The Academy for Theater and Digitality hosted the seventh Open Lab on Jan. 27, 2023, with Salvador Marino, Josefina Maro, Fabian Raith, Stella Lennert and Jakob Lorenz presenting the results of their five-month research semester. The evening creates digital synergies between dance, robotics, extended reality and classical theater and radio drama.
A Bug That Eats Memories: 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. Fading memories combined with real objects create a hybrid performative space that is both physical and virtual, between the digital and the real. Depending on the audience’s actions, and their personal curiosity, the narrative offers a wholly individual experience.
Palimpsest - ALL IS TRUE:
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. Palimpsest – ALL IS TRUE leads you into a parallel world far away from space and time, the laws of physics and traditional theatre.
Fasé de Cicatrización (Wound Healing Phase)
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: in biology the body is modifiable, in society it is manifest. 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.
The Open Lab Event shows that the digital does not displace the analog, but enriches it. Science and art find a stage here and show that new ways in theater bring exciting interaction possibilities and new ways of seeing.
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