The torch burns. A huge bison flares up. Who painted it and why in this gloomy cave? Why not outside in the light where it can be seen? Wasn't the bison meant for all eyes? It flickers like a hologram in the stone. Quite exclusive. People were already creating images over 50,000 years ago. The cave paintings still puzzle us today. Why and who took so much time, as it was a matter of survival every day? What began in the cave has today become an addiction to images, an unstoppable flood of pictures. Why actually? Who do images serve? Why is it such a tingly feeling to swipe your thumb around? A veritable excess of images: cat videos, war massacres, porn, everything flows into our heads as if through a hole. The selection and hierarchy of images remains a great mystery - shyly conjured up by users as an algorithm. In server, the theatre group maggots.gif sets out on the trail of this secret. Starting with the Palaeolithic dark chambers, in which high-end images from the spirit world were received through hidden shamanic processes, through to modern neuronal networks, through which vast amounts of image data shoot and are knotted together in brute server halls, the evening penetrates further and further into the depths of a feverish social practice, a hallucinatory, shamanistic technology of consciousness, without which we seemingly cannot live: Images. Images. Images.

On Sun, 22 June, the performance continues in a cross-border sound kaleidoscope with TOBEY: a lofi-jazz evening deep in the genre glitch that fuses spherical synthesizers, warm electric bass lines and the pixelated poetry of a Gameboy - where jazzy improvisation meets 8-bit nostalgia and enchants into something completely new.

A post-performance talk with maggots.gif will take place on Thu, 03.07. read less