The Netherlands is one of the few countries where Science Fiction plays no role in mainstream media, let alone the arts. If we look upwards at all, it is through the disarming Duplo bricks of Govert Schilling, or Vincent Icke's mildly ironic commentary in DWDD. Or making 'Mission Earth', a failing soap opera with bickering comedians in an otherwise totally tension-free universe.
Social criticism here we prefer to do directly and on the man rather than through the rather broad diversions of Battlestar Galactica or the disarming idealism in Gene Roddenberry's original classic Star Trek. 2001, a Space Odyssey we find because of the year in the title, is already outdated. So net coordinators have no imagination, and we have to make do with that.
Because we think that just doing things is crazy enough, we call the boys of Pips:lab completely idiotic nerds. A press preview of their latest show 'Shadows in the Clouds' soon degenerates into an incomprehensible speech full of abbreviations that a mere mortal cannot make sense of.
It's about motion capture and 3d painting, pattern scanners and more of the sort. Techniques that are commonplace in the film and game industry in much more expensive and slick form. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Michiel de Ruyter could not exist without it, but to make a theatre show with it? PIPS does it.
It's going to be a lot of hassle. As an audience, you are part of a 3D environment, with motion sensors and live animations, which, thanks to the advancement of technology, are becoming increasingly affordable to execute. Things for which just a few years ago I was being blindly piloted through a slow-moving virtual space laden with complete mainframe computers in one of Eric Joris' performances, are now portable and can be experienced in real time.
The result, for all its doltiness, is quite stunning. The story doesn't even matter that much, as long as the tinkering child in us is kept awake. Walking through texts floating around you, actors bumping into a text message, all accompanied by vintage synthesisers like the Juno 60, and rototoms that are then used to trigger state-of-the-art computer graphics.
Interactive science fiction theatre. They have sold very few shows yet, probably because theatre programmers have as much imagination as net coordinators. So be quick about it. Even a spectacle group born out of Catholic hippiedom like La Fura dels Baus has embraced the app and virtual reality. In June experience at the Holland Festival. In a few years, this anywhere else in the world so mainstream. You can say now that you experienced it in 2015.
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