You Are the Line in the Nerdwald — Garbicz 2026
Back in the forest.
This summer, das Shining had the pleasure of bringing You Are the Line to the Nerdwald at Garbicz Festival 2026 — a wonderfully strange little corner of the festival dedicated to interactive art, light, sound, experiments and things that are sometimes difficult to explain before you experience them.
And honestly, it is difficult to imagine a better habitat for this piece.
You Are the Line turns the people in front of it into the artwork itself. A camera captures the contours of moving bodies in real time, while three laser projectors translate these outlines into large drawings of light. There is no predefined choreography and no finished image: every movement changes the composition. The audience becomes performer, drawing and data at the same time.
In the middle of the Nerdwald, surrounded by trees, strange machines, installations and people drifting through the night, the work developed a life of its own. Sometimes people discovered their outlines almost accidentally; sometimes they immediately started experimenting — stretching, dancing, merging with others or trying to confuse the system. That moment when someone realizes “wait, that’s me” is still one of my favourite parts of showing this installation.
It is also exactly what interests us about You Are the Line: the border between observer and performer disappears. Technology is present, but it is not really the protagonist. The body is. The machine simply watches, translates and returns movement to the space as light.
The work itself reaches surprisingly far back in history. It refers to the ancient story of Dibutades, in which the outline of a shadow becomes the origin of drawing. Here, that simple gesture is translated into a contemporary system of cameras, algorithms and lasers — a continuously changing choreography between body, data, light and space.
A huge thank you to the Nerdwald crew and everyone at Garbicz for inviting us, helping us make this happen and giving experimental work a place inside such a beautiful and wonderfully chaotic environment. And, of course, thank you to everyone who stepped in front of the camera, danced, played, experimented and became a line for a moment.
After showing the installation at Bachstelzen / Fusion earlier this summer, seeing it transform again in a completely different environment was especially exciting. Every location changes the piece — and every crowd teaches us something new about it.
So: more forests, more walls, more architecture, more dancing bodies, please.
You Are the Line is available for festivals, exhibitions, clubs and other spaces where bodies are allowed to become light. If you have a place that might need three lasers and a little bit of controlled visual chaos: get in touch.
See you somewhere between the trees and the machines.