is the knowledge-sharing platform for the 

. Explore the experiments and bold ideas behind the Academy's Fellowship programme, delve into the science behind the projects of our HIDA researchers, and explore the results of international collaborations.

is a platform for discovery and documentation. Each 

showcases a unique artistic-technological research project, with topics as diverse as the use of AI in theatrical design, choreography for and with robotics, and the possibilities for theatre in virtual spaces. Each 

 offers the chance to learn more about the members of our artistic research network. By pooling our knowledge in such a way, creative research into theatre, performance and digital technologies can become more accessible, sustainable, and artistically innovative.

Funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, the Academy will award a total of 54 fellowships between 2019 and 2022, each lasting for five months. The 

 are designed for people interested in artistic-technical research which explores the possibilities for digital narratives in theatrical spaces, as well as their practical implementation. Fellows have researched a variety of digital methods (motion capture, coding, XR, VR, AR, sensor technologies, robotics, and more) across artistic fields including opera, dance, orchestra and drama. 

Helmholtz Information & Data Science Academy

(HIDA), the Academy for Theatre and Digitality has offered joint research fellowships at the interface of digital art and cutting edge scientific research since 2021. The HIDA fellowships are kindly supported by the 

Artificial Intelligence

VR (Virtual Reality)

Interactive

Sound Design

Projection/Mapping

3D Printing

XR (Extended Reality)

AV (Audiovisual Design)

Theater Dortmund
Theater Karree 1-3
44137 Dortmund
Germany
Fon: +49 (0) 231 226 14330

Address and location of the Academy for Theater and Digitality:
Speicherstrasse 17
44147 Dortmund
Germany

E-Mail: akademie@theater.digital
Web: theater.digital

Tax number: 314/5702/9367
Sales tax identification number: DE 124643894

Management Team:

Executive Director
Tobias Ehinger

Administrative Director
Martin Lizan

Director of the Opera
Heribert Germeshausen

Director of the Ballet
Xin Peng Wang

General Music Director
Gabriel Feltz

Artistic Director of the Schauspiel
Julia Wissert

Director of the Children's and Youth Theater
Andreas Gruhn

Director of the Academy for Theatre and Digitality
Marcus Lobbes

Please also note our privacy policy.

 as the sixth division of Theater Dortmund (hereinafter referred to as "Theater", information about Theater Dortmund can be found 

), is pleased that you are visiting our website. Data protection and data security when using our website are very important to us. We would therefore like to inform you at this point, in accordance with Article 13 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (DSGVO) and Section 13 of the German Telemedia Act (TMG), which of your personal data we collect when you visit our website and for what purposes it is used. Since changes in the law or changes in our internal company processes may make it necessary to adapt this data protection declaration, we ask you to read through this data protection declaration regularly. The data protection declaration can be accessed, saved and printed out here at any time.


§ 1 Scope of application

This data protection declaration applies to the Internet offering of Theater Dortmund, which can be accessed under the domain www.theaterdo.de and the various subdomains (hereinafter referred to as "our website").


§ 2 What is personal data?

Personal data is individual information about personal or factual circumstances of a specific or identifiable natural person (data subject). This includes, for example, information such as your name, address, telephone number, date of birth or e-mail address. Information for which we cannot establish a reference to your person, e.g. by anonymizing the information, is not personal data.


§ 3 What personal data do we collect/process and use?

Access data without personal reference is stored, such as the name of your Internet service provider, the page from which you visit us, the names of the requested files and their retrieval date. These data are evaluated exclusively for the improvement of our offer and do not allow any conclusions to be drawn about your person. 

If you wish to make use of services offered by us on our website, such as purchasing tickets via the ticket store or ordering a newsletter, etc., it is necessary for you to provide further data. This is the data that is required for the respective processing, such as your payment information when purchasing tickets or your e-mail address when ordering a newsletter. 

We process the data we collect about you for the provision of the services we offer, to answer your questions and to operate and improve our website and applications. 

We process your personal data exclusively to provide you with a comprehensive service via our website or, if you use our contact form or, to process your ticket purchase or, to process your application or, to provide you with requested information about our offers.

Fellowship

HIDA

PlayOn!

discover cutting-edge digital research in theatre and performance 
meet our research fellows and collaborators in the 

Portal: Academy for Theatre and Digitality

Björn Lengers works together with Marcel Karnapke since 2016 in the Berlin-based digital performing arts collective CyberRäuber. Their work - according to leading German theatre magazine "Theater der Zeit" - is characterized by "an arguably unique blend of affinity for technology, pioneering spirit, pragmatism and love of theatre".


CyberRäubers' Virtual Reality projects bring theatre elements (spoken and musical theatre, ballet) into virtual spaces, where they can be directly experienced by visitors. Their stage pieces use digital technologies as creative and immersive tools for artists and visitors. The collective has recently made waves with their "neural theatre"-pieces, using artificial art on stage.


Driven by curiosity and the belief in a great future for theatre, Karnapke and Lengers are experts for the digital exploration of theatrical traditions. Their work is shown internationally in theatres, festivals and galleries.

Björn Lengers

I am interested in immersion, the "reality" part of Virtual Reality. As CyberRäuber, Marcel and I have tried and created various avenues into immersion. A very short summary of our findings would be that a high degree of immersion is generally not necessary to tell a story or to convey what you want to. And that immersion generally suffers if you aim for too much realism: the more you rely on your target's collaboration, their imagination and established social and cultural norms, the more they will get "into it". Participation / interaction trumps detail, trumps realism.

