PlayOn! Bulletin, Issue One, June 2022

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HOPE CONFERENCE
BRINGING THEATRE MAKERS AND TECHNOLOGISTS TOGETHER
In 2021 and 2022 PlayOn! created an innovative online conference bringing together
leading creatives and technologists exploring immersive technology and storytelling.
Sourcing speakers from all over the world audiences were able to register for free to
engage with the activities. From AR scavenger hunts to large scale installations the
work showcased also traversed artforms including opera, theatre and our favourite
subject ‘utopias’: Content is also available to stream online for free.
https://play-on.eu/creative-forums/
HOPE 2021 | RELAUNCHING THEATRES ON THE TRANSMEDIA STAGE
Still from Hope Conference 2022 Pola Weiß
HOPE 2022 | IMMERSIVE THEATRE IN EXPANDED SPACES
TWITTER THEATRE –
MOTHER HOPE AND
HER CHILDREN
co-production: Burgtheater Wien (AT),
Berliner Ensemble (DE),
Teatr Ludowy (PL) and PlayOn!
This was a performance that took
place in the imaginations of the audience.
Using the hashtag #HopeVorstellung
Hope conference attendees gathered
on twitter collectively creating the
experience of travelling to the theatre to
sitting down and watching the play. The
audience were supported and fired up
on Twitter by actors from the three coproducing
theatres as well as the other
PlayOn! companies. This was a communal
experience that enabled people to
travel (not) to Berlin and Krakow and
visit (not) a guest performance – and
all in one evening!
macro and micro movements of different
bodies. The workshop demonstrated
how a performers movement could trigger
a whole range of on-stage effects.
BERLIN@PLAY –
AN INTERACTIVE
AR-THEATRE GAME.
A joint adventure by Akademie
für Theater und Digitalität (DE),
Landesbühnen Sachsen (DE),
Platypus Theatre Berlin (DE)
Berlin@Play is an AR theatre game that
takes place in urban space. It asks the
questions: What is the city around me?
What role do I play in it? The staging
of the piece in public space with digital
technology aims to reinterpret each
place the audience encounter, turning
the spectators into players and putting
them in Kafkaesque situations.
SEKLAKI
HANDS ON WORKSHOP
Claudius Lazzeroni,
professor for Interface Design at
Folkwang University Essen (DE)
Audience interact with their environment
using a tablet exploring a narrative
based on Kafka’s novel “The Castle”, the
audience are told stories, have to find
places, evaluate them and make their
Berlin @ play
own decisions.
In his workshop, Claudius presented
Watch the trailer.
SEKLAKI, a system of different sensor
Through AR, they experience a digitally
watch?v=PhYU_e1nPS4
and tracking possibilities adapted for
staged space. The beauty of this project
an easy use on stage with little techno-
is the potential for it to be played in
You can play the game in Berlin in
logical knowhow. The goal is an easy
other cities, using technology to bring
summer 2022
control of sound, light and visuals with
the storytelling into the urban space.
https://games.platypus-theater.de
Continued from page 3
CHILD OF NOW - Imagining the next century
through the life of a child born today
Child of Now Prototype
recording moving holograms and audio
experience to immerse visitors within
messages addressing the future. We
the archive. In the coming years we will
have just finished the first prototype of
develop the Gathering to collect 14,400
Laila Finnish National Opera
‘Gathering’ at Arts Centre Melbourne.
holographic and audio portraits.
Once we have collected 1000s of
holograms we are ready to perform
The embryonic, almost impossibly large
Laila Finnish National Opera
AI AS A STORYTELLING
CO-CREATOR
Guy Gadney (UK)
Guy is co-founder and CEO of the
ground-breaking storytelling platform
charisma.ai, a toolkit for creating
interactive stories with believable virtual
characters. How can artificial intelligence
become the co-creator of new storytelling
formats? Guy’s technology
allows characters and audiences
to communicate in dynamic and
compelling ways.
https://charisma.ai
MAÑANALAND: AN
AR STORYTELLING
SCAVENGER HUNT.
Lorne Svarc (The TANK NYC, USA)
Mañanaland is an interactive transmedia
piece that explores a utopian alternate
universe where the social and political
conflicts of today are a thing of the past.
The story is experienced in a hybrid virtual-physical
world through a virtual news
network and a series of AR hunts across
three of the five boroughs of New York.
The piece made good use of the existing
AR game app Scavengar for theatrical
storytelling. Seeing new applications for
existing technologies was particularly
interesting with this project.
https://thetanknyc.org/
mananaland
REIMAGINING
DIGITAL STAGES
Annastina Haaparsaari (FI)
As project manager of Opera Beyond
Annastina presented a unique
and ambitious project for the Finnish
National Opera and Ballet, based on
their recent production Laila, an immersive,
interactive installation, which won
the 2020 FEDORA Digital Prize. By combining
arts and technology without prejudice
or preconceptions, Opera Beyond
builds an ecosystem of independent
actors that gives rise to unusual combinations.
The Laila installation changes
and moulds its music and visuals when
audiences interact with the piece. “In
Laila, you are not the audience, but
one of many actors shaping reality.”
https://operabeyond.com
part two, ‘Existence’, a ten day public
performance ritual. We shuffle the holograms
into age order from 1-101 years,
and replay them 1 minute at a time over
10 days on top of Hamer Hall, the city's
largest stage. Each day this collective
portrait ages by a decade. After 10 days
the Child of Now dies in a life affirming
vigil with fireworks and festivities.
It is in this way that the project embodies
the art of speculative thinking
– generating a portrait of the current
population engaged in the act of
imagining the next century. Our utopian
aim is to create a portrait that
reflects the diversity of current and
future Naarm, Melbourne. It is therefore
critical to consider who contributes to
the archive of portraits to ensure the
project captures the diversity of the
current population and also reflects our
estimation of the future population.
scale, public art project Child of Now will
be many things: a sculpture, an experience,
a publicly and personally owned
mass ethnography, a work of performance
art, an archive.
We have an impulse towards utopia and
a certain knowledge that only through
examining the past (the now that has
happened) can we improve the future
(the now to come). The project itself is
utopic by nature, founded on the belief
that with enough collaborators the near
impossible can be performed.
This is in the true tradition of utopia
as Thomas More perhaps saw it, an
impulse towards something that might
be impossible, towards a world that is
better than the one we live in, towards
an archive and an ethnography that is
decolonised, owned by its subjects and,
finally, free of the racist impulses of insti-
and pluralistic, so it could be delivered
anywhere the human species are found,
anywhere people dream, anywhere we
can imagine. We are looking for collaborators.
New cities, new populations, new
children of now.
Please get in contact if you would like
to join us on this adventure.
Find out more:
http://robertwalton.net/project/
child-of-now/
The technology required to make Child
of Now did not exist when we started
work on the project in 2017. Over the
years we have worked with our collaborators
at University of Melbourne
and Phoria to create a holographic
portraiture system, 3D models of 10,000
years of past and future life along our
tutional collecting.
We desire to create a new type of art,
knowing it might be impossible and
knowing we might change the discourse
if we can indeed achieve our aims. In
this way we are defining the artistic
impulse as a striving towards a place
that does not exist, knowing perhaps,
that it’s better than here. Child of Now
FINAL THOUGHTS AND HOPES
HOPE 2021 and 2022 were attended by over 1550 people taking part in workshops,
talks and socialising in our online networking bar. What began as a need to go online
out of necessity due to the pandemic became an opportunity to engage with theatre
makers, technologists and creatives all over the world.
Perhaps there is scope for a Hope Conference 2023? Watch this space.
city’s river, interactive systems and a VR
was born in Melbourne but it is myriad