A fragmentary approach to  Carl Maria von Weber’s opera and its thematic contents. The four 15-minute parts do not follow any chronology or linear narrative. They do not claim to tell the plot of the opera. It is focused on chosen highlights and creates new worlds for the visitors to discover themselves. One of the episodes, for example, contains an encounter with Kaspar or follows Ännchen through a labyrinth, or you visit Agath in a virtual forest and roam through a large Max mountain range.

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Concept & realisation: CyberRäuber
Composition & Sound design: Micha Kaplan
Dramaturg: Deborah Maier
Production manager: Eva-Karen Tittmann

Supported by the Fonds Doppelpass of the

Last year’s winner of the VRHAMMY Award, Dani Ploeger, returns to VRHAM! with his latest project. Last December, the artist traveled to the fortified border fencethat Hungary had raised along its southern border with Serbia to keep out migrants and asylum seekers. The barbed-wire is capable of delivering electric shocks and is equipped with heat sensors, cameras and loudspeakers that shout inhospitable messages in several languages. Once at the border fence, Ploeger cut off and ran away with a piece of razor wire from the border fence. This was a daring action: damaging the border fence is a criminal offence under Hungarian law. His SMART FENCE project uses old and new media, from celluloid film to augmented reality, to explore the way we delegate our responsibility towards asylum-seekers to these tech-enhanced structures. Along the way, the artist also attempts to deconstruct the techno-ideologies that are often inscribed in these technologies of control and exclusion.

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Director: Dani Ploeger

A dance show based on Embodied Virtual Reality experiences, in order to materialize the feeling of displacement. Eve makes possible the meeting between the virtual and the real: in this ritual, the audience “enter” the body of Eve and go through a story. Eve is like a Pachamama, the goddess venerated as the mother of the earth and time in Incan mythology, a creative self-sufficiency power maintaining life around the four cosmological principles of water, earth, sun and moon.

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Choreography and performance: Margherita Bergamo (Telma Ha)
Interaction Design, VR Developer & Co-creator: Daniel González (Omnipresenz)
Scriptwriter & Associate Producer: Mark Lee
Associate Producer: Lucia Candelpergher
Music Composer & Sound Designer: Dale Nichols
Visual Artist: Kirstin Huber
Costume Designer: Paloma Bomé
Video Capture: Émilie Léveillé
Production & Distribution: Compagnie Voix & Omnipresenz

With the support of: BeAnother Lab, Le Réservoir Ville de Saint Marcel, Département de Saône-et-Loire, École de Danse Contemporaine de Montréal, Oculus VR

12, 13 und 14 June 2019
for 5 participants aged 6 and older
Duration: ca. 30 minutes

Fugue VR is a MR experience by VR expert and member of this year’s VRHAM! jury, Michel Reilhac, that explores the vertigo intrinsic in Yoann Bourgeois’ work and challenges our relation to reality. Don your VR headset and join a spacecraft lost in the immensity of interstellar travel. The crew members choose someone who will use dance as a mean to break the curse that is holding down the craft. Your mission: accompany the dancer in the quest for salvation.

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Director: Michel Reilhac
Choreography: Yoann Bourgeois

Supported by Creative Europe Desk Hamburg.

7, 8, 9 and 10 June 2019
for 2 participants
Duration: ca. 45 minutes
Language: German

A glance, a fleeting moment was all it took to decide the fate of two lovers, their families and an entire city – the meeting of Romeo and Juliet. In what is possibly the best-known love story of all times, two worlds collide when the children of rivalling families fall in love. Juliet and Romeo meet for the first time at a masquerade ball hosted by the Capulets – an intoxicating evening which evolves into a tragic battlefield of emotions. Does the love between Romeo and Juliet thrive on its impossibility? Does their unquenchable desire for freedom lead them astray? Must their pursuit of self-determination lead to violence?

The artists’ group CyberRäuber creates projects that combine theatre and virtual reality (VR). The new medium offers fascinating possibilities for encounter with the great theatre classics. Following their 2017 production «The Ghost-Seer», the Berlin-based group now invites audiences at the Kunstfest Weimar to explore Shakespeare’s tragic love story in all of its many facets and from different perspectives. Equipped with VR glasses, the viewers of «Meet Juliet, Meet Romeo» assume the role of guests at a masquerade ball. Before their eyes and by simply being there, they witness the romantic encounter and the start of an irreversible tragedy.

