Immersive History Lab
What if media and performative arts meet at the conjuncture of history and remembrance culture in the digital age? Körber-Stiftung’s new Immersive History Lab, initiated by its eCommemoration programme, deals with new strategies of history-telling by supporting artists and storytellers, who use immersive digital strategies to engage people with the past.
Point of Departure
For many people, the world finds itself in a state of emergency. For decades, politicians, science and cultural institutions have promised that teaching history will turn the world into a better place. We were supposed to have learnt our lessons from past failures, horrors and tragedies, keeping in mind what the influential intellectuals Theodor W. Adorno called humankind’s task “to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen”.
Körber-Stiftung’s new Immersive History Lab deals with new strategies of history-telling by supporting artists and storytellers, who use immersive digital strategies to engage people with the past. They believe that a confrontation with the past plays a key role in shaping and spreading informed ideas of equality, foster historical reflection and self-determination all the while improving conceptions of responsibility.
We see a crisis of official institutionalised memory politics all over the world. Top-down policies of commemoration, often reproduced in analogue and digital educational programmes, appear inconclusive.
Digital contemporary arts can find and provide answers to this crisis of history-telling as they are able to provoke a user-centered confrontation with history. They are able to create new meaningful commemoration that also matches the guidelines of public history institutions such as museums: participation, interaction, non-linearity and openness for interpretation and self-study.
What is the Immersive History Lab about?
Two guest artists, three institutions, three academic advisors and one goal: breaking new ground for memorializing history in the digital age. Initiated by Körber-Stiftung’s eCommemoration programme, the newly founded Immersive History Lab invites two guest artists working at the crossroads of arts and media to commence groundbreaking research – investigating how memorialization and public confrontation with history can look like in the future. Therefore, the Immersive History Lab provides starting grants for each guest artist to work on a best practice experience that creates new access points to memory culture and self-reflective and self-critical commemorative practices in the digital era.
The concept of a lab ensures that research and project outcomes correspond: an environment, where ideas can be tested and intensely discussed, allows for a robust finished project, whose starting point, spheres of influence, and final outcome concur with our theoretical and practical demands. This is particularly important in the field of commemorative culture as new forms of remembrance need to be assessed as we observe a general fatigue in regards to conventional forms of memorialisation.
We provide these grants because we believe that digital arts can be more effective than various forms of existing commemorative practices: they empower people to use self-determined decision-making when learning about history, which is ultimately more sustainable than e.g. a ritualised culture imposed and enforced by institutionalised education. Looking back into the past with digital arts raises questions connecting the past to our present and future instead of simply delivering easy answers in times where access to facutal knowledge is worldwide guaranteed by the WorldWideWeb.
eCommemoration has created an extensive network of international and transdisciplinary experts – some of whom will contribute their expertise to the guest artists and projects.
Institutions
Academic advisors
Our guest artists
Our guest artists work on topics such as practices of commemoration, memorialization and historical controversies. They use their artistic ideas and knowledge to shape new entrance points to historical narratives and remembrance practices. The Immersive History Lab shows that artistic approaches are a real benefit for the field of historical-political education, adding much needed variety of perspectives, including immersive, international, aesthetic and interdisciplinary approaches. The projects of the lab adhere to the three contributions identified by eCommemoration, which new media projects can add to traditional forms of engagement with the past: alterization and speculative pasts, new forms of participation and/or engagement with the past, mulitidirectionality and multivocality.

Jens Heitjohann graduated from the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen in 2007 and has since worked as a theatre maker in the independent scene as well as in visual arts contexts – throughout Germany and internationally. He is the artistic director at Theater im Depot, Dortmund.
His works have been shown at venues including the Mousonturm in Frankfurt, the Festspielhaus Hellerau in Dresden, the Schaubühne Lindenfels in Leipzig, the Meetfactory in Prague, the Hartware Medienkunstverein in Dortmund, Urbane Künste Ruhr, the Festival Theater der Welt and the Schillertage in Mannheim. From 2008 to 2017, he also taught dramaturgy at the Leipzig Theatre Academy, as well as giving seminars and workshops at other universities. In 2010, he co-founded the RESONANZEN biennial festival in Leipzig with Barbara Büscher, which he ran together with various partners until 2016. Jens Heitjohann worked for the city of Wuppertal as an artistic project developer for the Forum Wupperbogen section of the future Pina Bausch Centre.

