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

Installation

VR (Virtual Reality)

Puppetry

Interactive

Stage Design

Dance

Sound Design

Theater Dortmund
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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

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Fellowship

HIDA

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

Portal: Academy for Theatre and Digitality

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

To find productive and interesting ways of transmissions between performative questions of embodiment and disembodiment, presence etc. and the virtual space, specifically virtual reality environments as predesigned interfaces of embodied first person experience. 

How can one use the critical knowledge within performance and live- arts, its knowledge about perceptive, sensorial and affective questions, its aesthetical strategies of staging to design virtual environments which allow a conscious and non - illusionist experience of immersive potentials.

How can the virtual spaces of visuality, sound and the imaginary landscapes of text converge within VR, how can they productively disrupt each other? And do the (perceived) gaps of such disruptions leave or open up potentials for interaction, freedom of somatic experience or inter- passive enjoyments?

Overall: which interesting ways exist to explore cross- medial forms of staging theatrical and performative contents in a new digital medium? Which unknown ways of story-telling and aesthetic experience can emerge, which simultaneously are able to question the medium's tendency towards a totally closed and illusionistic fictional environment?

As one of the starting points, we developed several “worlds” in unity, where we combined spatial design, scripted behaviors of the elements and animations. We think of these “worlds” as of virtual scenographies and described it as frameworks or infrastructures of possible/potential experiences, sensations and actions. Like a stage-design in a real-world-theatre-production, these virtual scenographies where inspired by the theatre piece as well as the creative concept and especially the sound design, which developed in parallel. 

At the same time, the virtual scenographies influenced the dramaturgy, the treatment of the text etc. After exploring and unfolding these scenographies in “open worlds” we narrowed down the open structure of the spaces and implemented a sequential order and a timeline-based structure, where the scripted behaviors / scenographical mechanics where one of the building blocks. Here are some examples of these scenographical scripts:

A quite big part of the work was to create a good working VR-Body. By VR-Body we refer to the avatar, that is attached to the player and controlled by the player as his “own” body. We called it “inhabiting a puppet” and tried to get the feeling of “having” a body in VR as organically glitchy as possible.

Enables the VR-camera (which is always at the same time tracked by the movements of the players head) to travel in and out of the VR-body. So that the player can for example look herself from outside or merge with another vr-body or (animated)avatar. This script was created to experiment with Out-Of-Body-Experiences and with a feeling of synchronically having a first, second and third-person perspective.

A VR-Rig, that adjusts to floors in every rotation/world orientation, so that you can for example walk a road, that bends in a vertical loop. With the help of that script you also can for example teleport on every face of a cube so that a wall or a ceiling can get your new floor. So the script creates possibilities in the virtual world, that are not there in the real world, but very interestingly, this feeling of freedom disappears after a while and makes place for an uncanny feeling of a dead end or a never ending race.

This script is about the VR-body. With the help of that script, we can blend in animation-data (for example of mocap recordings) and “occupy” the VR-body. This “occupation” can be related to certain rules, like: if you move your arms fast enough, the movement of “your” VR-body is synchronized, but if you move slow or stop moving, animation data takes over and controls the movement of your arms. This script dissociates the feeling and the seeing of a body, that is supposed to be “mine”.

Training a VR with gestures and movement-qualities, that then will be recognized, to trigger or conduct certain reactions.

Hardware, Software, Sound and Unity Requirements

Development Diary

Christoph Wirth

AUTO_NOMOS is a research on cars, crashes and VRs. Starting from the piece 'The One-Legged Runner' by playwright Katharina Schmitt, it investigates transmissions between performative environments as well as theatrical tools of staging and VR-technology with a strong focus on sound and (choreographic) interaction design.

AUTO_NOMOS critically revisits the dispositives of western history of technological progress, its phantasms, desires and catastrophes, and takes the car as an complex allegory of the latter. Within the virtual environments AUTO_NOMOS suggests, the car becomes a vehicle for an aesthetical and poetic reflection on proxy desires and phantasies of self- optimization induced by modern technology as well as the infrastructures and ecologies of life, phantasy and drive connected to them.

RESEARCH PLATFORM

Academy for Theatre and Digitality

Markus Wagner

Fellow

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