Digital technologies are not inanimate. They contain all the energy, work, and performance that emerges in their processes of production and consumption – processes that are commonly plagued by exploitation and lopsidedness. The Virtual Healing Hub creates a compassionate space that is coded for all those analog, digital and hybrid bodies and spirits that feel disconnected. In it, new relationships between technology and humans are facilitated that feel pleasurable to all pixels and cells.

In the interactive performance, the audience enters into relationships with digital technologies in order to produce healing bodily sensations over the course of several quests. The audience is invited to create an experimental connection to the present through speculative interactions with their own tech and the avatars of the dgtl fmnsm collective, in which affects and data streams are critically processed, thereby enabling regeneration as an individual action and collective process, with and through technology.

The consistent hybridity of the performance is reflected in the interplay between the performers of the collective present and the extended level of its action, which takes place digitally in a custom-made virtual space that the audience can follow via a projection screen. The audience interacts with their own devices and with the virtual avatars of the collective. In addition to performative elements, the Virtual Healing Hub includes a sound performance, live streams and a queer strip for a laptop. The piece is presented in German and English with accompanying subtitles.

Virtual Healing Hub premiered on 27/05/2023 at Bundeskunsthalle Bonn as part of 

“DAS[neue]WIR. Art and its institutions will belong to all of us – Performative festival” curated by Michael Annoff & Nuray Demir.

The performance was shown in October 2023 at Kampnagel as part of “Diversify the Code – Artistic Production and Institutional Structural Change“, a collaboration of Kampnagel and Deichtorhallen in Hamburg and in October 2024 at HAU Hebbel am Ufer Theater in Berlin as part of “Spy On Me #5 – Enter AI”.

Duration: 60 min

Language: German and English with subtitles

Status: Available (Contact us!)