Linz / Hagenberg / Fristedt / Kirchdorf. The curtain was lifted on Monday (January 17) for the premiere of “Aliation” at the Linzer Landestheater and thus also for the virtual reality created by two digital arts students from FH Upper Austria Campus Hagenberg for this play about growth.
If your world is too narrow and alien, as in the case of Nicolas, the young protagonist of the play “Aliation”, then reality – and therefore also real theater – no longer offers enough space. Her only option is to escape to the Internet, to the digital world of vlogs, mobile videos and games, where the audience can participate thanks to the cooperation between the State Theater and the Faculty of Computer Science, Communication and Media at the Upper Austrian University of Applied Sciences (FH OÖ) in Hagenberg can dive.
Theatrical expansion
Nicola’s virtual world was visualized by Master of Digital Arts students Nils Galist (24) from Friedstadt and Manuel Lattner (22) from Kirchdorf an der Krems. The two upper Austrian players have developed a game called Build Your World designed specifically for the play.
“Our game should not be seen as a traditional video game with missions, objectives or opponents. It is an extension of the theater scene to digital,” the developers specify. Accordingly, the game mainly focuses on discovering the environment – from fields to meadows to the desert – and what the protagonist creates from it.
“We visualized and narrate this teenage adulthood, past and future in her life using virtual environments. Given its size, it would not have fit the real stage,” says Galiste Watner. Actors and stage assistants were also involved in the digital creation process, practicing their choreography using digital formats and also designing the play’s script accordingly.
Unfamiliar terrain
An exciting process for students of the Master of Digital Arts, for whom theater is an unfamiliar area. “Cooperating with the Landestheater was a great experience for us,” the two assert, “on one hand, because we were able to get a first-hand look at theatrical productions using our video game, and on the other because we could use our expertise to bring some analog theater to life, and thus make it More attractive to the new generation.
Galist Waltner began designing Nicholas’s virtual world last September as part of a semester project in his Master of Digital Arts program. First, they both worked together on the visual design of the worlds and the game. Towards the end of the project, Manuel Lattner took over the technical part and made sure that the puzzle was assembled as a whole, while Nils Galist continued to develop the graphic building blocks.
The collaboration between FH OÖ Campus Hagenberg and Landestheater Linz came as part of the EU project “Play On! New storytelling using immersive technologies”, as nine theaters and eight universities work together and break new ground in performance art with the help of digital technologies.
To experience online
The play “Aliation,” based on an unpublished novel by German-born author Corinna Antelmann, who has lived in Upper Austria since 2006, can still be watched online as live on various dates in January and February as part of the Landestheater’s Netzbühne . Details are in progress www.landestheater-linz.at/netzbuehne/netzbuehne-live/netzbuehne_aliation to exist.
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