Lex Rütten and Jana Kerima Stolzer are an artist duo working together since 4 years. The starting point of their installations and performances is often shaped by the link between human being, its technological environment and the resulting emotional challenges. In the past the duo realized scenic installations and performances at the interface between exhibition space and theatre space.

https://www.thisisinternet.de/

Lex Rütten

Max Schweder is a digitalist, musician, performer and producer.

He works as a creative coder for the Koproduktionslabor Dortmund (

) and as a freelance digital artist, realizing a variety of projects such as the ARD cultural production Einklang (ARD Mediathek - Einklang).

As a member of the inclusive Un-Label Performing Arts Company (

), he creates accessible stage projects and gives workshops in accessibility and inclusion.

Schweder releases his music as a solo artist under the pseudonym Strange Attractor and together with Tobias Hartmann in the duo CYLVESTER (

). With CYLVESTER he also realizes digital art projects (see e.g. 

Max Schweder is a fellowship alumnus of the Academy for Theater and Digital Dortmund, the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp (BEL) and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. As an artistic researcher at the Conservatoire Antwerp (BEL), he developed interactive performances such as EMPTY MIND (

Schweder studied music production at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln (MA) and jazz saxophone at the ArtEZ Conservatorium in Arnhem (NL) (BE).

Website

Max Schweder

(b. 1987, Fuzhou, China) studied audio-visual techniques, media production, theatre, and literature at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing. She is strongly committed to explorations of the mediated lives of our contemporaries, and her works often walk on the boundaries between collective and private memories, fiction and reality. In addition to her role as a director within the framework of conventional theatre, she is also a performance and sound maker, arts writer, while curating and convening live art events as part of her practice.

In recent years, her works have been performed in various cities in China and abroad, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Suzhou, Hong Kong, and Yokohama. She has received commissions from Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center, Times Museum (Guangzhou), Beijing International Fringe Festival, etc, and has been selected as a resident artist at the Akademie für Theater und Digitalität (2020) and the A4 Artist in Residence International Exchange Program (2022). In 2021, she was nominated for Emerging Director of the Year at the One Drama Awards in Shanghai.

Ran CHEN is founding member and artistic director of Beijing-based theatre collective StageNoMore (2014-), co-curator and resident director of Sound and Fury Play Reading Festival (2019-), co-founder of Open Field Arts Fund (2021-).

Instagram

YouTube

Ran Chen

Laura Waltz is a Berlin-based performer with a focus on movement research and puppetry/object theatre. 

Educated in dance, acting, and puppetry/object theatre, she explores the deep possibilities for meaning through/of movement and interdisciplinarity. She is interested in how these different forms can feed and influence each other within the creative process, and in their combination on stage as an extension of traditional expressive power. She experiments both with her own body as an instrument as well as the animation of external performative materials, the merging or the separation of those, and all the possibilities that lie in between. In doing so, she questions the resulting effects as echoes of dramaturgical choices.

This performative focus and creative process has become the core of her work. As such, she appeared in the leading role in the inclusive production "VOM UMTAUSCH AUSGESCHLOSSEN" (D. M. Couturier) at Thikwa Theatre (invited to PAF 2021), where she danced, acted, and used puppets. Furthermore, she continued guest performances as a dancer and choreography assistant at "SpeeDance Project" (curated by T. Zirkilevich and E. Starke) at Dock 11 in July 2022.

Laura wrestles with content that deals with feminism and inclusion, as well as experiments with and positions herself against hyper-sexualisation and objectification of the female body, patriarchal dynamics and their persecution, foreign appropriation of bodies, discrimination against women and FLINTA* individuals, and more. Through this work, she met artist Nora Amin and became a guest dancer at Sophiensaele in Amin's solo "My Dance" (Festival White Money by FLINN WORKS, 2021), as well as a performer/dancer in the creation "Re-Rooting" also by and with N. Amin, with duos and solo scenes (cofinanced by Tanzfabrik, supported by Prozessförderung, #TAKEHEART) at Theater Oyoun - Kultur NeuDenken in Sept. 2022. Diving deeper into these themes, and passionate about exploring the basis of feminist/sociological theses on witch-hunting and current social manifestations of it, she conducted her research project entitled "Own my Body?" in Autumn 2022 (Residency Funding for Graduates/NeuStartKultur/Fonds Darstellende Künste, as part of #TAKEHEART, supported by Kampnagel). This exploration became a physical research project on the freedom of the female body within a patriarchal society, translated into a stage context. Her main questions included: "Is the associative space on stage only an extension of social patriarchal attributions? Or can I ultimately determine the sexualisation or nonsexualisation of my body on stage?"

