Programme

“Unter Haut” (Under Skin, approx. 40 min) is a multimedia performance project about bodies and digitality in the Immersive Room and the foyer of the Dortmunder U. Four performers move in networked costumes. Sound (throat microphones), movement and projection (generated from motion data) intertwine to create a choreographic feedback system.

The “skins” costumes each connect two performers, making closeness, dependence and networked identity physically tangible – central aspects of the piece and of digital representation. Live data from throat microphones forms the basis of the soundscape in the multichannel system, while motion data drives the projection. Over the course of the piece, the two modules increasingly influence each other.

The choreography between the foyer and the Immersive Room is formed by bodies, projection and sound. The audience moves in groups between these spaces, creating a fragmented, feed-like experience.

The piece deals with digital twins, shared control and the question of what we understand as a body in the digital age. In cooperation with Witten, workshops, performances and an installation-based follow-up use at the Dortmunder U are being developed.

The project is supported by Neue Künste Ruhr, Kulturforum Witten and the Koproduktionslabor Dortmund. Rehearsals take place between the end of September and the beginning of October, with the first performances at the Dortmunder U from the end of October. The piece is conceived as site-specific and can settle into other spaces after the funded performances.

Venue: Foyer of the Dortmunder U

Spotting fake news, classifying hate speech, checking sources. Sounds easy? Two young people from the youth group of VKII Ruhrbezirk e. V. put the participants’ media literacy to the test.

An interactive quiz explores how confidently we really move through digital information spaces. Then the perspectives switch: the young people talk about how they themselves became aware of issues such as disinformation, hate speech and a critical approach to social media. Together we discuss how educational offers can reach young people – and whether adults are automatically more media-literate.

It is also about democracy: who decides which information we trust? How does digital content shape our opinions? And why are young people particularly affected by disinformation and hate speech?

A workshop by young people for young people and adults, with a quiz, discussion and a critical look at our digital everyday lives.

One sheet. One pen. Eight pages. Let’s go!

What actually is a zine? And what stories can you tell with it? At the kick-off, we Schnellhefter*innen show why we love this small, self-made medium so much: zines can be personal, political, silly, chaotic, loud or quiet. And above all, they don’t have to be perfect.

In this two-hour workshop, we fold our own little booklet from a sheet of A3 paper and support you in designing the pages with small creative prompts. It is less about thinking and more about trying things out.

We show how low-threshold making becomes possible when material and working time are deliberately limited. Drop by, grab a sheet and a pen and make a zine with us.

“Unter Haut” (Under Skin, approx. 40 min) is a multimedia performance project about bodies and digitality in the Immersive Room and the foyer of the Dortmunder U. Four performers move in networked costumes. Sound (throat microphones), movement and projection (generated from motion data) intertwine to create a choreographic feedback system.

The “skins” costumes each connect two performers, making closeness, dependence and networked identity physically tangible – central aspects of the piece and of digital representation. Live data from throat microphones forms the basis of the soundscape in the multichannel system, while motion data drives the projection. Over the course of the piece, the two modules increasingly influence each other.

The choreography between the foyer and the Immersive Room is formed by bodies, projection and sound. The audience moves in groups between these spaces, creating a fragmented, feed-like experience.

The piece deals with digital twins, shared control and the question of what we understand as a body in the digital age. In cooperation with Witten, workshops, performances and an installation-based follow-up use at the Dortmunder U are being developed.

The project is supported by Neue Künste Ruhr, Kulturforum Witten and the Koproduktionslabor Dortmund. Rehearsals take place between the end of September and the beginning of October, with the first performances at the Dortmunder U from the end of October. The piece is conceived as site-specific and can settle into other spaces after the funded performances.

Venue: Foyer of the Dortmunder U

Digital Thoughts // Latent Affects // Repetition // Temporal Suspension // Identifying Patterns // Embodying Anti-Patterns // Destruction // Reconstruction // Subject to Change

3ΔÆA’s musical mission lies in reconciling opposites: the eerie, abrasive sound aesthetics of deconstructed post-club with the ritual trance of the dance floor. The music is the result of an artistic reflection on becoming oneself. The loop of the machines becomes a digital prison of consciousness that tries to break through algorithmic rigidity.

Venue: Mono Listening Café

FlowAR is an app that makes ideas for the Ruhr area visible in 3D and augmented reality. On a virtual map, a picture emerges of how the region imagines its future.

What is missing in your everyday life? What could your neighbourhood look like in a few years? In this workshop you talk with others, turn your wishes into your own visions and capture them creatively. You try out the app straight away and make your idea digitally visible. No previous knowledge needed.

With your ideas you help us develop FlowAR further – and you become part of the FlowAR community.

Two-day workshop: Saturday, 24 October, 14:00–17:30 and Sunday, 25 October, 14:00–18:00.