But of course, the more you let people interact, the more you lose the the ability to steer a narrative. In this dilemma we usually opted for limited realism (high aestheticization), limited interaction, a limited scope of character, space and time, and worldbuilding as a narrative strategy.



 as an idea manifested itself over the course of years. It basically grew on the compost of CyberRäuber's work in theatre, in which we usually didn't have the time, scope and resources - and more importantly - not the framing for such a project.



 aims to be maximally immersive with a given, limited technological effort, following an approach of a minimally detailled realism, maximal imagination and direct, personal contact.

Hundred thousands of years of evolution have led us to develop certain quirks that can help storytellers create compelling narratives, something that can also be ab-used, of course. Think about what we imagine in clouds, in the shadows of a forest lighted by flickering flames of a campfire. What kind of faces we see in objects, landscapes, moving leaves, what voices and sounds we hear in the wind. The less there is to see or hear, the more we augment; little impulses, visual or aural clues are launch pads for our imagination, something every horror movie, every mystery story told on a nightly walk makes use of.



One way of direct, personal contact is the human voice. It can supply content and - with language, dialect, wording, timbre and emotion - context. We ascribe very much to a voice that could only be safely verified by meeting and conversing with the person with this voice.
In this project, the means to deliver the voice will be a recording, a voice message. Why? Because it is a controlled way of communication. For the ordinary person an ordinary conversation is something that can be quickly understood and deciphered, the situation, the conversation partner can be assessed. We would normally aim to reduce mystery, to understand what is happening and only continue to engage with the person and the topic if intrigued and feeling save. A voice message instead can be mysterious, incomplete, poetic, out of the norm. It can also contain additional information, environmental sounds. A voice message can be dilligently tailor-made for a situation and our goals. It doesn't need and anyway couldn't deal with an instant reply. The communication here isn't a realtime dialogue, but an elusive conversation over a longer timespan, similar to an infrequent exchange of letters, including lost and/or overlapping messages.




Nevertheless the recipient has to have the feeling of being heard, of being reacted to. And as in any communication, truth and trust plays an important role...

During the fellowship different areas have to be explored:

Voice - characteristics, difference to simple text

AI - what can be done with artificial neural networks? Story, text to speech, speech to text...

Soundscape - binaural sound, artificial and recorded; AMSR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response)

The role of time (length, pace, intervalls,...)

As was to be expected, my research plan didn't survive contact with reality. I thought the main focus of my research would be on "Soundscape" and "Story". Instead, most of my time was spent on voice and specifically the creation of text and voice with neural networks, with timing and the delivery system of the messages (AdaptorEx, Telegram). 

"Soundscape" didn't play the expected role due to the realization that interaction with smartphones, the chosen device, is mainly happening visually, and when people listen to voice messages, they oftentimes don't use higher quality headphones and will be surrounded by other environmental audio. After creating and afterwards checking out some binaural and ASMR material on the phone it didn't seem relevant any more in the scope of this research. It is one of those engineering issues that can take a lot of time and are fun to work on, but ultimately don't deliver for an audience.

"Story" got deprioritized when I realized that neural networks, or more precisely large language models (LLM), would take over a large part of creating the narrative. 
Here maybe some further explanation is in order. As CyberRäuber, we've been working on AI in theatre since 2018. In our so-called "neural theatre"-pieces (Prometheus unbound, Linz 2019; Der Mensch ist ein Anderer, Wiesbaden 2021; Mensch am Draht, Ingolstadt 2022; The Merge, Bangalore 2023) we aim to unleash the creative power of generative AI. The text the actors speak and play is created in real time by LLMs and transmitted to in-ear speakers via text-to-speech. You could also call this a text-to-body-mechanic, the actors repeat and interpret what they hear and thereby embody the AI. The process works amazingly well. While still maintaining parts of improv theatre, this isn't improv because the actors follow the logic and emotional content of the texts. Actors can never lose focus, have to stay "on" all the time and are oftentimes visibly struggling with their task, because the text will always be new and unknown, its twists and turns unforeseen. This is fresh material! The audience on the other hand usually themselves struggle with the uncanniness of the whole set-up, try to follow what's happening on stage, enjoy the actors' struggle and they take on much more responsibility, because the play develops on stage and in their heads.

So, AI is already playing a crucial part in CyberRäuber's artistic methods, and we've been following the latest developments in the field on a daily basis. And with the current generation of LLMs (2023/24) we now actually possess very powerful storytelling tools. The question was: is one person alone capable of creating, editing, curating large amounts of coherent, stylistically appealing, sensible text? Can a network convincingly take on the role of a narrator? To check and ultimately prove this thesis became one of the main isssues of the research at ATD.


This documentation is an ongoing process and will grow as the fellowship progresses. Last entry: 30. November 2023

You just received another one of those mysterious audio messages that strangely overlay your surroundings and ask you to perform a seemingly insignificant action: to walk a little slower, to press the pedestrian lights even though you don't actually want to cross the street, something else. A voice wants you to believe that you are decisively changing the future.
- - - Resonance is an interactive, immersive and theatrical narrative, which can be experienced by many people independent of time and place on their smartphones.

RESEARCH PLATFORM

Academy for Theatre and Digitality

Björn Lengers

Fellow

Short Bio

Projects

Contact

External Links