Stefan Kaegi says...
'I was working with visually disabled musicians for my last project ciudades paralelas  in many cities across the globe last year. I realized then how much they depend on synthetic voices to use mobile phones, read emails or browse through the internet. Even more than we depend on gps-navigators or telephone answering machines. When you listen to these voices all the time, they become personalities. So I started using text-to-speech-voices that are composed of human syllables to write very subjective texts. These texts look from a computer's perspective back at human patterns of behaviour. One of these behaviours by which the computer voice finds particularly strange is waiting. The artificial voice doesn’t wait. It doesn't know boredom nor the fear of growing old. Rachel and Peter are my voices in a mobile audio tour Remote Berlin that is running until mid-May in Berlin and later in a few other cities. These tours are always very site-specific experiences for crowds of 50 walkers. Opposed to Remote Berlin, my contribution for "while you wait" is more subjective and portable to wherever you wait. It focuses more on the imaginary world we build up, when we try to imagine what identities behind artificial intelligence might look like.'
 

About Stefan

Stefan Kaegi produces documentary theatre plays, radio shows and works in the urban environment in a diverse variety of collaborative partnerships. Using research, public auditions and conceptual processes, he gives voice to ‘experts' who are not trained actors but have something to tell.
 
Kaegi co-produces works with Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel, under the label “Rimini Protokoll”. Rimini Protokoll's purpose is to pry apart the sense of reality and present all its facets from unusual perspectives. Recent works include Call Cutta in a Box, a one-to-one telephone performance that takes place live from a call centre in India, Hauptversammlung (“Annual General Meeting”), a parasitic intervention at Daimler’s shareholders' meeting, the multi-player-on-stage-game Best Before (Vancouver 2010), the video-walk Outdoors (National Theatre of Wales 2011), various personalized versions of 100% [City ](in Vienna, London, Melbourne and many other cities in with 100 local citizens on stage) and Lagos Business Angels with Nigerian business people (Berlin 2012).
In 2007, Rimini Protokoll was awarded with the Faust Theatre Prize. In 2008 it received the European prize “New Realities in Theatre”, and in 2011 the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale for performing arts.

Since 2006, Kaegi has often worked with Lola Arias, most recently on Chácara Paraíso, which featured Brazilian policemen, and on Airport Kids, with global nomads between 7 and 13 years of age. Together they curated ciudades paralelas / parallel cities, a portable festival for urban interventions.
www.rimini-protokoll.de