Guest Speakers: Paula Strunden, Lundahl & Seitl
Moderation: Norbert Pape 

The symposium will focus on mixed reality in live performative art on stage. The title “Multiple exposure” hints towards the capacity of the technology to emphasize the multilayered nature of experience. 

VIRTUAL BLACKBOX – SYMPOSIUM aims to open up a discourse around this specific approach of using mixed reality as a tool to reflect on constructions of immersions and furthermore constructions of reality. In what sense and through which aspects does a cybernetic communication and co-existence of machines, bodies, materialities and ideas shape realities and form a path towards a dynamic interconnected ontology? 

HOSTS
Kiel & Meppelink, an artistic duo from Berlin and hosts of the symposium, working with live VR in the field of theater. They are specifically interested in theater as a means of deconstructing the world as a simulacrum. Their interest led to the creation of the prototype VIRTUAL BLACKBOX – THE SOFTWARE as a tool for creating mixed reality situations on stage. 2025, the software will be made available free and open source.  

Paula Strunden is an architectural designer and researcher, actively involved in exploring virtual reality (VR) and extended reality (XR). Her work often focuses on speculative room-scale installations and performative XR models. She investigates how VR can be used to create multisensory and embodied spatial experiences.

The duo Lundahl & Seitl (Stockholm) have developed a method and an art form comprising staging, choreographed movement, instructions, and immersive technologies, juxtaposed with material objects and the human ability to organize perception into a world. Their projects often blur the lines between physical and virtual realities, creating experiences that are both tangible and digital. This mixed-reality approach invites participants to question the boundaries of their perceptions and the nature of reality itself.

With his specific perspective on performative art and technology, Norbert Pape will lead the speaker’s panel and the audience discussion, attempting to thereby define a set of terms relevant to the symposium. Norbert Pape is a transdisciplinary artist working across the fields of dance, choreography and mathematics based in Berlin.  His work addresses the co-dependency of senses, abstractions and technologies in sense-making, and in particular in making space.