Sophie De Somere is the artistic director and founder of ONBETALBAAR (Priceless) based in Ghent, Belgium. It’s a workshop, a think tank in one. ONBETAALBAR is a space where carpenters, architects, craftsmen, stage designers and artists rethink the transience of objects: new tools and things are created from discarded items, tailored to individual needs, new possibilities and the society of the future. Ecology, economy, philosophy, design and the appreciation of (existing) material become the decisive design tools. Barbara Raes worked for over 14 years as a curator and artistic director at major institutions for the performing arts including Vooruit (Ghent) and Arts centre BUDA  (Kortrijk). However, her deep interest in transience, nursing and care work as well as rituals led to her to change her working focus: with BEYOND THE SPOKEN she initiated an artistic project that develops new rituals that address the transforming nature and needs of an increasingly secularized society.

As a temporary collective, Sophie De Somere and Barbara Raes are searching for ways to combine art and care work, thus looking at a field that has gained in relevance against the background of the Corona crisis. Raes and De Somere explore how objects or new rituals can initiate dialogue between people with different needs and customs. How could this lead to the creation of new forms of farewell and mourning? As a starting point for their research, the artists are looking for dialogue partners in nursing homes and social initiatives in Essen-Katernberg.

In the aim of achieving long-term resonance in the district, the duo jointly develop visions and model projects such as light installations, encounter projects with school children, in care homes, and other participatory based projects that can connect with existing WerkStadt formats to have lasting effects and influences. The subject of bereavement is at the core of Barbara Raes' work. She researches existing farewell rituals and their associated objects and applies her findings to designing new rituals that suggest new strategies for dealing with loss outside of traditional, religious contexts.

In her regular occupation, Sophie De Somere works with concepts of recycling management systems and develops prototypes for corresponding objects. In their joint artistic work, they share a high sensitivity towards diverse groups - they trace the needs within communities in moments of transformation and fragility and encourage people to both disclose and demand their own needs.

Nathan Fain works as a creative technologist building the underlying technological objects and interactive components for an artist's vision or writing and developing tech-utopic characters of his own design. Notable collaborations include Jaha Koo's ›Cuckoo‹, Rimini Protokoll's ›Situation Rooms‹ and several appearances of Johannes Paul Raether’s aLifveForms including ›Protektoramea 5.5.5.1‹ and ›X Shared Spaces‹.  His technical creations are often made to extend collective experience with intended real-world consequences by design. ›Empathy Bots‹, ›Surrogate Witches‹, network oracles and ›Assassination Markets‹ are examples of these fiction/non-fiction interfaces. At the centre of Johannes Paul Raether’s work are constructed identities (so called aLifveForms or AlterIdentities and SelfSisters of the artist) emerging at various sites in public space where they research, teach and tell stories. As colourfulbeings, made up from everyday objects, they discuss complex topics such as bio and reproduction industries, globalized tourism or occult substances in contemporary technology. The appearances and devices created by the aLifveForms have been shown at, among others, the 9th Berlin Biennale, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Fridericianum in Kassel, Savvy Contemporary in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions took place at District in Berlin, Transmission Gallery in Glasgow, and Ludlow 38 in New York City. Raether is currently Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg.

Nathan Fain and the aLifveForms have collaborated on various occasions since 2016. In awarding them a fellowship, PACT supports their decidedly interdisciplinary working approach and the development of their collaborative proposal under the title ›Techno Poesis‹ to create a space in which to shape a new and specific form of basic technologic-artistic research. Within their fellowship, Fain and Raether will attempt to dismantle a few pre-conditions and try to work for once beyond the project based economy, which haunts both their technologically applicable work in digital engineering and the artistic – creative industries.

For this purpose, they will use the motif of the ›Surrogate Witch‹, a motif coined by Protektorama, one of Raether’s aLifveForms in various moments, which will be designed as a cross-platform and multifunctional application within the framework of the Fellowship. Their ›Surrogate Witch‹ intends to be more than a techno-prop, but a machinic co-performer, a language device equally important as the script or a dramaturg. In the process of the fellowship they will construct expanded timelines (dramaturgies) for audience bodies (smartphone holding bodies) along the lines of the surrogate witch (set of digital performer-audience-connectors). This relation will extend before and past the date of performance and past the space of the stage. The framework itself will take many existing digital forms (such as a java scripted browser-based internet platform, an app in the app store, a chat bot) and creolize them into a set of interconnected technological units that function together as a networked “body” or “entity”. The ›Surrogate Witch‹ will be created as a “medium” that – through constant (re)developments and re-applications – has the potential to mutate from a definite app on a platform into a set of technological and artistic tools that facilitate their work in what they call "communeering", a term, which Raether coined through his AlterIdentities, to define a hybrid of the formerly distinct practices of engineering and community organising. Within this approach, their practice is not rooted in the theatre space, but rather connects to places of everyday and digital life.

Complex projects like ›Surrogate Witch‹ would not be feasible in the short production cycles typical of the current model of creating theatre work. Raether’s aLifveForms and Fain would therefore like to use the Fellowship to develop the ›Surrogate Witch‹ as a sustainable project: beyond the needs of a single-use practicality emerges a techno-poetic entity - even an artificial body form –  with hopefully its own unique structure and language. It ceases to be a simple tool, goes beyond modernist assumptions of author, actor and prop and can gain the status of a co-author, co-actor, an entity that becomes – aLifve – quasi “alive”. It is intrinsic to such endeavour, that it should be not only open source but fluid in its applicability. The process of development will allow collaborations with other developers or technical students at regional universities. Raether and Fain also propose that the inevitable failures of such experimental development be documented and published.