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I Feel You is an artistic research project being carried out by the SOAP collective at the Academy of Theatre and Digitality. It is dedicated to investigating intimacy and trust in immersive, media-mediated spaces – on the one hand as an interpersonal and thus intersubjective relationship, and on the other as a technically generated and mediated experience. The aim is to open up new approaches from an artistic-research perspective that deal with the dynamics and interactions of experience-based dimensions of intimacy and trust in and through immersive, digital spaces and their specific forms of interaction.
The investigation focuses on the following questions: Which physical and sensory indicators contribute to the establishment of trust in digital interaction spaces? How does the perception of intimacy and trust change when a real interpersonal encounter is replaced by a technological instance? How can performative strategies of physical and technical co-presence in virtual spaces be developed and captured? And finally: What ethical and aesthetic implications arise from medially mediated intimacy and trust relationships?
To address these questions, an experimental setting in the form of a performative XR laboratory is being developed, which will be made accessible to an interested public in the context of several events.
SOAP – Some Online Architecture Practice (Bettina Katja Lange, Uwe Brunner) – is an artistic research collective working at the interface of new media and critical spatial practice. Their work focuses on the exploration of digital environments, the politics of post-digital domesticity, and the ongoing tension between technology and intimacy. Through collaboration with actors from architecture, scenography, and media art, SOAP develops speculative and critical experimental arrangements to investigate the ubiquitous presence of media technologies and their penetration of social and cultural spaces.
SOAP has exhibited at Onassis Stegi in Athens, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, the New Media Art Museum La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona, CPH:DOX – Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, ETH Zurich, the Goethe-Institut in Beijing, and the Segal Center in New York, among others.
Bettina Katja Lange is a German stage designer and media artist. Her work moves between performative presentation formats, physical installations and virtual environments – with a focus on the documentary potential of unconventional theatre forms and digital media. She studied graphic design, later stage and costume design, and worked at renowned institutions such as the Münchner Kammerspiele, the Ruhrtriennale, the Volksbühne and the HAU Berlin, as well as at the Leipzig Opera, the German National Theatre Weimar, the Zurich Opera, the Graz Opera, together with the Vienna State Ballet, and in New York at PS 122, together with the Wooster Group and at La MaMa Theatre.
Uwe Brunner is an architect, experience designer and researcher based in Vienna. Since 2019, he has been teaching at ./studio3 – Institute for Experimental Architecture at the University of Innsbruck. He is currently working on a dissertation on the essayistic as a modality of critical spatial practice in digital environments. He is co-founder of the Vienna Architecture Summer School.
Photo © Ruth Stofer