 To this talk about theater and quantum age, I can show you three people that don't really come from our middle, but someone actually recalled me with a sea base hoodie, but they come from theater in Dortmund and they know what we can do as a community and what we can achieve and they want you to, they want to ask you something, so we are really excited if you can, if Kai, Maria and Lukas can tell us something about this. We're happy to be here, let's introduce ourselves. My name is Kai Fogos, I'm the chief of the theater in Dortmund and I'm Maria Simon, I'm a video artist, media guy at the theater, I'm Lukas Plass and I'm some kind of the nerd at the theater. This is really special to be here and to be able to speak here because we think that the CCC and the theater in Dortmund have a lot in common. I want to tell, say something about the theater. Theater is an art form, it's really special because it's in the present, so the art only happens in the moment when the people on stage and the audience shares a room and in Dortmund we really felt the need to work on this, the special thing on the theater is being in the present, we also have to make present theater literature that can be old like 200, 400 years and in the books architecture stays a lot of time and music can also stay and it's staying art but the theater disappears, you can actually record it but the cinema is a lot more interesting to people. The possibility to have theater as a present art form, you can react on actual happenings and re-thought, well what are the topics of our time? The theater in Dortmund said we believe that globalization and the migration movements and the digitalization that these are the main three topics of the present and we have to take care of that and look at it and look at the world how it changes with these topics and we have to find new thoughts, new ideas for handling the digital age in the globalized age. If we have a theater of the present on these topics, digitalization, globalization, migration, these pieces are not enough for example to show Romeo and Juliet and these two guys know them and they run away and they meet in secrecy and they are dead or if it's a comedy they marry in the end, these are structures that don't touch the core of the problems of society and digital age and how can we achieve this to tell stories for the digital age and we brought you for examples and one search where we try to make current theater and the first piece I want to show you is the golden age, it's 100 ways to kick ass of the destiny and if you open the newspapers besides the media market advertisements and the lotto numbers and sports results, there is also migrants drowning in the Mediterranean Sea and it's really overwhelming to see it in the media, it's kind of a shock for everyone. We have to play with some parts of this and a few parts of what breaks out over us in this media world, we have to make sure we are not on the shock. I was really amazed by the opportunity to use Ableton Live, the software where you can make loops and you can create new loops and connect them with each other and I was wondering how it looks like in the digital technology to use it on live on stage and so we made samples, it was six people on stage, two musicians and a whole technology on the theater around it and we made samples from music, from language recorded live, from gestures and also on theater texts by, well, from Chekhov to a call to a TV series and it's, it was from culture of the last 2000 years and we picked them apart and we have the meeting in the theater play so we can look at this and how it looked like. It's not behind us, it's in front of us, we are not being dismissed from the paradise with a flamed sword but we have to, but we have to gain it with our flamed hearts. This doesn't bring us death, but, but the life, so this is what it looked like. Two things I want to tell you that were really important for me, we had problems because we, we used text pieces of Beckett, of Brecht and Chekhov and we said, well, there's still copyrights on this and we can't play the whole play so it was the first time when I realized we are in a digital age but in a debate that's not yet arrived at theater, the theater, they have this, the holy grail of the genius that wrote texts and the players on stage and the people in the audience can just nod basically and there was this debate what's originality and who belongs, who belongs it to and we made this evening and we achieved it by putting in all the quotes on the back of the stage and this was the quotation right and not copyright infringement so this was basically the first moment where I worked together with the KS Computer Club because I thought there might be some net politics, there are people who take care of this for a longer time than me and it might be really interesting to have this debate with them and this was put into this piece where I was asking myself what am I as an individual person, am I really individual or just a copy of a copy of a copy, you couldn't only see it in the costumes but this was also carried by the pictures where people were walking down steps and stairs and we usually recorded this and we set it in contrast to the live image so you can actually recheck everything and you can also create samples of it and you can actually see how fast people get sick of it and how fast it gets boring and then people start walking in a different way something else I want to say about this because this is also something that leads us to the hackers it was like we had a door and that had to open and in theaters there's technicians who are standing with a rope and they open and close the door but we wanted to the sound guys to make a sound as soon as the door opens and close and in the third place there was also as soon as the door opened lights should go on and off in the normal theater you usually have someone sitting below stage managing basically and that person gives signs and for example to open the door to to flash sounds and lights and all these people do their stuff but well and in the back you know you still have like closing the door making