Anan Fries
Phygital Speculation and Tender Worldbuilding
Anan Fries has worked as a performer and experimental theater director for more than ten years. While they used to work with methods of worldbuilding and immersion in the mostly analogue space of the theater, they have in recent years started to incorporate digital technologies in order to explore more hybrid aesthetics.
Fries will talk about their works «Virtual Wombs», an exploration of posthuman pregnant bodies and «R.I.P. - Resurrect in Peace», a funeral for an extinct bird. Both are hybrid performances for which game engines Unity and unreal became essential collaborators and conspirators. And both works use hardware such as Virtual Reality headsets and motion tracking devices as interfaces between physical and digital reality and between the audience and the performance.
In their masterclass, Anan Fries will give insight into their artistic process, their collaborative practice and their rehearsal methods. And they will discuss some of the questions that drive their artistic research: What aesthetic potential lies in the co-presence of the physical body and digital technologies? What kinds of immersion emerge in phygital realities? What kinds of worlds can be built and what kinds of narratives can be explored with new technologies and within hybrid formats? How can we make posthuman and postanthropocentric perspectives perceivable?
