Using new imaging techniques and a mixture of live coding, artificial intelligence, and holography, a monumental tetralogy, a world of power, love, betrayal, and downfall, and at the same time a place of constant transformation, is curated with new imaging techniques. With a mixture of live coding, artificial intelligence, and holography, Marcus Lobbes and his team are creating an experiment of visionary power. Under the title “RING 10010110,” Richard Wagner's music drama and its reception history take center stage—through a visual level that is constantly changing, expanding, recomposing, and contradicting itself. For the first time in the history of the festival, artificial intelligence will play live on stage – not as a character, but as an imaging force.

The artistic team consists of:

Christian Thielemann (musical director)
Marcus Lobbes (curator)
Marcus Lobbes and Nils Corte (artistic-technical concept)
Andri Hardmeier (dramaturgy)
Roman Senkl (digital and AI storytelling)
Nils Corte and Phil Hagen Jungschlaeger (creative code/visual art)
Wolf Gutjahr (stage)
Pia Maria Mackert (costumes).

“RING 10010110” is a collaboration between the Bayreuth Festival and the Academy for Theater and Digitality.

The singers are at the center of the performance, with a calm, almost sculptural presence. Their bodies become a fixed point in a visually seething cosmos of light, texture, history, and association, amid projections that break apart, shift constantly, and merge with one another. What remains real, what is an illusion? Where does memory begin, where does interpretation end?

The projections are more than stage design—they are a reflection of a 150-year-old discourse. The AI that generates them has learned from countless images, voices, documents, and productions. It shows not one ring, but many: the national myth, the socio-political upheaval, the artistic explosive power, the romantic utopia, the deconstructed shadow. Each performance will be unique—because the images and associations are also constantly changing.

The project understands the Ring as an open resonance chamber, as a work that always wants to be retold—not despite, but because of its history. AI becomes a mirror of collective memory, but also a projection screen for our questions today: Who tells history? Who creates images? And who owns them? Thus, Richard Wagner's eternal validity intertwines with the transience of digital transformation. Sound meets code, myth meets machine, festival meets future. The stage becomes a laboratory of perception, a place where musical theater is not only performed but also explored. This Ring challenges, invites contemplation, overwhelms, and arouses curiosity. It is a ring of questions, not answers. And it is a ring that aims to cast Bayreuth—this place steeped in history and projection—in a new light.

Experience a musical theater that is both past and future, a Ring of the Nibelung that questions itself. And perhaps us, too.

ChatGPT-4 in dialogue with Andri Hardmeier