sounds again and it was 800 times opening and closing a door it was really really a lot and all the colleagues on the ropes they were fed up with it and we had the idea to to have a hack how to get this working and couldn't we just do do some kind of pneumatic system to open the door and to trigger all the same things at the same time and MIDI sounds to light and sound so this was basically the first technical hack we had at the theater in Dortmund and it got even worse so I come to the next work and this is the borderline procession the borderline procession and so the borderline procession developed in 2015 when we were thinking about Europe I looked at train of hopes that were coming to Dortmund and all the dead people in the Mediterranean Sea and I asked why are we debating from the German perspective and we're always kind of talking from the German perspective because we don't know a different way from her sometimes maybe from a European perspective but it would be great if we could like with a drone use different points of you and look at the European fences and understand the different points of you and basically just travel around the borderlines and then I remembered there's a story where Joshua for the very battle of Jericho basically walked around seven days and there were trumpets and on the seventh day the walls broke down and everything became one suddenly it wasn't one or the other instead it became one thing there was a synthesis maybe we should also think like that that here and now we basically combine here and now so that in the end we have one big thing so this was kind of my fantasy and maybe we have to build a stage like this that is composed of two parts here and there and in the center there's a wall and here you can see one part which is basically a house with a number of rooms and a garage and on the top you see sort of the other side which is on protectors there's cars and you can see the the apartment from outside there's a garden where you can be careful that no one enters and there's a bus stop and this is how we have a picture of two worlds from inside and outside from warm and cold and in the center there's a huge wall and the audience was able to sit on two sides either on this side or on the other side but a procession similar to Jericho basically drove around this and there was a camera dolly and they drove around and around for three and a half hours and showed us whatever we couldn't see or like the video of something we couldn't see or the video of what we could see and we'll show you what was seen there a little louder in the center of the road for our life I found myself in a dark forest now it's me coming now you're coming the borderline procession so what you saw were come place situations of a mom sending her kid to school a couple that lay down in bed and got up again but we also saw a woman dying over a long time and a family saying goodbye a couple falling in love a crying child warriors coming home we saw things that we see when we pass the street with open eyes but we only saw snippets what could happen to them where is he coming from weird where is he going and through sampling texts and different music like a DJ we tried to show a panorama of the world in three stations the station the world as it is right now in its in its contradictions we showed the crisis where things are falling together where we can't work together anymore and lastly the synthesis working together breaking down the walls this way of telling a story it became much more clear to us that this way of telling a story is very very interesting and it can be a very exciting future avenue for theater that we don't necessarily have this linear normal procession but instead the intendant has this builds up something and you as the audience can be the author of your own story you're recounting what you see in on the stage there's 23 and no one in the audience even even I as a register who was running around all the time and trying to do the live stuff we didn't have the chance of seeing everything like we can't see everything on the world but instead of reacting with stress on it and against the shock of oh my god there might be new stuff instead of that we we decide okay I'm telling my own story and this is just a try at telling the world and it will never be the whole world will only ever be a trial at studying so that was trying out the borderline procession and the audience really liked that this free choice of perspective what I look at the which which part and we wanted to document that and we soon realized that if we start filming that and cut it then we will just do what we don't want to do because then we will tell the story and not you so that's how it came to the connection with the with the ccc okay so what we saw that we kind of need someone because we still we as a theater we still have this tendency to do small things like this example with pressing the buttons and opening the doors is so if we could do this automatically that would be great there's some sort of technical issue which we're hoping to resolve now is it better now so how can we conserve this and record this evening and I'll show you a video that will show in the video right now but I still continue talking there's still an audio problem sorry about that so using a laser scanner we basically did a print out or like a VR experience and it wasn't only the borderline experience but also with the next performance that was about remembering and death so this way we don't only record borderline but instead we would do something completely different the actors texts we use the actors text and we also use the connect camera to scan the actors so this so you can't see it here in the trailer but at the later point the actors were actually in there and together with the cyber we did this VR together and we had this digital variant of our experience and it's crazy when you scan this entire room then suddenly you can enter it again even though it's not there at all so we made a lot of pictures that were all kind of calculated on there and we cooperated with the cyber robbers but they weren't able to work with