Duration: June 2023 to June 2024

Post-digital culture meets science fiction: the art project You better don’t know questions and stages the relationship between the environment, humans and the sense of reality and develops speculative narratives for paranormal and extraterrestrial experiences.

You better don’t know creates a fascinating surreal encounter with extraterrestrial life. The artists take up the UFO myth to invite us to play and experiment with orders of reality. The participants stand in the center of the action: In a hypnotic state between dreaming and being awake, they leave their familiar everyday surroundings to enter a post-apocalyptic world full of challenges. In exchange with beings from entirely alien worlds, they become active co-creators of a possible future.

Since my first paranormal, extraterrestrial experience at the age of eight in the form of a light phenomenon in the sky that cannot be clearly defined, I have always wondered whether this encounter was real or merely an illusion of light that appeared due to excessive consumption of sci-fi films.
I WANT TO BELIEVE My faith in humanity is based on our post-digital society finding a solution for dealing with intolerance and rejection of the foreign / alien. (Vesela Stanoeva))

The artistic project You better don’t know promotes the collaboration of various institutions and artists from a wide range of artistic disciplines (including media art, creative coding, sound design, dance, lighting design, scenography, costume design, 3D design) in order to jointly address the topic of the post-digital society against the backdrop of social and political change. The results of the cooperation project were presented at the NEW NOW Festival for Digital Arts in Essen in 2023. At least two further performances are also planned at Dortmund’s Theater im Depot.

Ruhrgebieterinnen is a collective of female artists founded in 2021 by Vesela Stanoeva and Elisabeth Drache and specialises in digital performance. They explore new forms of encounters and differences as well as the potential of diversity in various performative and installative projects.

MIREVI is the “Mixed Reality and Visualization” working group at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. In an external laboratory near Düsseldorf’s main railway station, a team of scientists, technicians and designers work together with artists on innovative human-technology interfaces that appeal to the whole body.