The connection between theater and new technologies is the focus of the “Future Labs” at the Schubert Theater in Vienna, which is taking place for the fourth time. From February 19th to 22nd there are two plays on the program, as well as an AR workshop and “Future Talks”. The live gaming piece “Let’s play I’m old and tired” by Total Refusal and the Theater im Bahnhof (TiB) is a guest, and the AI theater “Processing Pinocchio” is also celebrating its premiere.
At the center of the piece “Let’s play I’m old and tired”, which premiered in Graz in the fall, is a burnt-out avatar who – based on the adventure game “Red Dead Redemption 2” – is looking for peace in the video game wilderness. The Vienna premiere will take place on the first evening of the festival at 7.30 p.m., followed by a discussion about “New Media in the Old Game” in the “Future Talk” at 9 p.m.
On February 20th, the festival will host the premiere of “Processing Pinocchio”. The idea for the piece goes back to 2019, when director Simon Meusburger had the famous fairy tale retold by one of the first freely accessible AI language models (GPT-2). The result was, as they say, “raw, naive, poetically disturbed and full of machine logic errors.” In his new piece, Meusburger traces the rapid development of the capabilities of artificial intelligence. The aim is to create a dialogue between two AI generations, and “questions about ethics and regulation, boundaries and privileges as well as philosophical theses about people and humanity” will also be discussed. Meusburger then gives insights into his work in a “Future Talk”.
You can lend a hand yourself on February 21st and 22nd at the “Doll to Pixel” workshop, in which the Schubert Theater, in cooperation with the Artificial Museum, will focus on “extended reality”, i.e. augmented reality (AR): In the in-house online editor “Artificial LAB”, participants can design their own 3D works and playfully implement them in augmented reality. The resulting works will finally be presented as an AR walk on February 22nd.
date: 2026-02-12 07:13:00