A theatre show developed in collaboration with Christiane Kühl & Chris Kondek (Doubleluckey productions). The show centers the audience body as its subject and data. I worked with Chris and Christiane early in the conceptualization, research and writing period of this project. It was important to me that for this project we not view technology as a ghostly monster, not to affirm an accelerationist view of techno-evolution, but because the dystopic telling is already ubiquitous in theatre and giving into that narrative removes potential for other liberatory discourses (e.g. "if nature is unjust change nature" Laboria Cuboniks).
A important aesthetic limitation I set for this project was exposing the materiality of HR technology and that instead of using ready made technology we would develop our own and leave its electronics exposed on wearing audience bodies. For this we develop as many HR monitoring gloves as we could. As Anna O and in collaboration with Grzegorz Zając we designed 40 wireless heart monitoring gloves that the audience wear as they run around the theatre or performatively sleep. This data is was then visualized by Kim Albrecht and used during the show. The gloves send OSC messages of HR data to a socketio server for processing and visualization. In the process I developed several tricks for stabilizing noisy HR data. Credits
concept, text and direction Chris Kondek, Christiane Kühl (doublelucky productions) set and costume design Doris Dziersk composition and music Hannes Strobl video Phillip Hohenwarter, Ruth Stofer interaction design Anna O. electronics engineering Grzegorz Zając data visualization Kim Albrecht research and dramaturg assistance Maria Rössler light, technical director Marc Zeuske production Management Katja Kettner assistance to the director Clara Romstedt assistance set and costume Sarai Feuerherdt performance Joséphine Evrard, Chris Kondek, Christiane Kühl, Anna O. co-production HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Münchner Kammerspiele, Ringlokschuppen Ruhr, Schauspiel Leipzig supported by Capital Cultural Fund Berlin. thanks to Maximilian Gotzler/Flowgrade, Prof. Dr. Steffen Mau, Stephan Tuchscherer a.k.a. Graf Natural