A Friend Invited You/Characters (disconnected)

The digital landscape likes to present itself as a constant invitation: ‘Subscribe now’, ‘Add me there’ and ‘Follow me here’. In doing so, it takes the form of ready-made interfaces, with established structures and familiar patterns. The visual exclusivity of the information is reduced to a cropped image — through a typographical intervention in public space, this seminar renegotiates the associated visual status quo.
The staged news items have a shelf life. They depend on the topicality of their information, and thus on a very specific date. Once the deadline has passed and the event is over, the medium designed for it loses its very purpose of informing about it.

For the seminar participants, this gives rise to at least one task: never to lose sight of the temporal reference, both informally and in formal-aesthetic terms.
The Videorama, a window onto the city operated by Werkleitz, serves as a display for 38 different events taking place at various locations around the world during the period of the Burg’s annual exhibition. In relation to a specific location and a specific point in time, the question arises as to what extent the digital invitation to collective participation remains valid.

Characters (disconnected)

The plays by writer and director Falk Richter explore themes such as identity, social contexts, information overload and the breakdown of communication. On stage, he works closely with singers, actors, dancers, composers and video artists.

In our seminar, the participants had only one medium at their disposal: the written word. The aim was to stage various dialogues with a single, specified typeface per voice in a compelling manner, whilst exploring the essence of the speaker and depicting it with the help of (or, in some cases, in spite of) the inherent expression of the respective typeface – in other words, to make the character visible.
The werkleitz Videorama serves as a stage for these typographic productions, thereby offering the opportunity to engage audiences beyond the confines of the auditorium with Richter’s conceptual approaches and the dialogues of his unsettled and unsettling protagonists – and, incidentally, to demonstrate the power of typography.