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Concept: Björn Lengers & Marcel Karnapke (CyberRäuber)
Director: Branko Janack
Music: Max Nübling
Visual Consulting: Cleo Niemeyer
Production: CyberRäuber, Kunstfest Weimar
Cast: Bastian Heidenreich, Julius Kuhn, Lutz Salzmann, Isabel Tetzner, Dascha Trautwein

Kindly supported by NATIONALE PERFORMANCE NETZ Gastspielförderung Theater, supported by the Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, and the  Kultur- und Kunstministerien der Länder.

13, 14 and 15 June 2019
for 30 participants
Duration: ca. 30 minutes

Three musicians, three sessions, three evenings. We invite three musicians to improvise to the visuals of two different Virtual Reality experiences without having seen them ever before.

Session 1: Be there when this new piece of music is evolving and mixing with the visuals of the VR artists.

Session 2: Not too much into experiments? Come and see the second session – same experiences, same musicians and hence a little more of a clue what is coming up.

Session 3: Still too fancy? Then the third session is for you – the team is already familiar with the visuals and you can enjoy a session that has already developed over the course of the evening.

The next evening we start all over again and are happy to have a new band as guests. The VR experiences will be the same on all three evenings, but line-up of the musicians will change.

You wonder what you are going to see?

> CONSCIOUS EXISTENCE

> AQUAPHOBIA

Playing on 13 June
Achim Seifert & Roland Cabezas

Playing on 14 June
Christophe Schweizer & Chris Lüers

Playing on 15 June
David Grabowski

7, 8, 9 and 10 June 2019
for 25 participants
Duration: ca. 30 minutes

Miro Shot is touring a live immersive VR concert that allows their audience to experience the ‘world’ of the music itself. In these shows, the audience enters a room filled with projection mapping, digital art, VR headsets, and a stage. The audience is immersed in an audiovisual journey with haptics, custom scents, and dreamscape visuals. CONTENT looks at how our notion of reality has changed and fractured as technology becomes more and more prevalent. The signs are clear that music should no longer be presented in just one medium, one sense, and in one place.

The show’s visuals are designed in part by the Miro Shot Collective, the open source part of the band that features the work of multidisciplinary creatives. Anyone can join. Miro Shot is paving the way for accessibility and innovation in live performance with immersive technology. As writer William Gibson says, “The future is already here- it’s just not very evenly distributed,” but this is all about to change.

Music and performance: Miro Shot
Voice over: Erik Todd Dellums

VRHAM! goes Rathausmarkt. From 7 June for the whole duration of the festival you can discover Augmented Reality illustrations by Spanish artist Magoz on Hamburg’s Rathausmarkt square. Grab your smartphone, scan the QR code and bring the illustrations to life! Linked to this year’s motto DIS:SOLUTION, a new graphic piece by Magoz will appear every day, transforming the Rathausmarkt into a public exhibition space.

If you want more info on VR illustrating the City feat. Magoz or need help spotting the AR illustrations: for the duration of the festival you can find our VRHAM! Guides on Rathausmarkt between 12 and 2 pm.

Kindly supported by Hamburg Marketing and headraft

In Virtual Reality, sound plays a decisive role for an emotional and immersive experience. But how are virtual sound worlds created and what sets them apart from traditional formats such as cinema? Daniel Deboy (Co-founder of DELTA Soundworks, Kultur- und Kreativpiloten 2016) gives an insight into sound and music design for VR productions of various kinds.

This keynote is kindly supported by Initiative Kultur- und Kreativpiloten Deutschland 2019

Speaker

Daniel Deboy (Co-founder of DELTA Soundworks, Kultur- und Kreativpiloten 2016)

Virtual Reality enables a change of perspective: How can the use of Virtual and Augmented Reality in artistic non-fictional works contribute to a different access to crises, terror and fears? Documentary formats in Virtual or Augmented Reality create an immediacy beyond fiction which makes events almost tangible – and allow us to get a feel for what it can mean to spend everyday life in fear and terror.

We talk to Dani Ploeger (SMART FENCE) and Ricarda Saleh (PARIS TERROR) about their artistic approach to political events, about what is the driving force behind their projects and how immersive media such as Augmented and Virtual Reality offer new possibilities.

Speakers

Dani Ploeger (SMART FENCE)

Ricarda Saleh (Director PARIS TERROR: DIE GEISELN VOM HYPER CACHER)

Presentation

Melanie Stein