From August till December 2022, she collaborated as a dancer/performer in the residency 'AR Magic Loop' at Dock11 and performed during DOCKDigital's "OPEN LAB" in four different projects as a dancer/digital dancer ("Persona" and “Organism” by Baris Pekcağlıyan and Katrine Bregnum, as well as in the digital movement research "body parts {con}fusion" (performance + concept) with Nora Krahl and as visual artist, her mentor Beka Tcharbadze.

Most recently, Laura acted in the VR-Oper “Am Ende der Welt”, directed and composed by Nora Krahl, as well as danced in the inclusive production "Herzen. ZWISCHEN. Vulkanen" by Karina Suárez Bosche. This dance creation, which premiered in TAK in the frame of the "Special Olympics Berlin 2023” received the 3rd prize “Berlin Prevention Award 2023” from Berlin State Commission against Violence and the Berlin Senate. 

From September 2023 till March 2024, Laura was Fellow at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality with her movement research 'A_live'. This exploration led to a new body methodology for 3D avatars embodiment, and will be used a.o. for the theater production “Urban Legends” from the director Vidovszky György, (Premiere: May 24, Kolibri Theater, Budapest, co-produced by 'Play On!' and the Academy for Theater and Digitality). 

Laura Waltz

Hanna Rode is an artist working in theater, opera & film.

Her work is based on the idea of using the face and the body as a living canvas to make emotions visible, thus depicting the human being in a radical interpenetration of interiority and exteriority. The figures that emerge are "Frankenstein's characters" - often crudely composed and suspended between digital and analog being.


Hanna Rode

Kamil Kamysz, PhD,UX & Interaction Design Con-sultant with over 12 years ofexperience.Interaction Design StudioHead in the Faculty of Indus-trial Design at Jan MatejkoAcademy of Fine Arts in Kra-kow, Poland.Conference speaker, lecturerand workshop leader. Pas-sionate about complex andchallenging projects. Special-ized in cross-platform systemsdesign.

Interaction Design Studio Head, Academy of Fine Arts Krakow

Kamil Kamysz

Fehime Seven

I am a trained puppeteer with a background in electrical engineering. In my artistic practice, I like to combine these seemingly separate domains of knowledge into engaging theatrical work. 

My work spans from classical, analog puppetry to little autonomous cardboard robots arranged in a puppet-installation. Beyond theater, I like to explore textile art and its possibilities when combined with technology. In 2020, I produced several woven speakers that were shown at Kunstmuseum Bochum in 2021 and the Art Space festival in Bremerhaven.

Yvonne Dicketmüller

Eline Øverby is a norwegian actress and director based in Oslo. Øverby is a diverse actress, and has studied at the Academy of Music and Drama in Gothenburg, The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Insititute in New York and Nord Universitet in Verdal, Norway. She is both an actress and co-director in ‘Drømmespillet’.

Eline Øverby

Florencia Alonso

Thierry Tidrow is a Canadian composer working in Germany. He holds a B.Mus. (Hons) in composition from McGill University, an M.Mus. from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, where he studied with Richard Ayres, and is an Alumnus of the Akademie Musiktheater Heute fellowship. His music has been performed across North America and Europe and recent works have focused on vocal and text-based music, including five chamber operas. Thierry has won many prizes, including the Berliner Opernpreis 2018 and the Canada Council’s prestigious Jules-Léger Prize. He is currently composer in residence for Oper Dortmund. His work, described as both “exuberant”and “macabre”, explores the grey area between humour and darkness as well as truth and lie, walking a tightrope between comedy, tragedy, and horror.

Thierry Tidrow

Jiayun Zhuang is a writer and dramaturg currently based in the United States and the Netherlands. 

Edwin van Steenbergen is a light designer, set designer, and theatre technician based in the Netherlands.

Together, they are interested in exploring storytelling/storyliving techniques and technological possibilities in theatre and performance. In their research project at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality, entitled 

, they developed a real-time, algorithm-driven, and rewards-optimized installation performance to simulate a post-truth media-political sphere.