On Saturday and Sunday things get more intensive: the Schnellhefter*innen bring analogue and digital tools together. At various creative stations, participants draw, write, photograph, collage, copy, distort and continue working digitally. It is not about perfection but about self-efficacy in times of polished AI worlds.

Together we ask: which topics concern us? Who decides what is relevant and becomes visible? And how can zines carry personal, political, critical or niche content out into the world – independent of feeds and algorithms?

Analogue works move into the digital, digital elements back onto paper. With playful tools and an online zine maker, we develop the resulting fragments further and turn them into new forms. The result is an open, process-based space between paper and screen, centred on your own ideas, exchange and authorship.

How can AI tools be claimed in a self-determined way to undermine biases and shape our own emancipatory aesthetics beyond Big Tech monopolies? This workshop bridges critical discourse and your own artistic practice.

The first part is discursive and offers a look behind the scenes of data-based systems. Inspired by cyberfeminist approaches, it raises awareness of how biases arise and how creativity changes when working with AI. The subsequent practical part focuses on using common LLMs and the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion. Concrete methods for your own creative work are presented and tested in an experimental setting in order to subvert AI defaults and shape your own narratives.

The workshop is aimed at everyone who wants to critically question AI technologies and actively help shape them. As there are only a few PCs on site, please bring your own powerful Windows laptop if possible.

Community Visions brings together artists, creatives and organisers who share their visions for new digital spaces and forms of creative togetherness. How can digital spaces become places where we think, make, learn and dream together? Which new forms of community can emerge? And what becomes possible when we understand the digital not only as a space we use, but as a space we shape and invent together?

Venue: Kino im U

“Unter Haut” (Under Skin, approx. 40 min) is a multimedia performance project about bodies and digitality in the Immersive Room and the foyer of the Dortmunder U. Four performers move in networked costumes. Sound (throat microphones), movement and projection (generated from motion data) intertwine to create a choreographic feedback system.

The “skins” costumes each connect two performers, making closeness, dependence and networked identity physically tangible – central aspects of the piece and of digital representation. Live data from throat microphones forms the basis of the soundscape in the multichannel system, while motion data drives the projection. Over the course of the piece, the two modules increasingly influence each other.

The choreography between the foyer and the Immersive Room is formed by bodies, projection and sound. The audience moves in groups between these spaces, creating a fragmented, feed-like experience.

The piece deals with digital twins, shared control and the question of what we understand as a body in the digital age. In cooperation with Witten, workshops, performances and an installation-based follow-up use at the Dortmunder U are being developed.

The project is supported by Neue Künste Ruhr, Kulturforum Witten and the Koproduktionslabor Dortmund. Rehearsals take place between the end of September and the beginning of October, with the first performances at the Dortmunder U from the end of October. The piece is conceived as site-specific and can settle into other spaces after the funded performances.

Venue: Foyer of the Dortmunder U

Can you feel your body is a two hour movement workshop. Anna and Julie invite you to come and play with different modes of sensing your own and the collective body. We will propose games around sensing and sharing weight and the borders of the body through exercises with yourself, in pairs and with the whole group. We will explore elements from our performance “Unter Haut” presented at the festival.

This workshop involves touch. No prior experience needed, bring comfy clothes that you can move in. All bodies welcome! Facilitation language: German and/or English.

Two-day workshop: Saturday, 24 October, 14:00–17:30 and Sunday, 25 October, 14:00–18:00.

On Saturday and Sunday things get more intensive: the Schnellhefter*innen bring analogue and digital tools together. At various creative stations, participants draw, write, photograph, collage, copy, distort and continue working digitally. It is not about perfection but about self-efficacy in times of polished AI worlds.

Together we ask: which topics concern us? Who decides what is relevant and becomes visible? And how can zines carry personal, political, critical or niche content out into the world – independent of feeds and algorithms?

Analogue works move into the digital, digital elements back onto paper. With playful tools and an online zine maker, we develop the resulting fragments further and turn them into new forms. The result is an open, process-based space between paper and screen, centred on your own ideas, exchange and authorship.

“Unter Haut” (Under Skin, approx. 40 min) is a multimedia performance project about bodies and digitality in the Immersive Room and the foyer of the Dortmunder U. Four performers move in networked costumes. Sound (throat microphones), movement and projection (generated from motion data) intertwine to create a choreographic feedback system.

The “skins” costumes each connect two performers, making closeness, dependence and networked identity physically tangible – central aspects of the piece and of digital representation. Live data from throat microphones forms the basis of the soundscape in the multichannel system, while motion data drives the projection. Over the course of the piece, the two modules increasingly influence each other.

The choreography between the foyer and the Immersive Room is formed by bodies, projection and sound. The audience moves in groups between these spaces, creating a fragmented, feed-like experience.