us for the longest time so now we still have this data and we're hoping that in the future we can do something more with it because it's been lying dormant unused for a while and it's really really an amazing data set so if you want to play a round of that then send us an email I would love to hear from you but exactly this is our search how does digital theater happen and how do we do it and we don't claim to know how to do it their permanent trials trial and error and playing with the content and with the tools of our current age one subject that that I've been thinking a lot about was this permanent self optimization and the question of psych psychic diseases Sarah Kane who's a very popular author who a community suicide some years ago and she wrote she wrote a piece called 48 psychosis and tells the story about the the therapy she goes through them the drugs she she has to take and in public speech we say it's a it's a disease of the soul and we are measuring everything about our bodies but we don't find that soul so that's how I come to find Lucas and said what about trying to to see the actors on the stage not only bodily but also what exactly they they produce at as data during what they what they do on stage so in the beginning when I came to see it that was crash test Neustadt I didn't really do that before because I'm a software engineer and doing something completely different so then theater came to chaos trap and then we started that cooperation and that was the situation where I got started on theater the first real piece was psychosis and now we'll see the trailer of that 20 volume up a bit to build up a connection to others to be together in formative way being loved nice sound so what we actually did was having this thesis how you can use the biometric data to put this in one piece and so I sat down and started to look what you can actually do with it there was some Arduino based technology that was put into the costume we could measure the heartbeat heart rate the breath muscle muscle contractions and all these these things were shown on the stage recorded it was put into a computer and I managed everything and in the end I bought something to visualize all this data and to put it on the screen Mario did that and we also put this into the sound and made sounds of it and effects it was it was controlled by Ableton basically and this was the technology behind it it was a lot of experimenting as it's usually is and we use this to put this back usually everything I do at the theater I put it on github so if you if you want to build something like this you can do that but that was the story behind this the great thing and the important thing on about theater and the digital age is that it became it's not like the holy author that manages everything or the holy player but it's the whole team the players on stage the actors the technicians light sound everyone works together as a team to make theater and you can see this in this play there's the musician on stage the video or the dramatic people you can put this on on the screen and you mix it live it's a it's a kind of a band behind it that works together with the band leaders with the actors that are in this cube that's semi-transparent it's stuff is projected on them and they make a session together and I don't know if it's one or two years ago we actually we nearly made it to to the ccc with this play but we didn't find a room unfortunately so let's come to the last piece we want to show you this is the most current production it was it premiered in summer the parallel world when we talk about narration today and how we have to think how stories work out isn't it absurd that everywhere in this world for many hundred years hamlet is played and people say well this is the hamlet piece to be or not to be this everything happening at the same time in different places at the same time we usually talk about bodies on stage and this is reality but there's actually actual these virtual possibilities somewhere else somewhere else other people are standing on stage and it's a theater really only just some kind of box while you sit and look into it or as a theater that could could just expand so we asked the Berlin ensemble if they want to work together with us and have this piece together which we connect on the internet we had seven seven actors from Dortmund and seven actors from Berlin we put them together each team had two camera people and two mixers and we played we we built the same stage set up twice and we told a story about parallel worlds about quantum physics and we tried to build a theater in the digital age and can we play theater with people without sharing the same room and maybe it's not right what I said in the beginning that theater is the place where place and time just disappears maybe we just have to think bigger and if it's life it can be live here or in Berlin or wherever we can show you what it looks like so big world ocean sorry that's really embarrassing now so you can actually see four pictures there it is the world has been traveled it was measured was looked on on the side so where the people come from the Berlin ensemble and in the Dortmund theater and they look at each other this this is what the stage looked like on the right you can see Berlin on the left is Dortmund so you can't far from the earth when they open the gates separated stuff oceans oceans connected yeah sorry there is no distance synchro and this story can't close because the locks close no more they will not close they will never close again yes maybe in terms of explanation about the content we did basically tell a story but the story was only meant as a foundation to have a debate we have a figure Fred who's born who learns how to talk who falls in love who moves away who gets married who goes into a senior citizen center and then he or she dies and these seven stations the Berlin ensemble tells in the story that in the order that I told you but at the same time the Dortmund ensemble tells the story from the end so Fred dies first then he he's in a senior citizen home and so on so we see two ensembles playing at the same time on