Jiayun Zhuang and Edwin van Steenbergen

Joel de Giovanni

Samuel received his MFA from Yale School of Drama, whereas he majors in Design. His work on Twelfth Night was nominated for the Outstanding Lighting Design in the Connecticut Critics Circle Awards. His media art work Aesthetics and Freedom of Human Beings is one of the finalists of IFVA (Incubator for Film and Visual media in Asia) in 2020.

https://www.samuelcvlx.com/

Samuel Chan

Markus Wagner is a scenographer, 3D designer and VR developer based in Berlin. He studied philosophy and theater studies in Mainz and Leipzig. From 2010 to 2016 he worked at the Staatstheater Mainz, the Oldenburg State Theater, the Centraltheater Leipzig and the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna.

Since 2015, he has been conceiving and designing real and virtual spaces for exhibitions, trade fairs and brand worlds. In doing so, he deals both affirmatively and critically with topics such as digitalization, automation, virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence.

Since 2019 he has been developing interactive scenographies for digital theater and performances, mainly in the artist group oblique-sensations. In 2021 he was a fellow at the Academy for Theater and Digitality Dortmund. In the Digital Lab he explored the technical challenges and potentials of VR.

LA MACHINE A GLOIRE*2022 | obliquesensations (oblique-sensations.net)

DER EINBEINIGE LÄUFER 2022 | obliquesensations (oblique-sensations.net)

Markus Wagner

He was born in Tomar (Portugal) in 1952. He has attended different workshops in Lisbon, Paris and Brussels, in areas such as movement, music, masks, circus, juggle and others.

He works in Teatro O Bando since 1975, becoming a member of this cultural co-operative one year later. From 1975 onwards, he has leaded several courses and seminars of theatre at primary and secondary schools for students and teachers. He is responsible for the management and international affairs at O Bando. He performed in most of the plays of this company, and also worked as stage director.

Teatro O Bando

Raul Atalaia

Andrea Familari lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Having worked with theatre, music, contemporary art, especially in the live act audio/visual scene, Familari is a new media artist whose research derives from the investigation on generative processes, analysed through the lens of the noise and expressed via different media: video screenings, interactive installations, prints.

Since 2011, he has been experimenting and has established his practice within the international new media and art scenes. His repertoire is regularly showcased in theaters, concert halls, festivals, and museums. In 2013 he moved to Berlin.

, a multidisciplinary studio curating audio-visual performances, light design, scenography, videoclip production.

, a video-research channel focused on weekly interviews of artists whose practices relate to the audio/visual field.

, an artistic group, together with Marco Donnarumma and Margherita Pevere.

Vimeo

Andrea Familari

Julian Jungel is a director and coder of the interactive arts. His interest lies in the space where craftsmanship and sensors, generative design and music, animation and digital technology meet. Here he creates fascinating and fun user experiences through fast iterations of design and prototyping.

His toolset includes design process skills, hardware hacking techniques to interact with physical objects as well as classic programming languages like c++ and c#, arduino, processing and vvvv. He visualizes and animates with Cinema 4D and After Effects.

Julian did his BS in Computer Sciences at Hochschule Ravensburg-Weingarten then worked as a freelance programmer and 3D-Artist before he joined the Interactive Media class at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg from 2010 to 2013. Since 2015 he is senior lecturer on interactive arts at the internationally renowned Animationsinstitut in Ludwigsburg, Germany.

, a non-profit initiative aiming to reanimate creativity in kids, youths and adults with the help of agile technology and curates their workshops on animatronics, robotics, VR, wearables – anything that can be built from or enhanced with electronic scrap.

Today Julian works as lecturer for creative technology in M.A. Spiel &

 Objekt at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts

Julian Jungel

Rachel Briscoe is creative director of fanSHEN. By training, she is a playwright, with work performed at the Royal Court and Soho theatres. She also works as a creative consultant, helping organisations like the National Trust and Tyne and Wear Museums create more playful environments.

With fanSHEN, Rachel created The Justice Syndicate (Aesthetica Art Prize Anthology: Future Now; Lumen Prize longlist; presented at York Mediale and Doc/Fest 2019). In 2019, fanSHEN created interactive digital commissions for organisations as varied as NESTA, Museum of London, the Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science and Seven Stories: the National Centre for Children’s Books. In 2020 we are working on projects for Alzheimer’s Research UK, the Scottish Government and the Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences, as well as artworks exploring what a decolonising artistic practice could look like.

