Hybridity and mixed realities are at the heart of this year’s TEMPS D’IMAGES festival edition: artistic-choreographic works at the intersection of dance and technology that examine the intensive permeation of real and virtual worlds. The physical and the digital coalesce to form augmented realities, hybrid worlds. The invited stage productions and installations also deal with gaming as they design new, exciting concepts of physicalness between biology and digital technology, simultaneously enabling a new, thrilling, ‘phygital’ experience of bodily sensation: We have long been experiencing our reality as phygital – meaning physically as well as digitally, at the same time. This marketing coinage describes the fusion of both on- as well as offline in our time that is characterised by digitisation and artificial intelligence, which has recently been made productive for the arts in Kunstforum magazine #290: Mixed Realities: “So, let’s get phygital!”, it proclaims. The current TEMPS D’IMAGES edition will include the audience in the hybrid worlds each time; spectators become participants or even actors.
One further aspect that marks the festival in 20024 is its alignment towards research and works-in-progress. At the moment, tanzhaus nrw is part of the three-year EU project Movement, Digital Intelligence and Interactive Audience (MODINA). Dance and media artists conduct explorations into artificial intelligence (AI) and the interaction with an audience during MODINA. Christine Bonansea & Chris Ziegler are the first MODINA residency artists at tanzhaus nrw. As part of TEMPS D’IMAGES, they provide insight into their experimental work process with motion capture suits and the performative confrontation of a dancer with her avatar.