As part of the Immersive History Lab, Michael v. zur Mühlen will address the question of how artificial intelligence can be used to prepare historical material in an interactive and future-oriented way. The aim is to develop a format that enables visitors to engage with emancipatory movements and social issues in a new way.
The focus will be on developing an interactive and immersive experience that encourages personal interaction and reflection. An innovative concept will be trialled that combines historical content with current issues in order to open up individual perspectives and new food for thought.
Michael v. zur Mühlen, *1979, has been staging cross-genre drama, opera, contemporary music theatre and immersive audio-visual formats since 2004, including for the Munich Biennale, Kunstfest Weimar, NextLevel Festival Essen, PAD Festival Wiesbaden, HELLERAU, Forum Neues Musiktheater der Staatsoper Stuttgart, Staatsoper Berlin.
In the 2016/17 – 2020/21 seasons, he was director and chief dramaturge in the management team of Oper Halle, whose advanced programme has attracted great attention throughout Germany since the artistic relaunch in summer 2016 and has received several prizes and awards. In the 17/18 season review of the magazine Die Deutsche Bühne, for example, Oper Halle received the most mentions in the category ‘Most convincing theatre work outside of large theatre centres’ and was awarded the German Federal Theatre Prize in 2019.
His musical theatre film Im Stein, based on the musical theatre by Sara Glojnarić and Clemens Meyer, was nominated for the German Theatre Award DER FAUST 2022 in the ‘Sound and Media’ category and was named ‘important stream of the season’ in the 2021 Opernwelt yearbook.
The post-apocalyptic video game essay opera – a future game, created for the Next Level Festival in cooperation with Dresden HELLERAU, was awarded the German Theatre Prize DER FAUST 2023 in the category ‘Sound and Media’ and was nominated for the Explorer Award of the international AMAZE Festival for Playful Media.
What is the Research Approach of the Lab in the Fields of History and Memory Culture?
In the field of academic history-writing and academic research of our past, the idea of historical truth has been under fire since a very long time. Scholars such as Johann Gustav Droysen became famous for criticising Leopold von Ranke’s approach (in his book Historik, published in 1857) that researching history has the aim to tell “how it really was”. However, Droysen confronted Ranke’s strive for objectivity with a subjective approach of history-writing. Therefore, he highlighted the importance of a person’s point of view and their time when researching a historical subject.
The influential post-war historian H.R. Carr developed Droysen’s critique further in his well-known essay What is History?. He pleads for a dialectical understanding of fact and interpretation, of the past and the present and denies the existence of “historical truth”. Inspired by post-structural approaches developed by thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Barthes, the American historian Hayden White went even further in his 1973 book Metahistory saying that there is no historical research that is not a narration. By so doing, he calls the separation of fiction and non-fiction, of history and literature into question. White argues that every historical story can be (and often was) told in the traditional pattern of emplotment. Therefore, a historical event can be researched and told as a romance, a tragedy, a comedy or a satire. For White, history is a form of art, not science, and therefore he addresses the role of ideology and philosophy in social sciences and humanities.
Departing from such observations, the American cultural theorist and literature scholar Saidiya Hartman creates the approach of Critical Fabulations. With Critical Fabulations, Hartman, who is mainly researching the history of the Atlantic slave trade and the life of black women in the United States, targets voids and silences in historical archives. Her concept offers a way to shine a light on experiences and perspectives that have been invisible or marginalised in historiography, especially those of the enslaved. What is Hartman doing in her writing? She studies her subject with archived material, but then moves on and begins to critically fabulate. She creates fictitious characters filling the voids of archives, thus positioning characters between the fictitious and the archived.
Our projects and guest artists, trained in the field of artistic (associative) research, are inspired by Hartman’s approach. This creates experiences that become tools of historical unlearning and of speculative story-telling in order to build a future in which engagement with the past becomes a driving force of political and cultural self-positioning.