HOLIDAI

HOLIDAI

Finally, a real vacation—an interactive play for AI and players ready for a break
 

By: Reinhold Bidner, Tobias Hammerle, Georg Hobmeier, Sophia Reiterer, Sonja Prlić and Karl Zechenter.
Stage: Selina Nowak, technical stage development: Sebastian Frisch, testing and media art consulting: Georg Hobmeier, assistance: Jana Sturm

Premiere: December 17, 2025, 7 p.m., ARGEkultur, Salzburg

Tickets: ARGEkultur

Additional performances:

December 17, 9 p.m.
December 18, 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
December 19, 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.

Live your best life on the vacation of your dreams, unique and made just for you! gold extra takes you to dream beaches and cities: In the AI live theater HOLIDAI, dreams come true so much that you wish you were awake. Risks and side effects are taken care of.

It all begins during the most wonderful time of the year, on vacation: AI chatbots meet CNN over an alcopop in an Airbnb: Here, smart home technology, crime noir, and the perfect vacation come together.
HOLIDAI—The freedom you need! Here, everything is tailored to your own wishes and offers adventure depending on your mood. Play along and explore the surprises that await you in the place of dreams. Come to the AI Escape Room and take part in an experience that is created anew each time, together with the audience.

How did we get here? Smart devices have taken over navigation, playlists have taken over our taste in music, ChatGPT finishes our work, and passport photos come from Midjourney. Smart watches, smart homes, and artificial intelligence push us comfortably through life. HOLIDAI takes a pointed look at AI, which can take so much off our hands so that we finally have time for something else. But for what? What experiences do we have without mishaps, mistakes, and misadventures? In gold extra's interactive play, smart devices have taken care of that too. HOLIDAI is the sum of all the vacation mysteries that can only happen to you.

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. a glimpse into the preparations:

 

The play is being co-produced by ARGEkultur Salzburg and will premiere there in December 2025.
 

Co-production:

gold extra regularly collaborates with ARGEkultur. Most recently, this collaboration resulted in the documentary escape room experience BORDER GRID (2021) and its digital sequel ONCE UPON UNSTEADY GROUNDS (2023/2024) in the Digital Foyer of ARGEkultur.

The Prequel: BLACK BOOK

They stand on dark street corners and watch people come and go, they rush after passers-by who quickly turn out to be false leads. And it's always raining. It's been like this for weeks: the group of detectives has been given an insignificant-looking surveillance assignment, something that should take two or three days to complete.
But the case grows until it increasingly occupies all the employees of the detective agency, and at the same time becomes impossible to handle. There is nothing left to do but return the case, but that proves impossible. And by then, the detectives have long since become deeply entangled in the case themselves.

This performance focuses on the observations and assumptions of the group of performers, which give rise to their own crime thriller. Black Book is an experimental play with which we are further developing our aesthetic work with the live escape room Border Grid. It is a play that we perform ourselves with our fears and assumptions. In our dark backyard, Franz Kafka, Frank Miller, Boris Vian, and Paul Auster meet and shoot a film noir.

The first prequel session took place in November 2023, followed by two more in 2024 and a final session in 2025. In the play sessions, we explored the new format with the audience—especially the interplay of AI, procedurally generated content, and audience participation.