404-TOTLINK

A hyperlink installation by DARUM

a co-production by DARUM and Impulse Theater Festival, Germany

Approximately 500 people are buried each year in Vienna in "lonely burials" - funerals that take place without the presence of relatives, friends or anyone other than the funeral personell. Who were these people?

This question formed the basis of DARUMs debut performance "Uninvited Guests" (March 2019): On five one-time-only premieres, the audience delved into the various biographies of five real people whose funerals were "lonely", putting the deceased themselves at the center of their own performance, a type of substitute for their uneventful burials. The project was selected and was planned to be revamped for the 2020 Impulse Festival in Cologne, Germany. Due to the Covid19 pandemic the live performance had to be moved to 2021. A similar fate was going to fall upon that festival so with the basis of "Uninvited Guests" and the sebsequent lecture performance "What's left?", DARUM is creating a new, digital hyperlink installation which deals with lonely funerals and the themes of death, dying and lonliness.

"404-Deadlink" is aestetically inspired by the largely disappearing colourful and sometimes trashy Internet of the 1990s and early 2000s, and is an interlinking, digital archive which uses documents, texts, photographs and videos to explore the traces of lonely deaths in Vienna, as well as questions urban loneliness and the impenetrability of human existence in an essayistic manner. An associatively proliferating labyrinth with its own logic and without beginning and end, inviting its visitors to go in search of traces for themselves and to lose themselves in them - and in doing so encounter the familiar and the unexpected.

Based on the 2019 NESTROY nominated project "Uninvited Guests".

Online 24/7

at www.404-totlink.at

Premiere: June 9th 2021

at the Impulse Theater Festival (Germany)

Available everywhere on the internet

In German

Start

Reviews:

"Download, click into a parallel world, an afterlife installation. For years, the three artists have been looking for traces in people who were buried without relatives. ... A tender and dignified work that you can now immerse yourself in virtually for hours huge questions."

(Dorothea Marcus, Deutschlandfunk Kultur)

Interview with Kai Krösche about the Project (in German)

Start des Impulse TheaterfestivalsWDR 5 Scala

00:00 / 04:41

Duration:

The amount of time you spend in the 404-Totlink client is up to you, but please at least reserve around 90-120 minutes for the main installation.

Credits:

A project by DARUM Artistic direction & programming: Victoria Halper, Kai Krösche Artistic collaboration: Laura Andreß, Matthias Krische, Clara Hirschmanner Additional artistic contributions: Emre Akal, Shabnam Chamani, Simon Dietersdorfer, hoelb/hoeb, Nora Jacobs, Moritz Kellershohn, Kristof Kepler, Hannes Benedetto Pircher, Roland Rauschmeier, Mario Schlembach, Stefan Schweigert, James Stanson und Simon Windisch mit Nora Winkler Game Dramaturgy: Philipp Ehmann & Clara Hirschmanner (Play:Vienna) Idea, Music and sound design: Kai Krösche Special Thanks: Brigitte Halper, Sebastian Schley

This project is available online 24/7 for at least 10 years and is free.

"Uninvited Guests" is a production by DARUM in co-operation with WERK X-Petersplatz (Wien). Funded by SHIFT, the City of Vienna's Department of Culture as well as Bezirk Innere Stadt.
The new digital version "404–TOTLINK" is a co-production between DARUM and Impulse Theater Festival. Funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture, Civil Service and Sports.

Technical Specifications:

Unique Browser based on Chromium

Downloadable client für mac OS (Apple) and Windows

Only for PC

Genre: experimental, documentary, game

Shooting locations: Vienna, Austria

Language: primarily German

Press & Reviews (in German)

Deutschlandfunk Kultur - Artikel & Interview "Politisches Theater zwischen Lockdown und Lockerung" von Dorothea Marcus

Kritik-Gestalten - Interview "Nur Kunst am Grab"

Festivals:

2022