the screen birth and death at the same time and then learning to walk not being able to walk anymore and in the last scene in the middle in the center scene the wedding we see and in the wedding the the actors are playing with each other they really talk to each other but now how does it work so the task was that video and tone would be sent over really life in real time so we used some material and we basically had to kind of adapt it to this use we had two video streams from Dortmund to Berlin and from Berlin to Dortmund 64 channels of audio video works through Tika and audio via Dante because usually the these the technology is not meant for this kind of thing so they don't really like sending it out so we had to kind of build our own little thing and we used our own fiber 10 gigabit 420 kilometers and a lot of switches in between and obviously we spent a lot of nights working on that and in the end we actually had 4.7 milliseconds latency and we managed to have this communication so it's very important that this works in the in the early evening already because all the communication before the theater actually happens is all through this communication channel through this fiber so many many hours before the evening starts it's very very important that it already works and it was very interesting for us that it actually works it's not like Skype where you talk and maybe a second afterwards you get the answer but instead it's a layer to transport that way you can see how it actually works and this is a video and here they're actually singing together and it actually works that they sing in parallel the latency between voice and picture is in house actually but in principle talking and singing was possible maybe we can turn the volume on so now there's two people talking in a chronic way and people have been saying that this is basically Skype but the latency that we have there you can't get with Skype this coreacle talking Luca's work done this for weeks dismissive of his work because he worked for it on week for on it for weeks and this is actually faster than phoning and it's interesting when you sort of when you're on stage and you phone someone and at the same time our fiber still transmits the audio the fiber is a lot faster so the way we built this up is very clear we have two stages basically and you can have four little screens or four big screens and two camera man from Dortmund on the left side at the top you can see that and on the what happens in Dortmund is on the left Berlin is on the right there's a little bit of confusion who's the where at this point so I basically traveled back and forth between Berlin and Dortmund and you see the same stage and I basically gave directions with my microphone in Dortmund and Berlin so I saw them I heard them and they heard me and at one point I really didn't really know where I was anymore I was lost in time and space I didn't know where I was somewhere between Berlin and Dortmund I assumed inside skitter but which is a town in the center basically but the most interesting thing is that for actors now acting is a great profession that is related to empathy and power and basically daring to open up to other people and we thought are we actually losing some of this special profession when we can't touch each other anymore as actors and we made sure that we could hear each other very well during between Berlin and Dortmund and that we had could have screens and see what my colleagues did in Berlin or in Dortmund so we could actually play together we could act together but you had to be more careful we have to think of each other we have to be more sensitive to each other because they're not right next to us and we still want to do our together so this was one of the interesting things that came out of it and we thought that this distance might actually require a little more of thinking of each other a little more carefulness so these were four examples of what we did we could talk a lot more about what we did during the last nine years but we're thinking of how can you basically do theater in the digital age but our problem is that all of these projects were a lot a lot of work in preparation and in normal theater that doesn't really work and normal theater doesn't have the time to do that we can't do we can't prepare seven weeks and that usually we only have seven weeks for basically knowing what we want to do and then after seven weeks we actually start and this doesn't work for these kind of technically complicated issues so well in the hacker space you're basically soldering stuff and trying out stuff and you take it to to the rehearsals and I really want to have room in Germany where we can just experiment for for theater and the digital age and also to research for this and with this we ask a lot of people and it's true on the first on the first of January we will open a special special place for this the academy of digitalization and theater will slowly start and you can show us the next one okay it's supposed to be a laboratory for research per year we want to have 20 people who get scholarship somewhere between digitalization and and performing arts and in March we will just show all the all the formalities for it and the first 10 scholars should be there in summer to be there for five months around to to work on stuff and to try out stuff and to experiment not to have a financial pressure and this is the one important point the scholarship program we want to offer and we also offer a qualification program with a special institution in German and we want to to work with people from light and sound from from stuff how to how to work with the digitalization options with our craft and to optimize it to make it more present we want to offer stuff there on a regular basis for people on the theater and maybe also for other people who are interested in this and the third thing is it's a training and the study area as a master studies for example to have digitalization on theater media art cyber whatever and we're working on this and it might take two years but this academy will be completely running this academy you should keep it