NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. 3rd Eye - find your fate is an XR world model. A double world model with an outside world and an inside world. The possibilities of extended reality are brought into play here with the utmost accuracy in order to depict a reality that reveals itself to be supermaterial at its core. World models are tools that visualise connections that are ungraspable on the original scale. Situations can be created in the model that cannot be accessed in so-called physical reality. They can also be used to predict effects and consequences that are equivalent to a glimpse into the future. They open a third eye. The external appearance of 3rd Eye is a world model made of transparent spheres. A room-filling virtual sculpture that celebrates the omnipresence of the pi factor with its configuration. The sculpture is made visible with an XR headset. You can enter the interior of the virtual sculpture through the virtual outer shapes. This opens up a boundless, starry night sky all around, an astronomical universe in the centre of which the people entering seem to float. They are surrounded by whirling signs that evoke strong associative meanings. When called upon, they approach and combine to form a personal oracle for the visitor. A voice in the headset interactively instructs the steps of the procedure. Visitors can reach for the oracle signs and return to the familiar world with them from outer space and the world model. With 3rd Eye, they have perceived a world structure and glimpsed aspects of their own future.

NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. “A Simple Silence” Wraps Up Craig Quintero’s Trilogy Exploring Spatial Transformations & Immersive Encounters. It seems like such an easy request: a simple silence. A stillness without the weight of work or love or death. A moment in between. But we have learned there is an almost impossible gap between this ambition and the reality of living, that our silence is never simple. In the flickering light, we hold our breaths, anticipating the storm. Something must be lost before it can be found. A Simple Silence is the final chapter in Riverbed Theatre’s award-winning “Just For You” Trilogy that premiered in Venice in 2022 with All That Remains and continued in 2023 with Over the Rainbow. This new 360VR experience continues the series’ exploration of our connectedness to the world around us, imbuing the environment with an animistic quality while also blurring the boundary between seeing and being seen. The audience is not a witness to the experience; they are the experience. A Simple Silence confronts us with the uneasiness of our inevitable truths, that every beginning implies an ending, that we are shadows passing through the darkness.

NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. Munich is his canvas - from the first graffiti of the 19th century to modern murals: graffiti legend Loomit takes us on a journey. In razor-sharp 16K VR, we experience his creative process and how urban spaces, design, and chance influence his work. It is the first German VR documentary with this image quality.

NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. The woman from Duchamp's painting "Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2" rises from her passive representation into the three-dimensional space of the VR art installation. One becomes many; together, they ascend an infinite staircase towards the sky - a counter-movement that invites us to question our perspective on the female body.

NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. The woman from Duchamp's painting "Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2" rises from her passive representation into the three-dimensional space of the VR art installation. One becomes many; together, they ascend an infinite staircase towards the sky — a counter-movement that invites us to question our perspective on the female body.

NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. Welcome to "Ekklesia," - an immersive VR-building game where the audience is guided through a story by three narrators, not only creating a new civilization but also unlocking the secrets of a long-gone society. Equipped with VR goggles and controllers, each player builds a new civilization. The decisions made not only influence the construction of the city but also the direction in which the story develops. The gameplay is increasingly broken up and replaced by narrative elements. In collaboration with the digital division, author Robert Maximilian Rausch created a total of 60 scenes in which the three narrator characters have their say. These scenes are arranged in different sequences and ensure a coherent experience, regardless of the game's course. Participants can shape the plot individually, resulting in a completely different story for each person. "Ekklesia" means 'place of coming together' and so, approximately once a month, the audience sits around a table of eight in the Old Rock Café and enters a new virtual world using VR glasses. Somebody can select time slots for a game session to take place.

NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. Flow invites you to float with the wind on what seems at first glance, to be a day like any other, with its turbulence: a night in the life of a woman, painted by the ebb and flow of air currents. Smells, heat, breathing, natural and artificial gusts of wind, the air currents, affected by invisible presences, make the imperceptible perceptible. They reveal to us a series of events in which the woman - that we are invited to follow during her wanderings - takes part. They immerse us in a world entirely made of air. But when the storm calms down, and the woman wakes up from what turns out to have been a dream, the world is no longer the same.

NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. Free UR Head is a public participatory choreography project, using custom developed real-time XR technology. It started with the idea to bring people together and play with VR technology, making it more accessible and public. What if we can conduct the heads of the VR audience into a choreography? We invite you to join and participate in an unprecedented collective large scale immersive performance. Seated with VR headsets you will “perform” into an impromptu unrehearsed choreography. The experience will take place in the presence of audiences there on purpose or passing by who can enjoy the choreography taking shape in real time. By playing around with collective movement using virtual reality, Free UR Head questions and explores the boundaries of conducted collective movement and behavior in a mutual relationship with digital technology.

NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. Interior and exterior, transparency and opacity, exhibitionism and voyeurism, feminine and masculine; all these notions oppose or unite in the infinite cycle of a labyrinth with no exit. Life here is like a loom whose living weft is woven from a myriad of branching threads and paths. Ito Meikyū is a virtual reality experience that develops around references from Japanese art history and literature (The Fukinuki Yatai, The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book) and unfolds as a large sensory fresco with strong emotional potential. A heterogeneous set of drawn, animated and sound scenes are taken from digital material; they recreate a kind of subjective world (inner and outer) in the form of a labyrinth composed of fractal architectures, inhabited by plants, objects, animals, men, women, motifs and calligraphy. The virtual wandering space allows us to access different scenes based on the randomness of our choices: a kind of hide-and-seek game with the universe at the centre of which we are the omniscient spectator.

NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. Sixty years after President Kennedy's assassination, "JFK Memento" chronicles the events of November 22, 1963, and the investigation that followed. Across five chapters narrated by the last living witnesses, journalists, and investigators who lived through the events, this documentary is a historically accurate record of these 48 hours that changed the world. Dive into the defining moments of the investigation as archive photos and films come to life, re-mastered in 3D, and re-projected onto the historic sites as they were back in 1963. Produced in collaboration with the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas and with the support of Meta, "JFK Memento" is a narrative learning experience.

WALK-IN: no slot reservation necessary Limbophobia opens with a dramatic quote from the book Will Grayson, Will Grayson: “I am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me.” This spiritual crisis in a dark border region forms the introduction to Wen-Yee Hsieh’s misty nocturnal world in which visitors finds themselves in twilight zones of existential terror. The powerful black and white graphics making up this hallucinatory world blur the boundaries between the real and the digital, the solid and the ephemeral, the eternal and the temporary. What starts as a glance through a misty window on a storm-swept beach turns into a wild ride into increasingly unstable realities rocked by explosions and collapsing buildings. All this is accompanied by music that sounds like the slow breath of the collective unconscious.

WALK-IN: no session reservation is necessary The heart of LUMINESCENCE lies in its interactive and immersive nature. Through the multiplayer Augmented Reality app ARpoise, the audience is surrounded by 3D objects which guide them through the journey: They meet on the beach, then jump into the ocean and float with the currents, dive into the deep sea and emerge again, facing the imminent danger of climate change. Everyone present plays a pivotal role in shaping the live performance. By tapping on the 3D objects during the performance, the audience brings the (under)water world to life. At the same time they become an important part of the concert, because every 3D object contains an audio sample: Via their smartphones and provided tablets, everyone can trigger soundscapes and melodies live alongside the performer, merging their actions into a harmonious whole. This dynamic collaboration results in a one-of-a-kind Mixed Reality experience that unfolds in real-time.

NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. Life is a show. By a colossal sculpture of the nature creation, a motherless tin boy sits boredly on a toilet, catching a glimpse of his father engaging in sordid affairs with other women. The story tells about three tin toys, revolving around three generations, each bearing a resemblance to one another, as they inevitably confront family conflicts. Among them, the male members are rushed by the relentless time, growing into the "adults" they once despised, as if trapped in a mirror reflection, unable to break themselves free. Deeply controlled in their roles, they forget their own expressions and movements, losing their own shadows beneath their feet and the images in the mirror. They are unaware of being entangled in the control of whose dreams, memories, or ideals. In the end, they only faintly remember the gentleness that once existed in the image of their mothers.

WALK-IN: no slot reservation necessary How can something technical like Artificial Intelligence – so often associated with our alienation from Nature – help us listen to and communicate with non-human beings? Upon closer examination, most animals and even plants have their unique forms of communication - languages that we're only beginning to decode with modern technology. Yet, the real question remains: Is humanity prepared to embrace the profound insights offered by Nature's own sonic dialogues? kennedy+swan created a series of watercolors that can be scanned using their mobile app, merging the tactile with the digital. Each image is augmented with an interactive virtual scene, expanding the narrative of the paintings. The 3D elements, handcrafted by the artists in the form of miniatures, sculptures, and drawings are then digitized to complete the augmented reality overlay. \O/ BOOK TABLE: You can purchase "LEXI.exe" and "Mixed Signals" at our Festival Kiosk. \O/

NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. Immerse yourself in a vivid poetic world where characters and images merge. This interactive experience invites you to travel back in time as a ghost and look over the shoulder of the famous Chinese poet Libai (701-762, Tang Dynasty) - while he writes, dreams, and thinks. But you are not just a spectator: by interacting with the characters, you can influence events and leave your mark.