Rachel Briscoe

Simone Arganini trained as a dancer with Manfredi Perego and in acting with Elisa Cuppini and Savino Paparella. He works with Daniele Albanese, Teatro delle Briciole, MP.Ideograms.
Since 2015 he has been a stable member of CollettivO CineticO.
In the musical field, he studied guitar and singing, and then devoted himself to electronic music (Conservatorio “A. Boito” di Parma; one-year course in Sound Design for Linear Media and Videogames at Ecipar Bologna). He follows the course on technology and performance “Declinazioni” by Studio Azzurro and Ariella Vidach and the Biennium of Electronic Music, interactive/multimedia address at the Conservatorio “A. Pedrollo” in Vicenza.
He is a dancer and performance author, as well as a sound designer, involved in composition and programming of interactive devices for theatrical performances.

Simone Arganini

Roman Senkl

Franziska began writing for theater at the age of 14 as a scholarship holder of the ZEIT-Stiftung at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg. Today she is a playwright and librettist.

Born in Hamburg in 1991, she lives and works in Berlin now. Here she studied Theaterstudies, Journalism & Communication (Bachelor of Arts) and 

 at the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK). In 2017 she received the Kleist-Förderpreis für junge Dramatikerinnen und Dramatiker for her play 

 (first premiere: at Ruhrfestspiele, by Schauspiel Hannover). For her libretto 

 – a sci-fi opera – she won the Berlin Opernpreis in 2018, together with Zsófia Geréb and Thierry Tidrow.

She was the German delegate at the International Young Playwrights Festival of Interplay Europe in Izmir and a scholarship holder at the Centre National des Ecritures du Spectacles La Chartreuse, Avignon.

, for which she wrote the libretto, was invited to this year’s Performing Arts Festival Berlin.

Franziska vom Heede

Vat Teater

Mihkel Seeder

 is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer whose work has been produced in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Berlin, Edinburgh, and elsewhere. Together with the director 

, he founded the narrative technology company 

The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Grace B Matthias

 (Playwrights Realm at The Duke on 42nd Street); 

Song of a Convalescent Ayn Rand Giving Thanks to the Godhead 

(American Repertory Theater, Joe’s Pub); 

 (O’Neill Playwrights Conference selection); 

 (published by S. Fischer Verlag; filmed by HBO); and 

, which has been performed over 1,000 times at venues including Lincoln Center, American Repertory Theater, and three sold-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. 

He is a former NYFA Playwriting fellow and member of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, Ars Nova’s Play Group, and a graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwrights Program at Juilliard.

Hearth Gods

Michael Yates Crowley

, director, actress, since 2024 artistic director of Teatro Fontana, home of Elsinor Centro di Produzione Teatrale di Innovazione. She graduated in Medieval Philology at the Federico II University in Naples, continued her second degree in Bologna in Theatre, graduating in History of Directing with Claudio Longhi, trained with Pierpaolo Sepe, Carlo Cerciello, Antonio Latella, Michele Monetta, Yves le Breton, developing a vision of experimental, iconic and innovative theater. Since 2013, he has directed in Bologna together with Micol Vighi the theater company and the training and theatrical research center Sblocco5. Her works are characterized by the use of immersive technologies and technological experimentation (such as Binaural Dummy Head, holograms, video interactions, robotic arms and artificial intelligence).
Since 2022 she has been the artistic director of 

Ivonne Capece | Sblocco5

Elsinor Centro di Produzione Teatrale

Ivonne Capece

Ariane Trümper is a scenographer, artist and researcher living in Rotterdam. She works on the interfaces between media art, performance and spatial design and researches performative processes and perception filtered through bodies and technologies. Her work deals with the transitions between physical and non-physical spaces and the experience of those. Ariane has an MFA in scenography, is a member of the editorial team of the Dutch group Platform-Scenography, pre-PhD candidate and lecturer of the MA Scenography at the University of the Arts in Utrecht.

Ariane Trümper

Performer in numerous performances at Theater am Ortweinplatz (among other things, preferably not, the audition, between the trees, socialist intervention Druppe) and Das Planetenparty Prinzip (Please play me !, the part of the game game, smart ass). 

2018 director and production management at Spleen * Trieb-Produktion Do you know the truth ?. Actors in short films and cinema commercials.

At Planetenparty Prinzip responsible for conception, production, performance, video.

