Verrrat der Bilder (Betrayal of images) – Augmented Reality

Among all the digital terms, "augmented reality" sounds particularly enticing. What is meant is an augmented reality. Imagine sitting in a theater with a pair of glasses on your nose, such as those currently being developed by Microsoft as "HoloLens," to view both the real stage and - in your mind's eye, so to speak - additional information. You would see the real dancer through the glasses and, for example, his or her name superimposed. The Berlin company Nico and the Navigators is now providing the audience with 25 such pairs of Magic Leap glasses, thanks to their technology-enthusiastic stage designer Oliver Proske, but above all thanks to funding from the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Through several playful preliminary courses under the title "Betrayal of Images" - it's once again about "Bauhaus 100" - a real gymnast lets herself be shot at with virtual building blocks. One may also spray her with a virtual spray can and leave three-dimensional stains. Kid's stuff. Great, on the other hand, is when she dances, to exercises from the school of Bauhaus teacher Gertrud Grunow (tanz 6/19), with wiry 3D costumes by Oskar Schlemmer, all of which come from the computer's resonating graphics program. When she recites Kandinsky, "The eye is the hammer", one thinks: It is the hammer, here, in Berlin's Georg Kolbe Museum, to watch a gaggle of actors who themselves never see what we experience thanks to additionally superimposed graphics, pictures, sketches. How precisely the real bodies can be fitted into a graphically designed landscape, sometimes a Bauhaus kitchen, sometimes the Israeli memorial Yad Vashem: this makes any stage set completely superfluous. Next year, it is believed, such glasses will only cost around 500 dollars. So it could be that soon small theaters with up to 200 seats will offer this visual experience as a matter of course. That's assuming that cultural foundations don't always want to see their national heritage celebrated, but also have the courage to support experiments with digital technologies without going through the Bauhaus.