Black Book

BLACK BOOK

Performance with AI control

By: Reinhold Bidner, Tobias Hammerle, Georg Hobmeier, Sophia Reiterer, Sonja Prlić and Karl Zechenter.
Stage: Selina Nowak, technical stage development: Sebastian Frisch, testing and media art consulting: Georg Hobmeier, assistance: Jana Sturm

Premiere: Mid-December 2025, ARGEkultur, Salzburg

They stand on dark street corners, watching people come and go, rushing after passers-by who quickly turn out to be the wrong lead. And it’s always raining. This has been going on for weeks: the group of detectives has been assigned a seemingly insignificant surveillance job, something to be done in two or three days.
But the case keeps growing, until it increasingly involves all employees of the detective agency, while at the same time proving impossible to resolve. There is nothing left but to hand the case back, yet that turns out to be impossible. And by then, the detectives are already deeply entangled in the case themselves.

In this performance, the observations and assumptions of the group of participants are at the center, from which their own crime story emerges. Black Book is an experimental theater piece, with which we further develop our aesthetic work from the live escape room *Border Grid*. It is a play that we perform ourselves with our own fears and assumptions. In our dark backyard, Franz Kafka, Frank Miller, Boris Vian, and Paul Auster meet and shoot a film noir.

 

The play is co-produced by ARGEkultur Salzburg and will premiere there in December 2025.

The piece was prepared in public play sessions. The first took place in November 2023, followed by two more in 2024. In these sessions, we explored the new format with audiences – especially the interplay of AI, procedurally generated content, and audience participation.