I AM (VR) | Susanne Kennedy & Markus Selg in collaboration with Rodrik Biersteker

Do you know who you are? Where you’re going to? What you’re looking for? Well, don’t worry: the time has come for you to consult your digital oracle. Because “I AM (VR)” is a virtual reality experience that draws participants wearing VR headsets into one of Onassis Stegi’s lesser known spaces, where they’ll find themselves inside mysterious rooms, opening doors onto the unknown, and walking down tunnels that – like wormholes of sorts – lead through the fabric of spacetime to reach new planets, set under new skies, to stand before a new oracle. And as the voice of the narrator guiding you along this psychedelic trip of self-awareness says: “If you think of fire, you are on fire. If you think of war, you will cause war. All depends on your imagination.”

Just months after the Onassis Culture digital art exhibition “Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data” set inside Pedion tou Areos park, Onassis Stegi is presenting the first virtual work created by the acclaimed theater director Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg in collaboration with Rodrik Biersteker.

Over the last 15 years, Kennedy has been radical in her experiments, introducing Internet and cyberspace paganist dramaturgies to the stage, even when tackling works as classic as Anton Chekov’s “Three Sisters”, which screened on the Onassis Channel on YouTube in 2020.

With “I AM (VR)” – which draws inspiration from the oracle at Delphi and its call on visitors to “know thyself” – Susanne Kennedy and her multimedia artistic associates Markus Selg and Rodrik Biersteker have created a virtual reality environment that takes participants on a 35-minute journey through a hallucinatory environment, a post-theatrical setting involving digital perception, play, and interaction that can only be described by the following maxim: “I dream, therefore I am – in reality and virtually.”

-Susanne Kennedy studied direction at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten (University of the Arts) in Amsterdam, where she launched her career as a director. Invited to join the Munich Kammerspiele in 2011, she has worked with the company to this day, and with the Volksbühne (People’s Theater) in Berlin. Winning the XIV Europe Prize New Theatrical Realities in 2017 has been a highlight of her career to date, awarded for her take on “The Virgin Suicides”; Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel of the same title has also been adapted for the screen by Sofia Coppola. The stage production was presented at the Athens Epidaurus Festival in 2019.

-The ideological origins of “I AM” lie in the Delphic maxim “know thyself”. The phrase, which we interpret in the present day to mean the virtue of self-awareness, is thought to have comprised one of three maxims inscribed at the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, a fact confirmed by Pausanias in his travel writings. The origins of the phrase itself are not known – it has been variously attributed to Socrates, Heraclitus, the Seven Sages of Greece, and the first Pythia (the Oracle of Delphi) Phemonoe, among others.

-A modern-day oracle, set inside the heart of a large boulder, was dreamed up by the award-winning visual artist Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm for the “Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data” exhibition, produced by Onassis Stegi and presented inside Pedion tou Areos Park in the summer of 2022. The work, titled “FRANK”, was an artificial space “loaded” with philosophical data – an attempt to juxtapose the wonder and fear people feel about the phenomenon that is artificial intelligence.

-The term techno-shamanism first appeared in the Western world during the 1980s, and describes the cultural movement advocating the interaction of applied technologies with allusions drawn from spiritual and religious traditions, and the incorporation of the cyberspace experience into shamanistic practice. Treading the limits of neo-paganism, the aim of techno-shamanism is to seek out mystical experiences and higher levels of consciousness. Lacking a spiritual leader or other figurehead, the movement nevertheless enjoyed extensive exposure in the time of Timothy Leary, one of the most controversial academics of the American psychology community. Since young adulthood, he had been associated with research into the therapeutic effects of psychotropic substances; a little before his death (in 1996), and having gained a following among Generation Xers, he turned his attentions to cyberspace environments as an inexhaustible arena for “anarchic” psychological transcendence.