm.net/

Lukas Rehm

Sensory Airplanes is a project by artist and composer Lukas Rehm, tracing the emergence and consequentialities of posthuman self-conceptions along the gradients between hard sciences, mythology, the imaginary and the affective. The work is realized as an environmental composition in multichannel moving image, 4D-sound and animated light. 

Sensory Airplanes

Bridging art & science, dance & technology, in artistic practice and doing academic research at 

 - University of applied sciences Mainz (Project originally founded by choreographer William Forsythe). 

Guevara's work propose playgrounds where the body in time-space becomes a source of non-binary knowledge. They propose abstraction as a strategy to decolonize knowledge. A blurry gaze at the constant state of becoming. They create choreographies that linger at the threshold of exciting and forgetting where the body is a source of healing. 

Jorge’s work has been presented in New Media Art, ArtScience and Performing Arts festivals such as Ars Electronica, Documenta, Impulstanz, NODE Forum for Digital Arts, KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS.

Choreographer, Media and Interaction Designer, Researcher

Portfolio (2022)

Jorge Guevara

The natural empathic-embodied relation between dancer - audience is partially lost when using VR headsets. This research aims to help the audience to find new aesthetics, new engagement, new meanings and purpose when dance is mediated with digital environments. Through two live performances, I created a visceral sense of unfolding or revelation, but also a feeling of immediacy and loss. 


Sigil :: bringing the inner world out

Sarah Buser

The goal of the research on Die Andere Stadt was to find a technological and dramaturgical translation of some of the main concepts of the novel The City and The City by weird-fiction author China Miéville. The concept of “unseeing” presented in the novel and the assumption that Augmented Reality is an ideal medium to question our surroundings were the starting point of the research movement.

Die Andere Stadt

Peter Lorenz is a freelance stage-director and performance-maker specialised in transdisciplinary
collaborations to create new formats. His works move between contemporary theatre, new opera,
experimental sound performance and interactive installation.


While studying applied theatre studies with focus on directing at the University of Glasgow, Peter
worked as assistant and revival director in theatre and opera (e.g. Scottish Opera, Vancouver
Opera, Cologne Opera, Theater St. Gallen, Innsbruck Festival of Early Music and Bayreuth
Festival). He has also developed his own productions and experimental performances in Austria,
Germany, Great Britain and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he co-founded the Street Arts Festival
Mostar in 2012.


In 2017 he adapted Elfriede Jelinek’s BAMBILAND as a one-woman performance at the James
Arnott Theatre in Glasgow, and in 2018 he staged Gerhild Steinbuch's HERR MIT
SONNENBRILLE at the Theater diemonopol in Innsbruck, where he also revived his solo-
choreography TIME DUST from the ruins of Mostar for its Austrian premiere. He designed the
costumes and set for the world premiere of Christian Spitzenstaetter's opera STILLHANG at the
Tyrolean Festival in Erl, which won the Austrian Music Theatre Prize for Best World Premiere and
has been revived at Theater Brandenburg in 2023. His experimental sound theatre HOW DEEP IS
THE SEA was realised in 2021 in the form of interactive deckchair radio play stations at six
locations in Innsbruck and in the same year he directed Neil LaBute's FETTES SCHWEIN at the
Großer Rathaussaal in Telfs at the Tiroler Volksschauspiele.


He invented the interactive performance machine in a pizza box for INVISIBLE CITIES
INNSBRUCK in 2020, which was also exhibited at the Magic Carpets Landed Exhibition in Kaunas
as part of Kaunas European Capital of Culture. The machine has been developed further at a
fellowship at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality in Dortmund and presented in the frame of
INVISIBLE CITIES KOTTBUSSER TOR in Berlin 2022. In the same year, Peter directed the world
premiere of Gerhild Steinbuch's GUTE GESTÄNDNISSE BESSERER MENSCHEN at the Tiroler
Landestheater Innsbruck as well as the experimental musical MORAG YOU'RE A LONG TIME
DEID, which he co-wrote with Claire Love Wilson, in Vancouver.

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