WALK-IN: no slot reservation necessary Transform your environment with a wall treatment of a deep blue reef, festooned with exotic and colorful corals! View the wall with the free ARpoise augmented reality app to see the corals grow out of the wall and come alive, swaying gently in the ocean currents. Brightly colored reef fish dart amongst the corals and the burbling sound of a scuba diver's breathing apparatus provides a soothing ambient background. On closer examination, you will see that the "corals" growing out of your wall are made of colorful plastic garbage, and some of the "fish" are flocking plastic debris - a reminder of how our addiction to plastics has filled all life on Earth with plastic. Only 9% of plastics can be recycled at all, and much of it is sent to countries with poor waste management, and ends up in our oceans. Plastic waste is endangering already stressed coral reefs - and in Greece divers discovered a "coral reef" entirely made of plastic. I will donate 10% of all sales to organizations fighting ocean plastics worldwide.

NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. The VR experience "Spectral Haven" is set in a future that could already be now: How do we deal with AI-driven service industry that is increasingly dominating our everyday lives? What is behind the human desire to create a synthetic consciousness and merge into it? And what will actually happen once we have achieved this? Ray Kurzweil's seminal book "The Singularity Is Near" serves as an entry point into a world where the promises of conscious AI fell short. “Spectral Haven” is the first feature-length narrative VR experience by ZKM’s artistic research and development department, the “Hertzlab”. Together with the artist Christian Schlaeffer, hundreds of photogrammetry scans, eerie robot simulation surroundings and a disgruntled futurist make up an engaging and immersive experience into a future where AI holds none of the promises of today, but all of the regrets.

NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. The Imaginary Friend invites you to take part in the vivid imagination of Daniel, a grieving eight-year-old struggling with the line between reality and fantasy. Become Daniel’s imaginary friend and let him share his world with you. Discover his joys and anxieties, even help him fight his demons head-on. However, as you spend time together, Daniel’s surroundings don’t quite understand. Why is he talking to himself? Is he crazy? When his father intends to fix him, Daniel needs to figure out his feelings before disconnecting from reality completely… With its unique point of view in storytelling and the latest technical developments in VR, The Imaginary Friend presents an intimate experience unmatched in the VR landscape. Daniel sees, talks and interacts with you, allowing you to form a deeply personal bond with the boy. Through interactive gameplay, you don’t only push the story forward but also actively participate in Daniel’s life.

NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. Within the walls of the former Green Island prison, political detainee A-Kuen, tells the stories of imprisonment and persecution happened in the 1950s in Taipei. Among fellow inmates, frozen in time, he recounts his own experiences and those of his friend, A-Ching, who never made it out. Experience the time and place, and the waiting, in hope, for a chance to keep the stories alive. The Man Who Couldn’t Leave integrates the stories of numerous political victims of the White Terror and told through the form of an undelivered family letter. An immersive VR experience of hope, fear and camaraderie.

SPECIAL LOCATION: this session happens at Residenztheater München and can be booked via their website. Inspired by William Shakespeare's tragedy about Timon of Athens "Tremens" is an immersive experience between drama and social virtual reality. The audience is invited to question familiar ways of thinking and to experience the foyer of the Residenztheater as a space in which the overwhelming fusion between theatrical assertion and virtual boundlessness opens up new perspectives on our present. For booking a session please go to: https://www.residenztheater.de/stuecke/detail/xr-lab-behind-the-scenes-showing-zu-tremens

NOTE: To book slots on Thu or Fri, you have to be a ticket holder or have a FFM festival badge. In ‘The Grand Getaway’, holidays are in the offing for Wallace and Gromit. Sun, sand, and the chance to test out their latest contraption, Auto-Caddy. But Wallace has his dates mixed up – they have to be on the other side of the country in just half an hour! There’s only one thing for it... they’ll take the Rocket! Under the guidance of BERYL, their beverage and employee related logistics contraption, the pair pack and prepare for take-off. But soon a mishap with the controls sent the team hurtling off course. Will this be a holiday to remember? The Grand Getaway is an interactive, narrative-led VR experience for the Meta Quest which will take fans on a brand-new adventure with much-loved characters Wallace and Gromit.