Khuriya Muriya Islands, Oman; as described by Paul Scheerbart in The Gray Cloth in 1914

Khuriya Muriya Islands, Oman; as described by Paul Scheerbart in The Gray Cloth in 1914 (Environments for Fulldome, Experiments).

Neo-Vaporwave meets Scheerbart and artistically altered references to both horrors and aesthetics of World War I in a hub space where art deco and bauhaus furniture exhibit the models of the prototypes I’ve created during winter semester 2023/24 as part of the project class "Towards the immersive Gesamtkunstwerk, part 1" by Hon.Prof. Micky Remann et al. Kind of like what I did recently with the virtual exhibition version of my Compliment Machine. Generally, this was a very cool project class, and I was very, very happy to actually participate in something that merges theatre and video/film art, and to at l(e)ast have one (1) artistic-practical class on film in my entire years of studying despite repeatedly applying for different film classes at different universities!!!

My media art scenery that I was tasked with, a depiction of Li-Tung’s ballet at Khuriya Muriya Islands, that evolved over the past months and that in the end I’ve just called "Khuriya Muriya Islands, Oman" is based on Paul Scheerbart’s descriptions in his 1914 novel The Gray Cloth. We worked with the German text (Das graue Tuch und zehn Prozent Weiß. Ein Damenroman, Hofenberg, 2017) as well as an English translation (The Gray Cloth: A Novel on Glass Architecture, MIT Press, 2003, translated by John A. Stuart). This fulldome film will be part of a theatrical multimedia planetarium Gesamtkunstwerk in a couple of months.

You can also find all of these prototypes as fulldome and VR films in a YouTube playlist.

(My personal favourite and the work that I initially intended as a final thing definitely is The Red Cloth and 10% Glitch, but in it's abstraction and length it unfortunately didn't fit in with the work of the other participants/overarching concept and so on.)

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Like Scheerbart and his contemporary Karl May I too never visited the international places the novel depicts – but instead of imagining and reproducing a orientalist, racist fictional "realism" that appropriated culture and stereotypes like May definitely did (as larger debates in Germany around 2022/2023 reminded me of May again) and Scheerbart to some extend, I moved into my own mind and tried to somehow react to Scheerbart’s text with my own artistic interests, to kind of break or counteract his text in some way, and to enter a more nuanced dialogue with the source material. I wrote my bachelor's thesis back in 2021 on literature, concrete and visual poetry in video games and video game environments with a focus on first-person walkers as ludic poetry films. (One can find some of the magnificient ludic artifacts that I looked at in my research collection I've started a while ago.) One of my personal favourites of my own artistic work with game engines so far, COMPLEX FEELINGS (2021, my kind of inofficial artistic bachelor's thesis), and also a lot of my later thoughts and future works was/were/will be directly influenced by this (ongoing) research. As almost all of my writing, it is unpublished as of now, but it would be cool to have it published as part of a dissertation, which is also like the sole reason why I'm even doing a master's degree and so on. For the semester project on Paul Scheerbart that you can see here, I continued my artistic research by carving the 3D environment out of Scheerbart's text and letters, and working with 3D letters as an environmental, architectural and visual element, forming concrete poetry and aesthetic architexture and textkörper. (I love my special interests!!! My special interests are valid and cool!!!)

As they sometimes appear in my fictional writings, I have a weird soft spot for the aesthetic horrors of (historic) gas masks. Here, they act as both Bruch as well as historic-reference-making to the release date of the novel, 1914.

In general, I demand that theatres drastically reduce their depiction of canonical texts, because I am oftentimes tired of seeing canonical texts reproduced, while at the same time today's playwrights (hello :3) cannot make a living from their writing. (See also an interview with me on the now defunct platform theater:morgen, which is unfortunately no longer available otherwise online and which I have not saved in any other way.) I consider any reproduction of voices such as Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller or even writers of ancient greece etc. to be out of date. I would rather advocate mixing such texts from the public domain into performances as an overall concept in dialog with a contemporary text whose writer(s) get(s) paid etc. In this case here, however, as a small or unbudgeted production, it’s rather okay. Especially as Scheerbart is less well known and also has a generally interesting body of work, and of course I appreciate the visibility of writers with an anarchist position(!).

scheerbart orb scheerbart orb

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This project features some original soundtracks that I’ve coded using Sonic Pi. Otherwise, I used CC0 sound files I’ve found on lovely freesound.org.

For the videos, I've been using the tremendously helpful Fulldome Camera For Unity by rsodre on GitHub.

A part of this class was academic input regarding the use of AI technology in fulldome production. I am not the biggest fanTM of AI and I didn’t use it for visualization purposes or something, but still included some AI generation as a helpful tool. The skyboxes that you can see were generated using Blockade Labs Skybox, as those spherical skybox images are generally difficult to make for me. (I just cropped the watermark on those images, hence they don't look as smooth, but I think it's fine.) As kind of a theatrical alienation effect, the earliest prototype of the ballet scene features some AI generated backdrop displays that I made using DeepAI. In the MainHub, there is also a model of Scheerbart’s head that was important to me to have there – as some that complex wouldn’t be possible for me to model at all as of now, I tried using Tripo3D.AI, and as YouTuber Gamefromscratch says, the results of this tool look kinda awesome and awful at once. Additionally, the texturing just kinda failed lol. But I embraced this as an aesthetic, I think it looks way better and more interesting than if it was recognizable in its texture as the actual "realistic" head. It now looks like some hobby artist’s papier-mâché project, and I totally love that. This model was generated using Scheerbart’s image from Wikipedia.

And here you can further admire the model of the Scheerbart head on the Tripo3D website.

Additionally, my early ballet prototype uses a 1905 serpentine dance video recording of the inventor Loïe Fuller from Wikipedia. Scheerbart descibes the dancers as serpentine dancers, but I just wasn’t able to animate this dance style. I think with the swirling letters in my latest prototype of the dancers I am coming closer again towards the movements and aesthetics of a serpentine dance style.

This project reuses the map marker from the Koordinatenlyrik project, and I am very sure there are other inter- and intratextual references as well. Also, a hidden planetarium scene can be discovered that is based on my 2018-2021 multimedial sound-text-theatre project Sound & Space. About Earth. (And Beyond.) that I released online (and is thus one of my few theatre texts that ever saw the light of day) but that was never staged nor translated. An actual staging of this project as intended would span more than 3 days uninterrupted.

During the nights in which I worked on some of these prototypes, I’ve listened mostly to three songs, I figured I could link them here: [1] [2] [3] .