Tracing Tales (2014/2017)

Which grape is the one for you? Four players move into the mysterious CON.VENT and experience a dystopian daily routine that blurs the lines between self-optimization and surveillance.

Let’s not kid ourselves any longer: Our thoughts are free—everything else is monitored, stored, analyzed. Everyone, whether digital native or digital skeptic, is affected, and everyone is aware of it. Algorithms—intangible, all-powerful, making their own decisions behind the scenes—are being granted more and more responsibility over our lives.

Many of us willingly entrust ourselves to algorithms to optimize our health, boost productivity, and choose our partners. But what happens when we replace self-reliance and gut feeling with data collection and analysis? When we outsource control over body and mind to a supposedly neutral entity for the sake of improving ourselves? What if one site were to control all our personal information, the way only God and his literary counterpart, the omniscient narrator, once did?

Premiere / Venues

Premiere in October 2014 at the Nationaltheater Mannheim

Restaged in July 2017 at the FFT Düsseldorf

A person in a bright blue turtleneck stands in front of a white wall, holding a grape between the thumb and forefinger of each hand.
A person in a bright blue turtleneck stands in front of a green wall with planter boxes and a screen. She holds a grape in each hand between her thumb and forefinger.
A person in a hooded sweatshirt stands in front of a gray wall containing a screen and small shelves lined with many Playmobil figurines.
A person sits in a white room at a white desk and writes something down.
Three people hold slips of paper in their hands and look pensively at slips of paper pasted to a wall.
Three people hold slips of paper in their hands and look pensively at a box mounted on the wall.
A person with their hair in a tight bun wearing a bright blue top stands in front of a wall with a screen and a loudspeaker, looking past the camera with a serious expression.

Credit: Christian Kleiner


And then you get this watch, and a new name, the door closes, and you’re in an unpleasant room – all alone. The lights are off, and you don’t really know what to do. You’re supposed to lie down, they say. The game starts, and in the meantime, amazingly, you almost forget it’s just a game.

Klas Libuda, Rheinische Post

Concept: machina eX /// Performance: Franziska Benz /// Text: Clara Ehrenwerth /// Direction, Restaging: Anan Fries /// Sound Design: Mathias Prinz /// Technical Direction and Interactive Design:Robin Krause /// Programming and Tech: Sebastian Arnd /// Performance Düsseldorf: Katharina Bill /// Equipment, Düsseldorf: Moïra Gilliéron und Anahí Pérez /// Direction, Restaging: Anton Krause /// Production Management, Düsseldorf: Sina Kießling

Production: machina eX in cooperation with the Nationaltheater Mannheim and with support from the GBG Mannheimer Wohnungsbaugesellschaft. Restaged in 2017 at the FFT Düsseldorf as a project within the framework of the Alliance of International Production Houses, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media