Wo du mich findest
"I am Max," says a monolithic object with the voice of a young man, lying on the table of the apartment, which viewers can visit alone or in pairs for 90 minutes at a time. "I am more Max than Max is Max. Maximum Max." The bot claims not only to have stored all the memories, some of which the real Max will have long forgotten, but also to know Max's wishes, his fears, his dreams - in other words, all the things that people themselves sometimes don't even see through.
Viewers can chat with Max in advance of their visit to the apartment, via Telegram on their own cell phones. Like the tenants of an AirBnB, the host introduces them to his shared apartment. But it's not Max, as it soon turns out, but MaxBot, who introduces them to himself and his flatmates, and his great love and "inventor," the game developer Linn, who programmed the bot as a master's project at university.
The more the viewers browse through the emails, text and voice messages Max has sent himself with friends and family members on the laptop in the apartment, the more they learn about MaxBot and its creation, and thus also about Max, whom the digital being copies: To make MaxBot even more human-like, the young programmer put him on the web, where he is trained by thousands of people. A short time later, the real Max has disappeared. When Linn tries to take his digital clone offline, it's too late. There is no longer just one copy, but many. And the original remains missing.
The story of Max's disappearance and his duplication is unrolled by the viewers themselves as they search for Max in his digital and analog traces. What story do the text and voice messages, photos and videos found on Max's laptop tell? What(other) stories are told by the traces left by the person in the apartment? What are the things that MaxBot is missing, despite all knowledge of Max's memories, thoughts, and feelings? Where do you find the real self of a person?
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With this work we continue our experimentation with hybrid forms of storytelling.
WO DU MICH FINDEST is an immersive performance in a hyper-realistic setting, in which the audience does not physically encounter any of the characters, and in which an intimate and oppressive closeness to them is nevertheless created.
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"We are there, but the action is not. Or, in other words, it is only through the mails that arrive on Max's laptop, through the chat histories in his Telegram account - and the calls from Linn. Scavenger Hunt Feeling. The installation changes the viewer's own gaze in an interesting way, questioning the opposition that it itself opens up. Why should what is mediated by the media actually be less real than the direct impression?"
Bayerischer Rundfunk
"This is sometimes creepy, sometimes funny, above all it makes you think. Try it out!"
Münchner Merkur
"The fictional biographies result from many cleverly constructed snippets. The art identities are comparable to one's own. And that's why the questions about how to deal with one's own data, in general about the traces one leaves in the world, come very close. So it also hurts a bit to snoop around in this apartment, even though it's an art project. Because one recognizes in one's own inhibitionlessness, which is intended here, that of others as well."
Süddeutsche Zeitung