in mind in March we sent out the documents for this so if you're actually working on a project and you really want to work hack Alexa or do a stage stage play with Alexa or you want to do something with body capturing I don't know everything where you say we're working on this and we need money and we need time and we really want to do this for five months to to share ideas with others who are interested in theater just just keep keep an eye on this you can get all information in March and maybe we can see each other in September this was everything I was I wanted to say so questions thank you so this talk had everything like technology on stage that works and all the stuff that you saw on screen that was what you guys did and that wasn't just theater so thanks so much and there will be questions answers now my first question if I'm sending with that data then how big is the response email don't write it to the local address but it's because it's really big like it's about terabytes of data 25,000 pictures in raw you we could just send modified data area so there's a web application for this to look at it if you're really interested just tell us so then bring it here for the next time so thank you so much for that great intro in our work and she alluded that you're working more as a team in the theater so I'm interested how you how you transform theater not only to the outside but also in the inside so in what direction and how well theater has to change it's permanently changing it's basically a really weird growing construction and we have to take care for the digital age and to change for this we're dependent on each other and I think the idea of just having the actors on stage these are the artists and maybe the director and the author and this was everything well maybe a stage and costumes but there's the workers and I think this model doesn't work anymore we need to have a theater that is a big team where you have respect for each other and what you can learn from each other that's both both the artists on stage except that the technician that needs this time but you also need the technician to know okay well it's not possible to use time tracking in this case because well if you want to have the position as an artist there's a lot to do in theater so this is a problem that artists have different different employment models than the technicians for example you have to put all this together and we might use the academic academy for this to to try out how the theater of the future can look like and what the work agreements should be to be more current and something really has to change and we're working on it. So my question is on the peace parallel worlds and you said so theater is an empathic way of acting between each other but you said that you were the only connection point but where the other points of connection the first five weeks we spent time in Berlin on one stage and then we went to our own houses it was really important not to say okay there's just two houses playing together but it's two ensembles connecting and it was really important to have all these rehearsals I'm sorry for the audio and because we were all connected with with each other I was the one who had the chance to to be there on a bodily basis because I traveled there in the last three weeks the Dortmund people were just working with the Dortmund people and Berlin with Berlin but in a bodily basis but each morning we sat in front of each other and we put the camera on stage and had had had the screen behind us and we could see Dortmund in Berlin and the other way around and we just discussed and debated on how to make scenes better and I think we were really close to each other but not on the bodily basis so I'd also like to say thank you for the talk I'm really close to technology and for 20 years now I've been doing theater and improvisation theater and that's where my question is how can you transform these ideas on the improvisation theater yeah you can really do that what's really nice about the golden age and also at the borderline procession these are things that are happening live you plan on something some patterns but what's actually happening in the evening no one really knows it's a lot of improvisation and in both pieces I have a headset and I'm connected to Mario and with the musicians and someone standing at the sample machines hey come let's let's do this well I can give you this one and it's really live jamming and and I think with this digital play digital toys and live on stage we are close to improvisation basically thank you so we have only a little time so you can ask questions to the three on the personal basis they're staying for the whole time maybe we have two short last questions I'm trying to be quick I want to get back at the question of social and financial collaboration between the the classic theater people and the technicians because there are some studies programs that are trying to bring these two together and I do know some of them personally who are on a technical studies and then they wanted to go into the theater and and said oh that works in the with the hierarchy but there was a lot of disrepair and a hierarchy does play a big role and so what are your concrete modes of of transformation do you have concrete ideas for that how you can enable that collaboration on the social level well we have to be in contact with each other we have to learn from each other and what I learned from these two guys is that it's amazing you know they actually learn something from me I guess and this is basically what's happening in the whole theater we have to be interested in each other and this climate of respect and curiosity and to to have lower details we're close to each other and we have to see that the financial thing is is honest and right but if you know so many people who are longing for this theaters are longing for people who are here and just just capture our world and make it make it future possible and we have the problem that there's just too few people doing this German theaters need hackers nerds that's a good keyword may I no sorry we are just running out of time