LIGNA Audiowalks vs MELENCOLIA

This is a smartphone app that allows you to listen to and participate in audiowalks created by the group LIGNA. The app presents a changing lineup of productions to listen to and engage with as a single person, as well as in groups. LIGNA consists of the media and performance artists Ole Frahm, Michael Hueners and Torsten Michaelsen. In performative interventions and mass choreographies, they have been exploring the possibilities for action of collectives that associate themselves in a dispersed and temporary manner since 2002. In doing so, they develop different models of media use. LIGNA's works have been awarded several national and international prizes.

MELENCOLIA APP was developed as a prologue and epilogue for the world premiere of the music theater show MELENCOLIA by Muntendorf/Lobeck, a work commissioned by Bregenzer Festspiele and Ensemble Modern. But it also works anytime and anywhere: If you have the app installed on your smartphone or tablet and use it to scan the MELENCOLIA QR codes, you can bring various AR creatures to life. If several people use the app at the same time in one place, the different sound tracks complement each other via the individual speakers to form a cell phone chorus of up to six voices. MELENCOLIA QR codes can be found, for example, at www.echofactory.org/melencolia. Over centuries and cultures, melancholy experienced the most contradictory attributions; it was considered a physical illness as well as a moment of contemplation, a possibility of overcoming earthly suffering and a sister of genius. Albrecht Dürer's enigmatic creatures in his equally enigmatic copperplate engraving "Melencolia I" have become emblematic of these contradictions and the insoluble amidst human longing for redemption. Based on Dürer's world, the music theater show MELENCOLIA establishes a melancholic playground of the kind that seems to have been lost to our overstimulated tired societies and the new, colonized digital worlds. With the MELENCOLIA APP you have the chance to bring Dürer's creatures into the now with the help of your smartphone or tablet and become part of a temporary melancholic community yourself. Concept: Muntendorf/Lobeck Composition: Brigitta Muntendorf Graphics, animation and design: Veronika Simmering Programming: vobe.digital Production: ECHO Factory 2022 Funded by: The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media