The Academy for Theatre and Digitality in Dortmund, a partner in the ACuTe project, hosted its seventh ‘Open Lab’ event in January 2023 to showcase experiments with performance and new technologies.
Five artists presented the results of their five-month research semester: Salvador Marino, Josefina Maro, Fabian Raith, Stella Lennert and Jakob Lorenz. The evening created digital synergies between dance, robotics, extended reality and classical theatre and radio drama.
A Bug That Eats Memories (Fabian Raith)
When several server farms are infested by the annamox beetle, the data from the Terra Cloud is irretrievably lost – including all of Mika’s late mother’s videos. Suddenly, Mika can’t remember exactly what her voice sounded like. Media artist Fabian Raith invites you to an interactive audio play experience. A Bug That Eats Memories questions the digital preservation of familiar data and offers a wholly individual experience in a hybrid space between the digital and the real world.
Fase de Cicatrización (Josefina Maro, Salvador Marino)
How much autonomy do we have over our bodies? Where do we draw the line between natural and artificial, organic and inorganic, or body and space? And what might a post-organic body look like? The duo Post-Organic Bauplan, performance artist Josefina Maro and artist and evolutionary biologist Salvador Marino, question the social constructs of the body. Fase de Cicatrización is a live dance performance using motion capturing for digital avatars
and robotic prosthetics, representing corporeality of different entities: the digital body, the robotic body and the biological body.
Palimpsest – ALL IS TRUE (Stella Lennert, Jakob Lorenz)
Orpheus in the Underworld, The Visit, Waiting for Godot: experience these theatrical classics unleashed from theatrical text and physical embodiment. Sound artist Jakob Lorenz and set and costume designer Stella Lennert develop VR projects that explore new forms of narration, with an anti-Anthropocene spirit. In Palimpsest – ALL IS TRUE, classic texts are staged as a subtext within the reactive virtual environment, and space and sound become the main characters – allowing new conclusions to be drawn about these characters’ actions, motivations and relationships. “
You can read more about the Academy on their website.
Photo credits: (c) Florian Duerkopp