RING 10010110

Marcus Lobbes Nils Corte Roman Senkl
Phil Hagen Jungschlaeger Pia Maria Mackert

Artificial Intelligence Opera Projection
completedCooperation

Summary
Richard Wagner’s monumental Der Ring des Nibelungen – a world of power, love, betrayal, downfall, and a place of constant transformation – is curated using artificial intelligence and innovative image-making techniques. Under the title RING 10010110, curator Marcus Lobbes and his team create an experiment in visionary power, with the history of Wagner's Musikdrama taking centre stage in a visual realm that is constantly changing, expanding, reassembling, and contradicting itself. For the first time in the Bayreuth Festival's history, artificial intelligence performs live on stage – not as a character, but as a visual force. ___________________________________________________________ RING 10010110 is a co-operation between the Bayreuth Festival and the Academy for Theatre and Digitality

Documentation

RING 10010110 premiered at the Bayreuth Festival in 2026, and is documented here across three interviews.

First, the Academy’s director Marcus Lobbes discusses his role as curator of this reimagined Ring Cycle, the controversial reception of the work, and why the Festival’s 150th anniversary was the right moment for AI to perform on stage in Bayreuth.

Götterdämmerung (c) Enrico Nawrath

Götterdämmerung (c) Enrico Nawrath

In the second interview, creative technologists Nils Corte and Phil Hagen Jungschlaeger take us behind the scenes of the development process for RING 10010110. They discuss the production's biggest artistic-technical questions – including how to balance the machine's ability to "dream".

The gauze and projections, as seen from the wings (Image: Marcus Lobbes)

Testing in the Festspielhaus (Image: Marcus Lobbes)

View from the stage, between the gauze (Image: Marcus Lobbes)

General rehearsal (Image: Marcus Lobbes)

The final interview examines RING 10010110's costume and makeup design by Pia Maria Mackert, whose work transforms the singers into art-objects as they perform from within the production's gauze drapes and AI-generated imagery. Here, Mackert explains her sculptural approach to desgining costumes for such a visually complex production.

Lighting test with costumes (Image: Marcus Lobbes)

Testing the relationship between the projections and the singers' positioning (Image: Marcus Lobbes)

RING 10010110 Artistic Team

Christian Thielemann (Musical direction)
Marcus Lobbes (Curator)
Marcus Lobbes und Nils Corte (Artistic-technical conception)
Andri Hardmeier (Dramaturgy)
Roman Senkl (Digital- and AI-Storytelling)
Nils Corte und Phil Hagen Jungschlaeger (Creative Code/ Visual Art)
Wolf Gutjahr (Stage)
Pia Maria Mackert (Costume)