Nido Santo was the Walden Crew stage at Zugvögel Festival 2026: a Church of the Phoenix where religious and holy themes were twisted into sarcasm, spectacle, and play. Less piety, more ritual for dancing — a temporary sanctuary built for fun, gossip, and collective mischief.
Alongside a serious soundsystem and party lighting, the stage became a cluster of installations: an AI confession cabin, dense facade videomapping, an interactive rocker (Wippe), a physics-driven church organ, phoenix sculptures, and hand-painted mosaic windows carrying sharp social critique.
Creative Direction
My role sat at the hinge between concept and crew: creative direction and team coordination, light concept and mounting, plus a custom TouchDesigner patch for light effects and a MIDI interface so other Walden members could take over light operation live. I also built the phoenix sculpture behind the DJ, coordinated the constellation of installations across the stage, and stayed on call for technical know-how whenever a system needed translating between artists.
The brief for myself was not to own every gadget — it was to make the whole church readable as one world, while enabling specialists to go deep on their own chapels.
Installations
Confession Cabin — Chris Stenkamp. A speech AI booth using Whisper and local LLMs. Visitors offered Beichten (confessions); the system collected them, anonymized them, and later recited sins back in the third person — gossip as liturgy, privacy as stagecraft.
Interactive Wippe — Virginia Deppe. A physical rocker with angle sensors and videomapping on its surface. Kaleidoscopic forms shifted with every lean and bounce, turning body weight into optics.
Church Organ — Nico. A single-instrument cabin powered by custom, science-based synths — physics as hymn, keys as experiment.
Facade & Mapping — Marcus, Caro & Peter Haehnel. Marcus and Caro hand-painted a facade of mythical wood-spirit imagery. Peter Haehnel mapped that painted surface into live, mesmerizing visuals — nights of calibration, then festival-long live operation riding the paint.
Mosaic Windows & Rosetta — Eva. Hand-painted mosaics of a fiery bird, loaded with social critique — including smashed smartphones still glowing with social media. Holiness, interrupted by the feed.
Crew & Process
Walden Crew was eighteen people with overlapping crafts — build, paint, code, sound, light, sculpture, operations. Another year of inspiring madness, and a noticeable shift: smoother planning, less wasted effort, sharper results. The church held because the crew held.
Thanks to the Walden Crew for building a sanctuary that never took itself too seriously — and for making holiness something you could dance inside.
