LiebDing

LiebDing is a web-based interactive dating application that transforms the foyer of the Stadttheater Gießen into a space of encounter between audiences and the theatre material memory. Visitors use their own mobile devices to browse and match with items from the prop collection — costumes, furniture, props — each of which has been given a voice through a custom chatbot interface.

The chatbots are not generic conversational agents. Each one is built from interviews with the theatre technical and backstage staff: the seamstresses, prop masters, stagehands, and archivists whose knowledge of these objects spans decades. Their anecdotes, technical expertise, and personal attachments to specific items form the conversational material that the chatbots draw upon. When a visitor matches with a prop, the ensuing dialogue channels not only the object fictional biography but also the accumulated human experience of those who have handled, repaired, and cared for it.

The work operates as a prologue and companion piece to the stage performance Versuch über die nachhaltige Ordnung merkwürdiger Dinge, extending the performance inquiry into material culture and institutional memory into an interactive, audience-driven format. Where the stage work examines the ordering and preservation of things, LiebDing invites the public into a direct, intimate relationship with those same things — reframing the prop collection not as inert storage but as a living archive of theatrical labour.

LiebDing was developed with funding from the Fonds Zero programme of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, which supports climate-conscious cultural production, and with additional support from Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien. It launched on 1 November 2025 at the Stadttheater Gießen and remains accessible online at liebding.art.