Interactive Theater, Das Planetenparty Prinzip

Alexander Benke

Marco Donnarumma (DE) is an artist, performer, stage director and scholar weaving together contemporary performance, new media art and interactive computer music since the early 2000s. He manipulates bodies, creates choreographies, engineers machines and composes sounds, thus combining disciplines, media and technology into an oneiric, sensual, uncompromising aesthetics. He is internationally acknowledged for solo performances, stage productions and installations that defy genres, and where the body becomes a morphing language to speak critically of ritual, power and technology.

The 7 Configurations cycle, his latest project, includes dancetheater productions, performances and robotic installations. By experimenting with the corporeal and psychological relationships of four human performers and six AI prostheses, the pieces attempt to dissect the conflicts between AI and body politics. In 2019, he co-founded the performance artists group Fronte Vacuo with Margherita Pevere and Andrea Familari. Their ongoing saga, Humane Methods, consists of hybrid live art events as social experiments, where human performers and audiences, non-human organisms and AI-driven machines expose the violence of today’s algorithmic societies. During the seasons 2022-24, they are artists in residence at Volkstheater Wien.

Touring consistently for the past fifteen years across major and independent theaters, concert halls, parking lots, squats, festivals and museums worldwide, Donnarumma’s work has been shown, among others, at Volkstheater Wien (AT), Münchner Kammerspiele (DE), Romaeuropa Festival (IT), Ming Contemporary Art Museum (CN), Chronus Art Center (CN), Ars Electronica (AT), Donaufestival (AT), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (DE), NRW Forum (DE), Nemo Biennale/HeK Basel (FR), LABoral (ES), musikprotokoll (AT), CTM Festival (DE), tanzhaus nrw (DE), Laznia Center for Contemporary Art (PL), and Kontejner (HR).

His repertoire received numerous acknowledgements, most notably the Autonom Grant 2020-22 by Fonds Darstellende Künste and Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe for ∑XHALE; the Digital Award at Romaeuropa Festival 2018 for Eingeweide; two awards at the Bains Numériques Biennial 2018, as well as the Award of Distinction (2nd prize) in Sound Art at Prix Ars Electronica 2017 for Corpus Nil; the nomination of Artist of the Science Year 2018 by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education for Amygdala; and the first prize in the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition 2012 for the XTH Sense.

Donnarumma holds a Ph.D. in performing arts, computing and body theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. He is currently a Medienkunst Fellow at medienwerk.nrw and an Associate Researcher at the Intelligent Instruments Lab, Reykjavik. In 2020-21 he was a Research Fellow at the Akademie­ für Theater ­und Digitalität, Dortmund. Previously, in 2016-18, he was Research Fellow at Berlin University of the Arts in partnership with the Neurorobotics Research Laboratory. He was funded by European Commission, Goethe-Institut, Berlin Senate, Fonds Darstellende Künste, Rockefeller Foundation, British Council and New Media Scotland. His writings are published by MIT Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge, ACM and Springer.

https://frontevacuo.com/

Facebook

https://assemblag.es/@Body_sound_machine/

Marco Donnarumma

Rahel Spöhrer

Born 1985 in Trondheim, Norway. Masters degree in Performance Studies from University of Oslo. Approached theatre through dance and music. In theatre she has worked as freelance dramaturge and director, with performance groups and at theatre houses. She was in-house dramaturge at Trøndelag Teater (Trondheim, Norway) 2014-2016, and Den Nationale Scene (Bergen, Norway) 2016-2017.

Teatret Vart

Vera Krohn Svaleng

Andrea Ligabue, Modena 1972. Married with Serena. Caterina (2001) and Francesco (2006) father. Master degree and Ph.D in Theoretical Chemistry at University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. From 2006 employed as computer programmer for University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and assigned to the Game Science Research Center in November 2019. Artistic Director of Play – The Games Festival, Italian greatest games event, since his 1st edition back in 2008. Game’s reviewer and member of the International Gamers Awards committee is working with games from 2010 collaborating with designers and publishers including LEGO and Centro Studi Erickson. Game Based Learning and Game Design are his field of interest. Own more than 1500 board-games and several role-playing-games and videogames.

