in German

World Wide Wiki

Showing HTTP 451 & The Last Entry

What remains when free knowledge comes under pressure? At DIGITHALIA, World Wide Wiki presents web-based artistic research from a cross-location collaboration between Schauspielhaus Graz, ARGEkultur Salzburg and HAU-Hebbel am Ufer Berlin. The starting point is the 25th anniversary of Wikipedia – a symbol of free knowledge and, at the same time, of the threats it faces from AI use, political attacks and censorship. The projects examine how endangered knowledge is preserved, shared or made to disappear, and what role theatre can play in this.

With works by eeefff, Gold Extra, Kronberger & Kronberger, Chinedum Muotto, Nina Vasilchenko, Planetenparty Prinzip und SOAP

What disappears when no one is looking? With ‘HTTP 451’, the Graz-based collective ‘Das Planetenparty Prinzip’ has created a dystopian game format about the slow disappearance of the free internet. As an interactive text adventure, the performance guides the audience through a network that is increasingly forgotten, restricted and manipulated. Content can no longer be found, is legally blocked, deleted or locked away – error codes such as 404, 410 or 451 become the dramatic engine of a collective experience. 

The audience becomes part of a rescue mission involving the entire audience: whatever still exists must be secured, copied and archived before the last entry disappears. But it quickly becomes clear that this is about more than just data backup. ‘HTTP 451’ asks an uncomfortable question: what is actually worth preserving? Everything? Only certain content? The idea of a free network? The truth – or even its distortions and lies? 

Playful, humorous and at the same time highly political, the work allows us to experience how memory, knowledge and the public sphere are negotiated when digital spaces become fragile. ‘HTTP 451’ is an interactive experiment about responsibility in the digital space – and about the need to take action before disappearance becomes the norm. 

With ‘The Last Entry,’ SOAP focuses on individual experiences of (data) loss on the internet. The internet, still presented as an inexhaustible archive of collective knowledge, proves to be an unstable and selective dispositif of digital memory: platforms are abandoned, archives closed, data deleted – decisions that actively determine the continued existence of digital spaces and whose loss represents a significant blow to digital culture, creativity and social interaction.  

Disappearing from the internet is no coincidence; it has become political and is the result of economic interests, political intervention and algorithmic decisions. 

In the form of a performative memorial site in VR Chat, SOAP's ‘The Last Entry’ creates a resonance space that combines documentary practice, digital performance and collective participation to form a walk-in landscape of memory, in which personal experiences of absence overlap and a new awareness of digital transience emerges. 

Concept & implementation SOAP (Uwe Brunner, Bettina Katja Lange)