Futuristic immersive performances and installation art questioning our relationship to technology and media.
Studio Brave New Human was created in 2025 to enable the production of critical yet deeply experiential and ambiguous (speculative) works that question our relationship to media and technology. Founded by Victorine Van Alphen and Naomi van Dijck during the fast success of The Oracle: Ritual for the Future as it already during its developmental phase attracted a lot of attention and was invited to Ars Electronica 2025 before it was finished. Together and in collaboration with many supportive partners, we enabled the work to grow with real audiences, sparking intimate conversations, deep silences as well as controversial discussions and envision a longterm process as (Co-)Production Studio.
LIVING ARCHIVE, PARTICIPATORY RITUAL AND TRANSFORMING SPECULATIVE SPACE.
The Oracle, is an immersive interactive work for a small group of 8 people in a unique 360 degree screen environment with a droid and drone as guides. It is layered, futuristic, experimental and ‘ritualistic’ to make certain socio-technological developments – for instance the influence of visual AI on our sense of self and others – more tangible and open for discussion by creating futuristic (sensual) situations, scenarios and space for sensual speculation to try to move beyond binary discussions.
Every version of The Oracle is different. With studio Brave New Human we – over the years want to establish a triptych or episode-structure to function as living archive and in plural form to be able to create interesting differences and relations across times, works and venues. We cannot do this alone and try to work with context and constant developments , let us know if you want to collaborate for a version for your festival, gallery, museum or other venue.
IS THERE A POLITICAL AGENDA?
Importantly Victorine Van Alphen and Valentin Vogelmann – who burned their hands on AI are not pro-AI at all, but work with and against AI for this piece to understand, warn, re-imagine, innovate, but most of all research what it could mean for us as vulnerable, complex, bodily beings and share this in an experiential provocative yet safe way with all kinds of audiences.
Studio Brave New Human wants to be research and experiment driven and attempts to not have a political agenda other than critically examining and re-imagining what AI could mean to us from our personal subjective perspectives. We are warmly inviting feedback, criticism, collaboration and other perspectives as we hope to include and transform our work constantly.
FEEDBACK AND CONTINUOUS RESEARCH
To lower the bar for feedback, we often organize after talks, workshops, or stay around after performances for discussions, questions and interpretations that may occur. We hope to encourage with experience based conversations on what technology and media can mean to us as human beings and society and profess not one philosophy but the constant examining of many possible ways of understanding our world, through multiple perspective, theories and experiments.
Furthermore we are very thankful to dramaturgist Berthe Spoelstra and Advisors Yannick Noomen + Nienke Huitinga. Nothing would have been possible without IDlab: Poetic Laboratory for immersive technologies (Special thanks to Erik Lint and Willem Weemhof), Frascati Theater (Special thanks to Belle de Wit and Sjaak Zegwaard), the Netherlands Filmfestival (Special thanks to Paulien Dresscher and George Knegtel) for the Fellowship, NL Filmfund, Stimuleringsfonds, Ars Electronica, IDFA Doclab (Special thanks to Casper Sonnen) for their support, trust and selection of us in early stages.
We also have an ongoing online feedback form open to any feedback: https://forms.gle/ejd1LVZGufgSEu2z5
or email the director and philosopher for any questions, comments, impressions, critique etc victorinevanalphen@icloud.com
Written by Producer Naomi van Dijck & Director Victorine Van Alphen & Researcher Valentin Vogelmann