The piece deals with digital twins, shared control and the question of what we understand as a body in the digital age. In cooperation with Witten, workshops, performances and an installation-based follow-up use at the Dortmunder U are being developed.

The project is supported by Neue Künste Ruhr, Kulturforum Witten and the Koproduktionslabor Dortmund. Rehearsals take place between the end of September and the beginning of October, with the first performances at the Dortmunder U from the end of October. The piece is conceived as site-specific and can settle into other spaces after the funded performances.

Venue: Foyer of the Dortmunder U

Part of block 1 (10:00–13:30)

How can and do we want to live together when digital spaces and public spheres are co-shaped by platforms that are geared not least towards exclusion and marginalisation? How can we counter this?

After an introductory problematisation of the status quo, the talk opens up two interrelated horizons for democratic coexistence under digital conditions: first, a reflection on where and under which conditions something can emerge that we can understand as something shared; and second, the question of how connections can be created that move us – and movements that connect.

Part of block 1 (10:00–13:30)

Social media, videos and podcasts are a natural part of young people’s lives – and at the same time important places where they get information, exchange ideas and form opinions. How can these media be used meaningfully in work with young people instead of being seen primarily as a problem?

This short input shows how media work can reach young people and turn them from mere media consumers into active media makers. The central question is how young people can be empowered to critically question information and sources, to recognise disinformation and AI fakes, and at the same time to make their own topics, opinions and perspectives visible. Media literacy is understood not only as the ability to use media critically, but also as active digital participation.

Using the example of the project “Salon5 FaktenChecker – Youth against disinformation”, the talk shows how young people pass on their knowledge through research, fact checks, their own fact-check reels and learning videos on the platforms they use every day.

Part of block 1 (10:00–13:30)

In the German school system, media education is considered a cross-curricular task – even in federal states that have made it a subject together with computer science. The challenge: if media education is everyone’s task, all teachers need to be qualified for it. In addition, schools need their own tailored core curricula based on a common standard that defines what pupils should be able to do at which age.

The talk presents the initiative “Mündig mit Medien”, which since 2024 has been using an action-research approach at Freie Universität Berlin and two partner schools to develop teaching formats with (prospective) teachers that can be used regardless of federal state and framework curriculum. Using the example of the Nelson Mandela School in Berlin, it shows how a school’s own core curriculum is created and how children and young people – from primary school to their final exams – learn to critically question and productively use digital platforms, tools and AI, to take part constructively in public discourse and to move through digital spaces in a self-determined way.

Part of block 1 (10:00–13:30)

How can digital applications make social and community work easier in concrete terms? Cedric Ngonthe from VKII Ruhrbezirk e. V. and Aime Yonkeu present two applications they developed themselves, both born out of concrete needs in practice.

The Ankoppeln app is a networking platform for non-profit associations. It helps organisations connect with one another and document their non-profit and social work digitally – showing how digitalisation can support cooperation and participation in civil society.

The second application, Docriva, is aimed directly at people who are confronted with complex documents in everyday life. Documents can be scanned, managed digitally and made easier to understand with the help of AI. People facing language barriers in particular get support in understanding and managing demanding letters more independently.

Using two concrete examples, the presentation shows how technology can be used to make access easier and to promote social participation.

Part of block 1 (10:00–13:30)

Together with our panel guests Nhi Le, Suraj Mailitafi, Dr. Tong-Jin Smith and Dr. Jennifer Eickelmann, we discuss the following questions:

Block 2 – hands-on workshops (14:15–16:00)

Spotting fake news, classifying hate speech, checking sources. Sounds easy? Two young people from the youth group of VKII Ruhrbezirk e. V. put the participants’ media literacy to the test.

An interactive quiz explores how confidently we really move through digital information spaces. Then the perspectives switch: the young people talk about how they themselves became aware of issues such as disinformation, hate speech and a critical approach to social media. Together we discuss how educational offers can reach young people – and whether adults are automatically more media-literate.

It is also about democracy: who decides which information we trust? How does digital content shape our opinions? And why are young people particularly affected by disinformation and hate speech?

A workshop by young people for young people and adults, with a quiz, discussion and a critical look at our digital everyday lives.

Block 2 – hands-on workshops (14:15–16:00)

One sheet. One pen. Eight pages. Let’s go!

What actually is a zine? And what stories can you tell with it? At the kick-off, we Schnellhefter*innen show why we love this small, self-made medium so much: zines can be personal, political, silly, chaotic, loud or quiet. And above all, they don’t have to be perfect.

In this two-hour workshop, we fold our own little booklet from a sheet of A3 paper and support you in designing the pages with small creative prompts. It is less about thinking and more about trying things out.