Andrea Ligabue

 is a live performance director specializing in new plays, opera, and digital media projects. He has directed projects internationally in Germany, the UK, Brazil, Ireland, Denmark, Mexico, Canada, Australia and the Czech Republic. Together with 

 he founded the narrative technology company 

He has created work in New York City at Lincoln Center, The Public Theater, PS122, HERE Arts Center, Ars Nova, The Bushwick Starr, The Brick, 59E59, 3LD, and Dixon Place. Regionally, his work has been seen at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, and the Humana Festival at Actors Theater of Louisville.

His work with composer Kate Soper has been performed at the Seattle Symphony, Smith College, and The New York Festival of Song at the Dimenna Center. He has developed new plays at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Playwrights Realm and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. His production of "temping" was selected by the Guardian and the Telegraph as one of the best productions of the 2022 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the piece was featured twice in New York Times.

He is a recipient of a 2021 Artists + Machine Intelligence Research Award from Google, as well as fellowships from the Likhachev Foundation, the Kennedy Center, and the National New Play Network. He has been a resident artist at the Orchard Project, E|MERGE, and the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. Rau is a Forward/Story fellow and a speaker at Books in Browsers, Performing Robots and StoryCode. He has been an assistant director for Francesca Zambello, John Turturro, Robert Woodruff and associate director for Anne Bogart, Les Waters, and Ivo Van Hove. He is a New York Theater Workshop Usual Suspect and a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab. He is an assistant professor at Stanford University, where he teaches Directing and Devising in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies and serves as the head for the Theater-Making Concentration as well as the Artistic Director for the department. Also at Stanford, he is an affiliate faculty member at the Stanford Institute for Human Centered AI.

Michael Rau

Hauke Berheide and Amy Stebbins are an artist duo working in contemporary opera and adjacent forms. Since 2016, they have created two evening-length operas, a children’s concert, and a short silent film with live chamber orchestra score. Their first opera 

 (Bavarian State Opera, 2016) received the Munich Festival Prize. One year later, conductor Oksana Lyniv produced and conducted the opera for the inaugural season of the LvivMozArt Festival in Lviv, Ukraine. Since then, Berheide and Stebbins have received commissions from the Oper Frankfurt, the Augsburg State Theater, and the Düsseldorf Tonhalle. In spite of the disciplinary diversity of their work, Berheide and Stebbins consistently approach their projects from a materialist perspective, oftentimes positioning ostensibly “new” issues—such as influencer culture or “Fake News”—in constellation with similar, historical events.

Berheide and Stebbins also advocate for contemporary opera beyond the stage. They have taught seminars on contemporary opera at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. As writers, they have authored several texts about opera aesthetics and new work development in trade magazines and academic journals. In 2018, the duo co-founded New Opera Dialogues, an international platform focused on contemporary opera aesthetics and best institutional practices.

For the 2024 season, they are creating a site-specific chamber opera with virtual reality components for the Augsburg State Theater. This project is made possible with the support of the MacDowell Colony and the Liz Mohn Culture and Music Foundation.

http://www.amystebbins.net/

Amy Stebbins

Alexander Nham is an audio and game designer as well as a performance artist.


As a cofounder of DrownTown he is currently working on 

LinkedIn

Audio and Game Designer, Performance Artist

https://drowntown.itch.io/light-of-atlantis

Alexander Nham

Piotr Froń (1994) - writer,dramaturg, culture animator. 

5th-year dramaturgy and directing student at the Academy of Theatre Arts in Kraków. He debuted with „The Bible” directed by Michał Zadara (Nowy Theatre in Warsaw, 2018). As a dramaturg he created plays in theaters in Warsaw, Wrocław and Kraków. In 2021 he was holder of a Warsaw art scholarship and a Nowy Theatre scholarship (granted for innovation in the dramaturgy techniques and modern thinking about structure of the theatre performance).

Piotr Froń

Fabian Raith

Helen is a freelancing director, who specialises on visual theatre. She has directed three productions in VAT Teater – two of them (

) were created in the international theatre project PLATFORM SHIFT+.

Helen Rekkor

http://www.andreawinkler.org/

Andrea Winkler

https://www.blutendefreischwimmer.de/

Gloria Schulz

Programmer, artist and curator, studied free art at HFBK and Critical Studies in Vienna. Research at the intersections of digital modelling, climate and social transformation, as well as artistic mediation. Concerned about how simulations of our world rub off into the reality of people’s lives, and to what extent this undermines aesthetic experiences.

