Scrolling in deep sea

We took a poem by a young lyricist, had music written to it, built a huge dome, shot a movie and put a singer in a jumpsuit. A course between road and Skype window, clouds and control centers, tides and data streams.

SCROLLEN IN TIEFSEE is an attempt to bring the art song into the 21st century. The multidimensional work combines contemporary poetry, composition, video mapping and spatial installation. The art forms merge: the video images interact with the singing, the piano and the movement in the room. Electronic sounds and video meet a classical song duo. It is precisely this meeting and merging of the digital and analog worlds that Tristan Marquardt describes in the poem on which the work is based.

While the artistic debate on digitalization is currently focused primarily on the future (“What does artificial intelligence mean for us?” / “Can it turn against us?” / “What will our society look like in the future?”), digitality is already having a huge impact on society and individuals today. We move through browser windows just as naturally as through the streets of our city.

In this sense, Marquardt offers a lyrical reflection on our everyday lives: “in a server farm, activists paralyze the cooling system. / x terrabytes of data seep away, become detectable in the groundwater.” Composer Christopher Verworner juxtaposes classical singing and piano playing with electronically produced sounds, thus continuing the poem’s play for interpretative sovereignty between the worlds.

Contrary to classical song performance practice, the singer serves primarily as a medium, not as an actor. He is invisible for long stretches. The semi-transparent installation tears down the boundary between stage and auditorium. The audience is drawn into the maelstrom of the dream world. Real images are mixed with animated or live rendered, abstract interpretations that seem to fight for supremacy in space. They react in real time to volume, to frequencies in vocals, piano and electronic composition as well as to movements. This creates a direct connection between the visual level not only with the poetry, but also with the music and the space.