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The brain lies enclosed under our skullcap in our head and thus sets the stage for the representation of our realities. These realities are stimulated via the body's own senses to create an image of the environment.
The overall picture of this stimulation is the epitome of immersion - the immersion in holistic imaginary worlds. But what is it that gives technical immersions credible coherence? Is it the perfection of the technical presentation? Is it the intuitive comprehensibility of a narrative? Is it the genuine touching of emotions that allows us to immerse ourselves completely? Or is it the confrontation with strange states of reality that inspires us to be active? We discuss this with the director Thomas Krupa, the video artist Mario Simon and the artistic director of kiU Harald Opel.
For an intense, immersive experience, it is not the performance of the technology that is decisive, but how well the narrative can be embedded in the viewer's perceptual experience. Together with the director Thomas Krupa (including "Die Wand (360°)"), the video artist Mario Simon (including "Borderline Prozession") and the artistic director of storyLab kiU Harald Opel (including page21), we will discuss the potential of the perceptual interplay between cognition and immersion.
16.00 - 17.30: Demonstration of the installation "Die Wand 360°" under the cathedral and in VR
18.00 - 19.00: Discussion with Thomas Krupa, Mario Simon and Harald Opel, moderated by Tobias Bieseke
About the guests
Thomas Krupa
Thomas Krupa is a theater director, set designer, screenwriter and 360° VR filmmaker. He works at the interface of analog theater and its spatial extensions into digital space. After more than two decades of work in the fields of music theater, drama and dance (including in Essen, Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Basel, Munich, Berlin, Expo Hannover, Brussels, New York), he founded a production platform in 2019 under the label "Collective Archives", which focuses on the creation of immersive image and sound spaces in the context of performing arts. For his form of VR storytelling, he uses analog and digital spaces as resonance spaces in which everything plays with each other and can constantly change. The narrative formats move between performance, music and visual art and manage to take the audience out of the comfort zone of the auditorium and directly into the production. At the end of 2023, Krupa won the German theater award DER FAUST for his VR 360° film "Die Wand (360°)" in the category "Genrespringer". In January 2024, he premiered the theater performance "Neometropolis" in Giessen, written by Hong Kong author Pat To Yan, with music composed by Berlin musician Lyhre.
Mario Simon
Mario Simon has been artistic director of the video department at Theater Dortmund for many years and has worked on major productions by Kay Voges, such as "Die Borderline Prozession", "4.48 Psychose", "Das Fest" (both nominated for the theater prize DER FAUST in 2013) and "Parallelwelt". He is an inventor and developer of new innovative media applications in theater and is now responsible for audio-visual media technology and audio-video production at the Academy for Theater and Digitality in Dortmund. He is a regular visitor to the Chaos Communication Congress and was a guitarist in the punk band Anewhope. He has received several prizes for his work, including the NRW State Prize for Young Artists. Simon experiments with numerous innovative formats at the academy, including immersion, holography, live camera, glitches and AI, and uses them in a variety of ways in the theater context.
Harald Opel
Harald Opel has been the inventor and artistic director of storyLab kiU at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmund U since 2016 and is a radical avant-gardist in his own right. He was born in Bayreuth, where he developed the idea of a holistic Gesamtkunstwerk at a young age. With his work "Nicht auszuschließen, dass er tot ist", he was an experimental mastermind of a digital age, experimenting with the possibilities of film techniques to perfection. With his "Matrix experiment for the poor", he recreated the bullet time effect of the film "Matrix" in an innovative way. A series-connected cable duct, in which a film strip was placed, was simultaneously exposed using a pinhole camera, freezing the moment in 360°. An actor jumped into the camera circle, triggering the first moment of immersion. It is this process that we use today to photogrammetrize the environment and make it available as virtual 3D. He is a pioneer and unassailably ahead of the present.
Tobias Bieseke (Moderation)
Tobias Bieseke is a research associate at the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts in the storyLab kiU and researches the potential of expanded perceptions and spaces of action for contemporary art. He experiments within the framework of artistic research and moves on the threshold between artistic application and scientific investigation. Since 2018, he has been doing his doctorate at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) in the field of experimental computer science under Georg Trogemann on the topic of Extended Realities - Technically extended visual perception and its effects on individual spaces of action in contemporary art.
Photo: ©storyLab kiU