Do Mayer

Christiane Hütter

Magda was born in 1975. She is a playwright, screenwriter, interior designer, and winner of the Gdynia Drama Award and the competition at the Polish Contemporary Art Exhibition. Magda Fertacz is a graduate of the College of Communication and Social Media and the Department of Journalism of the University of Warsaw. She made her debut as a playwright with the play 

, staged at the National Theatre in Warsaw by Anna Trojanowska. As the author has explained, the story is about the inability to get close to other people. An emotionally crippled couple faces the challenges of parenthood. The appearance of the child exposes unconscious, deeply hidden emotions. „Is it possible to reach an agreement?“, asks Fertacz, and the director of the play adds that it is a powerful work which proves that the famous fairy tale ending ‘And they lived happily ever after’ does not usually occur in reality. Dust earned a distinction in the Radom Odważny contest in 2005. Fertacz is also the author of several other dramatic plays, such as Absinthe, which has been translated into many languages and shown at the Pozoriszte Lutaka Theatre in Mostar, the Tmuna Theatre in Tel Aviv and the Observatorija Theatre in Riga, among others.

Magda Fertacz

ludwig technique (a.k.a. Johannes Bereiter-Payr) is a cross-media concept and performance artist. A self-described media agnostic and generalist dilettante, he works in very diverse fields: software development for research laboratories, construction sites, art venues and theater productions (on and behind the stage), to name a few. He has an intense interest in almost everything and is not shy to take on unexpected offers. This has recently lead him on a wild adventure to obtain a degree in medical technologies and to work in a laboratory for robotics and industrial automation.

ludwig technique mostly works in collaborations with other artists, as this allows him to explore more modalities and create more faceted,
immersive experiences. Since 2020, he has teamed up with theater
director and performance artist Peter Lorenz to explore the delivery of
interactive theatrical performance machines. As modern production
techniques and distributed manufacturing become state of the art, ludwig
technique incorporates them into the creation of his works, making use
of the humane and production resources of local maker communities. Being transparent about the distributed production process and credit all
people involved is an important aspect of his art.

Common themes for ludwig technique are recursive systems (e.g. feedback-loops), and interactive installations. He sees art as a means of pushing the boundaries of collective human perception, an inherently
human endeavour of exploration and deeply related to scientific research.

Concept and Performance Artist, Software Developer

Johannes Bereiter-Payr

Born in Langenhagen in 1992, Caspar Bankert began his artistic career in the radio drama studios of MDR, progressively honing his skills to join the digital theater scene. He studied Contemporary Puppetry Arts at the HfS "Ernst Busch" in Berlin, and has performed in a variety of productions both nationally and internationally.


He has found interest in merging gaming elements with theater performances, an endeavour showcased in the interactive mini-series "Gulliver," which he developed with his theatre company "komplexbrigade". His current projects include "INBETWEEN," an immersive VR city tour with Academy Alumna Sarah Buser, and "Artificial Stupidity," a project where he engages with AI alignment and Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities, an area dealing with enhancing the interaction between humans and artificial intelligence.


Based in Berlin and Dresden, he remains dedicated to his passion for theater, aspiring to further evolve traditional theater through the incorporation of modern technologies.


http://www.casparbankert.com/

Substack

Linktree

Twitter

Caspar Bankert

Nils Corte, born in 1975, lives and works in Berlin, Dortmund and
Nürnberg. He is a programmer, playwright, musician and producer. His
artistic focus is on the development, visualisation and utilisation of
extended reality in performance contexts. Most recently he wrote "Murder
on the Holodeck" and "Symmetry". Since 2015 he has been the organiser of the music and culture festival "Klingt Gut".

He is the developer of the award-winning visualisation software "Pepper's Holosuite", which enables actors and actresses to interact with holographically projected virtual objects on stage and make them simultaneously tangible for the audience.

He also programs on and for the social VR platform Mozilla Hubs and Neos
VR. He is an alumnus of the Academy for Theatre and Digitality, works as
a Digital Arts Officer at Theater Dortmund and is part of the collective
minus.eins. From the 2023/24 season, he will take over as Head of
Creative Technologies of the "Extended Reality Theatre - XRT" in the
Schauspiel at the Staatstheater Nürnberg.

