We are gifted every moment with life’s most precious achievement: A conscious mind, enabling us to sense and hold within, the universe’s boundless beauty – a source of infinite inspiration that fuels our inner space. Being aware of and grateful for the invaluable fortune of a conscious existence is vital for a life in harmony and enables us to use our precious gift within to sense that beauty in every little thing.

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Idea, director, visuals, sound design, music: Marc Zimmermann
Voice over: Helen Borkert
Producer: Felix Fahle
Spatial sound mix: Daniel Deboy
Voice over coordinator: Ana Monte

Germany, 2018

A meditative immersive media experience in a hand-drawn landscape of ancient bristlecone pine trees, sculpted organic matter, and transmuted earthy-electro sounds; get lost in an interactive sacred space. Following a trail of strange plants to the center of a mushroom ring, the viewer is transported into the forest. A timed, music scored, meditative experience begins as the user glides through the virtual space by swinging their arms with touch controllers as if walking. Viewers can move freely in and out of the sculptures and explore spatialized musical elements as they are gently guided through four abstract scenes.

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Design and Animation: Kelsey Boncato
Music and Technical Development: Daniel Oldham
Interactive Designer: Bryan Zhang
Lead Cellist: Yoshika Masuda
Lead Vocalist: Madison Stoddard

USA, 2019

An invocation of the languages that have gone extinct and an incantation of those that are endangered. In collaboration with VR pioneer Nonny de la Peña and Emblematic Group, Herzog has created an immersive VR oratorio in three parts. Each part will be comprised of its own standalone VR experience and embody three distinct expressions that viscerally answer the question of how to tell an extinction whose form is silence.

With the support of the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at SOAS University of London, The Smithsonian, The Rosetta Project and over a dozen other world archives and the generous help of The Simons Foundation, Herzog and her team created a spatialized sound composition from the world’s greatest linguistic archives.

How can one address an extinction the form of which is silence?—Making what has gone silent alive and present to us. Binaural or 8.1 (octophonic) sound projection is perceived by the human ear as distinct and genuine 360 degree immersive soundscape. Such immersive sound environments prompt the brain to perceive these voices as “present.” Created using the Unreal game engine, each language in the experience is anchored within the 3D space to a beacon of light that represents the geographical location on the globe where that language originated from.

Animation and imagery in LAST WHISPERSis precise and abstract at the same time. The locations of the languages, marked with pulsing dots, are GPS tied on the contours of the continents and countries. Yet the real topography of the globe is substituted by the “digital quilt blanket sewn” from satellite photographs of catastrophic climate events reflecting one of the reasons for human migration and dislocation, including a linguistic one.

The trajectory of these vanishing voices begins far away, like a distant echo. This chorus comes closer and closer and then envelops the visitor. The “others” become familiar and real until the visitor falls into breathing with them at the last exhale.

It is the first VR of it’s kind that transports audiences into a virtual landscape composed of the fabric of vanishing voices accompanied by original animation that poetically links image and sound. LAST WHISPERS is co-presented by UNESCO, who, along with the UN General assembly, have declared 2019 The Year of Indigenous Languages. The 360 version of Last Whispers was shown at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington DC to 500 people in a synced screening at the Terrace Theater which was presented by the Smithsonian.

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Director: Lena Herzog
Producer: Nonny de la Peña
Technical Director: Jonathan Yomayuza
Executive Producers: Meghan McWilliams, Cedric Gamelin

USA, 2018/2019

An immersive, verbatim 360° documentary about the Canadian immigration detention system. The artwork employs the practice of Verbatim Theatre and techniques and technologies of 360° Cinema to present the events surrounding the death in 2013 of migrant Lucia Vega Jimenez while in detention with the Canada Border Services Agency. The main objective of the project was to question what is visible in the Canadian migrant detention system by looking at its out-of-sight bodies. Research started with an examination of the Forensic Architecture collective and obtaining materials that would articulate Lucia’s story.
Videos available online demonstrated the architecture of detention center, which served as the initial core evidence representing the constraints that detained migrants face. Reading the coroner’s inquest transcriptions allowed the many traces left behind in Lucia’s case to appear and build the story. The forensic gaze of 360° film and verbatim theatre combined are the artistic substrate of a digital immersive experience of enactment that merges theoretical considerations of networks, assemblies, and appearingness with the lived experience of Lucia.

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Director: Fusun Uzun

Canada, 2017

A unique combination of theatre and Virtual Reality. Schauspiel Dortmund and CyberRäuber create an immersive, interactive virtual space based on the production “Die Borderline Prozession” by Kay Voges.
Whereas the three-hour play aims at overwhelming the audience with the concurrency of inconcurrent events, by employing acting, setting, text, and music, this VR experience is a tale of recollection and transience: walls and textures are in an advancing state of decay. In the background there is music and text, videos of scenes that might have taken place in these rooms, scenes from the theatre production showing life in all its range in contrast to the transience of the virtual world.
Designed for the virtual reality, “The Memories of Borderline” establishes a new hybrid art form: the connection of fine arts and media arts, gaming and performing arts. It explores the possibilities of theatre in the context of new technology and paves the way for novel narratives: the users become their own narrators.

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Director: Kay Voges & CyberRäuber

Germany, 2017