We show how low-threshold making becomes possible when material and working time are deliberately limited. Drop by, grab a sheet and a pen and make a zine with us.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Processing, this workshop offers an easy, hands-on introduction to the creative coding language p5.js, a programming language specifically designed to make code more accessible.

In this course, we approach programming from an artistic perspective: we use p5.js as a digital painting tool. Using simple geometric shapes, colours and algorithms, you build visual compositions step by step and create your first programmed sketches.

The workshop is designed for absolute beginners. No prior programming experience is required. Just bring your own laptop!

This workshop is part of the hackathon “Connections” within the framework of KoLab Days x ATEM Biennale and the YU Festival. After the workshop, work can continue in the workspace over several days, where the ideas developed can be deepened, tested and developed further together. Step by step, a collectively created VR installation emerges.

What does a virtual world sound like that connects with ours – and how can it be programmed with Pure Data? In this workshop, participants get to know PdXR, a system that makes Pure Data patches executable in interactive, immersive and networked XR environments. Together we develop small sound experiments, virtual instruments or spatial soundscapes, combining the possibilities of Pure Data with the interaction and spatiality of virtual 3D worlds. Pd objects and interfaces become interactive elements that can be explored, controlled and played together.

The workshop is aimed at musicians, sound and media artists, creative coders and anyone who wants to try out Pure Data in a new spatial and collaborative context. Prior knowledge of Pure Data is helpful but not essential.

This workshop is part of the hackathon “Connections” within the framework of KoLab Days x ATEM Biennale and the YU Festival. After the workshop, work can continue in the workspace over several days, where the ideas developed can be deepened, tested and developed further together. Step by step, a collectively created VR installation emerges.

How do 3D models get from Blender onto the web – and what do you need to consider so that they run smoothly there?

In this three-hour workshop, we look at the basics of 3D modelling in Blender and at how 3D assets can be optimised for interactive web applications and VR.

Together we go through the workflow from the first idea to a web-ready 3D asset: we teach basic modelling techniques, work with materials, textures and polygon counts, and show how models are prepared and exported for use in the browser. We also take a look at generative tools for creating 3D content and discuss how existing online assets can be used, adapted and integrated into your own projects.

The workshop is also suitable for beginners. No prior knowledge of Blender or web development is required.

Tools: Blender, 3D modelling, web art, optimisation of 3D assets, generative tools, online assets, A-Frame, VR.

In this workshop, participants learn how walkable AR worlds can be created with the web-based open-source framework A-Frame. They design and position objects, work with light, materials, transformation and movement, and thus create their own spatial artistic work. A-Frame offers a comparatively direct entry into immersive web applications and at the same time numerous possibilities for extension – through JavaScript, custom 3D models or sound-based applications such as PdXR.

Alongside the technical basics, we also discuss how digital spaces can be designed and used for your own artistic, design or experimental projects. The workshop is aimed at media artists, designers, creative coders, musicians and anyone interested in interactive 3D worlds, web technologies and XR. Basic experience with HTML or 3D design is helpful but not a requirement.

This workshop is part of the hackathon “Connections” within the framework of KoLab Days x ATEM Biennale and the YU Festival. After the workshop, work can continue in the workspace over several days, where the ideas developed can be deepened, tested and developed further together. Step by step, a collectively created VR installation emerges.

In this coding jam, we transform code and visuals into a “Collective Mess”. Instead of perfect code or finished results, the focus is on sketching, discarding, experimenting and deliberately disrupting. Using vibe coding as a medium and a variety of inputs, from cameras to mini keyboards to microphones, we experiment with code and interaction.

On a shared digital canvas, thoughts, discussions and images overlap, merge into new layers and transform into something entirely new. The collective painting thus becomes a living reflection of shared ideas.

First presented in the foyer of the Dortmunder U, the collaborative work then migrates to the metaverse, where it lives on in the hackathon’s digital space.

This workshop is part of the hackathon “Connections” within the framework of KoLab Days x ATEM Biennale and the YU Festival. After the workshop, work can continue in the workspace over several days, where the ideas developed can be deepened, tested and developed further together. Step by step, a collectively created VR installation emerges.

How does a shared digital world come into being when different artistic perspectives, ideas and ways of working meet?

In the hackathon “Connections”, contributions from 3D, sound, web art, creative coding, film and music were developed, tested and connected. Step by step, individual experiments, sounds, images, spaces and interactive elements grew into a shared web-based VR installation.

The aim was not to place individual works side by side, but to create connections between them: how do different elements react to one another? How can different artistic approaches interact in a virtual space? And what happens when many individual ideas become a shared space of experience?

On Sunday, visitors can enter, explore and try out this jointly developed space themselves – and experience how different contributions have grown into an interactive digital world.

Venue: Foyer of the Dortmunder U

No registration required.