Nils Corte

Marius Zoschke lives in Berlin as a freelance director and curator. He studied theatre studies and philosophy. Since 2020 he has been realizing
interactive performance formats and multimedia installations in public space under the label RECLAIM. Since 2021 he has been working at PlayON! as assistant curator for the annual HOPE conference. As part of his work at PlayOn!, he developed an AR performance in Palmela, Portugal and an audiowalk for the Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. Besides he created various charity events such as "IT MATTERS - Together
against Racism", a music festival, assisted in productions by Rimini Protokoll, Roman Senkl and others in the areas of stage design and mixed
reality.

Marius Zoschke

Creative Director and Somatic Coach with a background in dance, choreography and intermedia arts. 

Co-founder of 4 performance collectives, including Stratofyzika, with performance experiences inspired by computer science, technology, natural sciences, data privacy and the boundaries between humans and machines through a blend of new media, dance theatre and spatial soundscapes.

Stratofyzika

Hen/i

Birk Schmithüsen is a media artist based in Leipzig (DE). His work explores emerging technologies that affect our everyday lives. He is interested in the actual functionality hidden in a black box behind the simple user interface. In aesthetic experiments, Birk explores non-perceptible, abstract concepts such as Machine Learning (AI) and BigData as artistic media. The research results are staged in immersive new media installations. Between explanatory approaches through data visualization, abstract, aesthetic reuse of emerging technologies and speculative concepts, he opens up new perspectives on current topics of digitalization. Birk holds a diploma in fine art and got an EMAP/EMARE grant. His works were shown internationally at key media art festivals in France, the Netherlands, Austria, Spain and Germany, including re:public, Chaos Communication Congress, Ars Electronica and ZKM.

ArtesMobiles was founded by Nina Maria Stemberger (performance) and Birk Schmithüsen (media artist) and has been producing forward-looking performances since 2013. They are looking for ways to dissolve academic categories and break down the boundaries between conceptual art, theatre and technology. ArtesMobiles produces across genres and extends the performing arts with new media to create experiences, social experiments and performative installations.

Birk Schmithüsen

Luise Ehrenwerth (*1991 in Erfurt) is a costume designer, scenographer and passionate maker. A main interest in her artistic work lies in the versatile sensorial ways of perceiving scenic environments and their influence on the people who interact with them. Thus, in 2018, as part of her diploma at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, she developed the augmented audio reality project SCHRAPP SCHRAPP BUFF ZONG in collaboration with Nele Bühler, where they explored the narrative potential of acoustic spaces using binaural 3D audio recordings made with dummy head microphones. 

In 2020, within the Denkzeit-scholarship of the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony, Luise Ehrenwerth pursued the question of how Augmented Reality can be used to create virtual and at the same time haptically experienceable scenographies.

Among others, projects with her participation have been carried out at the DNT Weimar in 2019 (Co-stage design with Nurkan Erpulat for the Kunstfest's opening production "Reichtags-Reenactment"), for the documentary film ANMAßUNG (set design, directors: Stefan Kolbe and Chris Wright, Berlinale 2021) and in collaboration with the media theater collective machina eX the theatrical classroom game "setup.school(). - Die Lernmaschine" (Landesbühnen Sachsen/Theater Baden-Baden, 2021). 2021-22 Luise Ehrenwerth was a fellow at the Academy for Theater and Digitality Dortmund with her research project "connecting:stitches", in which she brings together costume design and digital technologies such as AR and microcontrolling.

Image: Noemi Sorgo

Luise Ehrenwerth

Annette Müller is a Düsseldorf based director, playwright, actress and dramaturge for contemporary dance and performance

 from 2005 to 2010.2010 to 2018 artistic director for 

 she directed pieces like „Kasimir und Karoline“ and „Frühlings Erwachen“, that was invited to Junges Staatstheater Berlin PARKAUE und and Landestheater Tübingen.As a director she works at 

“ was nominated as „bestes Jugendstück 2021“ at 

As a dramaturge she worked from 2015 to 2019 with the Performancecollective 

. They were often invited to the festival 

 and their work „Die Schöpfung“ was invited to 

. She also works for the cologne-based Performancegroup 

).In july 2021 she won together with the argentinian composer Cecilia Arditto den „

 with their draft of a multidisciplinary opera basierend based on the novel „L’Étranger“ by Albert Camus.

Annette Müller is a playwright, published by 

Annette Müller

https://lukasrehm.net/

Lukas Rehm

Bridging art & science, dance & technology, in artistic practice and doing academic research at 

 - University of applied sciences Mainz (Project originally founded by choreographer William Forsythe). 

Choreographer, Media and Interaction Designer, Researcher

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