“TRANSmission” – The motto permeates
Digital technologies shape our everyday lives – and have long since influenced art, theater, and society. NEXT LEVEL, the nationally unique festival for digital gaming culture, will enter a new round in 2025. Over four days in November (13th to 16th), contemporary digital culture will be exhibited, questioned, and celebrated in Dortmund with an extensive program of games, media art, and innovative performances. Under the motto “TRANSmission,” the boundaries between art genres, realities, and technologies will blur.
Here, “Transmission” means more than just the sending of information – it stands for cultural transfer, artistic translation and the constant change of digital aesthetics. Visitors will experience a dynamic field of tension between personal experience and collective encounter: digital theater formats, experimental games and immersive works of art create a space that invites interaction.
Arthouse meets attitude
In the Games Parcours, visitors can play over 20 arthouse games that not only offer playful approaches to socially relevant topics, but also feature impressive design, inventive gameplay, and compelling storytelling. Here, gaming becomes a space for reflection, a social incubator, a time machine to the future. The games on display here range from titles that have not even been released yet to the latest releases and community favorites. Among them is Lose Control, a game in which you literally lose control because the mouse and keyboard work differently than usual. Add to that: dark humor in a sarcastic philosophical story and a chaotic multiplayer mode where you can annoy up to five friends. In a permanent echo, you immerse yourself in the mind of the mysterious Subject 2184. Climate catastrophe has led to the collapse of Europe through conspiracies, and the player explores the question of how societies change. What solutions are there for the climate catastrophe?
The Academy for Theater and Digitality is opening its doors for the festival and presenting technology-driven plays, performances, and VR experiences, as well as presentations by international partner institutions. One example, the Department of Interfaced Dimensions (D.I.D), is an interactive mixed reality experience that intertwines digital game mechanics with physical props and virtual worlds. The work invites you to enter alternative realities and constantly switch roles: sometimes observer, sometimes manipulator, sometimes co-player. This creates a network of surveillance, interaction, and cooperation that raises questions about identity, agency, and control. Behind D.I.D. is not only an artist collective, but also an important international partnership with the V2_Lab for Unstable Media in Rotterdam. The festival opens with Waluigi's Purgatory by the group DMSTFCTN, a live performance that admirably combines gaming, acting, music, and interaction. It tells the story of an AI that finds itself in a purgatory for AIs that have failed their training. Burdened by memories of its past and doubts about its future, the AI explores purgatory with the help of the interactive audience, learning the eerie stories of those who have also ended up there. Using a fictional story, the work examines the contradictions of an AI that learns that it may never be able to befriend its human trainers.
A VR installation that makes seeing possible through hearing
SONA—a VR installation that makes seeing possible through hearing—shows how virtual reality can enrich us with extraordinary and empathetic experiences: We enter a darkened room measuring ten by ten meters, in which no visual signals offer orientation. Instead, motion capture systems and sensory shoes record every movement and translate it into sound. Footsteps crunch in the snow, rustle through the forest, or glide over sand; walls can be felt through acoustic reflections; will-o'-the-wisps lure us with voices. The result is an acoustic labyrinth in which we learn to see with our ears.
The Künstlerhaus Dortmund is transformed into a laboratory of digital arts. As part of the festival, a media art exhibition is opening here that has emerged directly from the influences of gaming and live action role-playing. The works on display invite visitors to interact at their own pace, sometimes slowing down, sometimes exuberantly. Internationally active artists such as Babak Ahteshamipour, Robin Baumgarten, Mélanie Courtinat, Creative Coding Utrecht, Nathalie Lawhead, OMSK Social Club, Sine Özbilge, Alona Rodeh, Janne Schimmel, Dorijan Šiško, Ruben van de Ven, and Yaloo will be presented here, alongside students who are still in training. Both students from the Master's program in Scenic Research and students from the Folkwang University of the Arts will present playful and narrative works.
The Dortmumder U is also part of this decentralized festival of digital culture. The Digital Arts with the storyLab KiU, Page 21, and the co-production lab are positioning themselves, but also showing what they have been able to achieve through collaborations over the past year. As part of NEXT LEVEL, Page 21 is opening two new narrative worlds with The Farewell and Zwei Hände (Two Hands) in the Immersive Room of the Dortmunder U. The Co-Lab Days have become a melting pot of the digital art scene. A place of exchange, technological experiments are presented alongside finished installations.
UZwei at the Dortmunder U is working with the artist group NEXUS to develop an educational program for schools that uses technology to explore the environment and thus enable new ways of seeing.
Another place for exchange is the Enjoy Community format of the Academy for Theater and Digitality, which will take place this time at the Kino im U cinema. Here, experts come together, artists introduce themselves, and institutions talk about their experiences.
This year's festival is supported by Theater Dortmund with its Academy for Theater and Digitality in cooperation with numerous locations in the Dortmund city area. In addition to the Academy for Theater and Digitality, the venues for 2025 are Schauspiel Dortmund, the Koproduktionslabor, the Dortmunder U (with uzwei, Kino im U, and kiU), Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Nansen, and Digitale Werkbank.
SAVE THE DATE:
NEXT LEVEL Festival 2025
Opening November 13, 2025
November 13 to 16, 2025
Venues: Academy for Theater and Digitality, Schauspiel Dortmund, Koproduktionslabor, uzwei, Dortmunder U, Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Nansen, Digitale Werkbank
Festival theme: “Transmission”
Further information at: www.next-level.digital
Social media: @nextlevel_festival
Press contact NEXT LEVEL:
Milena Kidess (mk@next-level.digital)
Viv Lennert (vl@next-level.digital) // Lex Rütten (lr@next-level.digital)
The project is funded by Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft Nordrhein-Westfalen as part of the funding program Neue Künste Ruhr, the KULTURsekretariat NRW and the City of Dortmund.