Wienies in Woyzeck are often sound-based and take into account the scale of the installation space. Zones of instrumental sound highlight recognizable character leitmotifs and draw the audience member through the space to scene locations with corresponding characters. Other wienies include tangible interfaces. These are physical items intended for hands-on audience interaction, such as a collection of Woyzeck's personal items, six decapitated dolls with their corresponding severed heads, a miniature house, and a life-sized mannequin. AR can be understood as a future screen and the experience of encountering scenes located spatially can be termed an embodied form of interactive or hyperlinked fiction.
Woyzeck can be considered the first plebian tragedy. George Steiner writes in The Death of Tragedy: Woyzeck is the first real tragedy of low life. It repudiates an assumption implicit in Greek, Elizabethan, and neo-classic drama: the assumption that tragic suffering is the somber privilege of those who are in high places. [...] Büchner was the first who brought to bear on the lowest order of men the solemnity and compassion of tragedy. (274-275) The innovative use of a socially disenfranchised anti-hero as a subject matter for tragedy combined with the perhaps unintentional but nevertheless innovative lack of order for scenes makes Woyzeck revolutionary in tone. This project reflects the structure and themes of Büchner's original script by allowing a subversion of form that requires audiences to create their own form or path through the narrative. Although Büchner was an anatomist, which would imply he was accustomed to fixed order and rigid procedure, he was also a radical social activist. While Büchner may have intended a traditionally linear order for the play, his intentions appear irrelevant in the work. The play's theme of anti-establishment social justice is fitting to the unstructured form of the plot. As Augusto Boal writes in "The Theater as Discourse," less predictable forms may allow for a more socially equitable conversation between the audience and the theater piece. Boal writes: The bourgeoisie already knows what the world is like, their world, and is able to present images of this complete, finished world. The bourgeoisie presents the spectacle. On the other hand, the proletariat and the oppressed classes do not know yet what their world will be like; consequently their theater will be the rehearsal, not the finished spectacle. (80)
Since Woyzeck is a piece about the down-trodden, it seems natural to tell the story using a form that challenges the traditional authority of the author as well as the coterie of literary experts devoted to the preservation of the author's status. I must be careful to note here that this production of Woyzeck is by no means strictly revolutionary. Far from it. This Woyzeck was created within the academic sphere, in a million dollar AR lab. This is not a public art piece. But the form of the piece is very important. As Suzan-Lori Parks writes, "[...] form is not merely a docile passive vessel, but an active participant in the sort of play which ultimately inhabits it" (7). Perhaps Büchner, a young social revolutionary living under the threat of arrest and torture, knew this about the power of form when he failed to order his scenes.
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