The Immersive Arts Space hosts a variety of events at the lab itself throughout the year. Additionally, we participate in exhibitions, festivals conferences and many more.
We will inform you in detail about upcoming events here on this page as well as our social media channels (Instagram, LinkedIn) . Stay tuned!
In the meantime, have a look at our past [here]
Immersive, multimedia noise performance by STUDIO ZYKLOS
(Melody Chua & Chi Him Chik)
“every seven years we are literally, completely new beings.
every cell, dead and replaced.
we wonder, how all these new cells have remembered
how to be alive in the way
of their dead ancestors,
and what ghosts, when understood,
make us whole.”
STUDIO ZYKLOS is an ensemble and lab comprised of Melody Chua and Chi Him Chik—The core of ZYKLOS’ practice is performing with self-developed improvisation machines (Aiii and AIYA) in order to challenge their methods of improvisation and push them to find new ways of human-machine interaction, collaboration, and production. ZYKLOS aims to destabilize traditional hierarchies of human and machine, create innovative formats for music performance, and develop narratives beyond the anthropologic gaze. Personal storytelling through interactive media is at the heart of everything ZYKLOS does—a more-than-human dialogue of understanding that takes the form of music-making, translation, and movement across different bodies, both visible and invisible.
phantom//wash premieres at the Immersive Arts Space on 17 & 18.October 2024 at 19:30. Duration 45 min. Trigger warning: death, suicide, strobe, noise
Ticket reservation [here]
Please arrive 10 minutes prior to the start of the event.
Mugen is an multidisciplinary immersive opera, that is based on Japanese writer Natsume Soseki’s (1867-1916) first dream from his short story “10 Nights of Dreams” (1908). The piece is divided into 7 x 7 minute parts following the character’s symbolic journey, that forms the emotional core of “Mugen”, while its themes of death, love, longing and the ambiguous syntheses of time and space create a rich character.
“The dreamer realises that he is sitting with his arms folded next to a woman lying on a bed, and she quietly confesses to the figure that she will soon die. This surreal encounter with the woman doesn’t faze the dreamer, and he asks her when she will die and whether she has to die. She confesses that she cannot change her fate and that she would like to ask the figure to bury her after her certain death. He is instructed to dig her grave with a large shell, bury her in it and erect a gravestone with a fragment of a fallen star. Finally, he is to wait in a hundred-year vigil for her self-proclaimed return. The dreamer follows her instructions and begins to count the days that pass as the sun moves from east to west. After some time, he wonders whether the woman has betrayed him. Unexpectedly, a white lily begins to grow from the fresh grave. At the end of its blooming period, he finally knows that 100 years have passed and the mysterious return of the woman is imminent.”
It will be a seated show, with audio-visual interaction on projection, with lights programmed to the music, dance, live music.
The shows will take place on 31st October, 1st November (two shows) and 2nd November 2024. Tickets can be reserved [here]
Credits:
MUSIC & CONCEPT: PAUL TARO SCHMIDT
DRAMATURGY: LEONARD LAMPERT
CHOREOGRAPHY: IVANA BALABNOVA
DANCERS: COKO DE WINDT
COSTUME DESIGN/MAKE-UP: CAROLINA MISTZELLA
VISUAL ART: WEIDI ZHANG
ART DESIGN/POSTER: OLGA ANTONOVA
LIGHT DESIGN: CHI HIM CHIK
SOUND DESIGN: JONAS FULLEMANN
PHOTOGRAPHY: ARDENNES ORNATI, PAUL TARO SCHMIDT
VIDEOGRAPHY: BENJAMAT HESS, JUAN PABLO SALAZAR, OLIVER KIMBER
FILM EDITOR: BENJAMAT HESS
PROJECT_MANAGER: OLENA IEGOROVA
MUSICIANS
NARRATION ERI OSHIKAWA
SHO NAOMI SATO
VOCALS SALOME CAVEGN, ALEKSANDRA SUCUR
DOUBLE BASS AZUNA OISHI
PERCUSSION BARBARA RIBEIRO
PIANO PAUL TARO SCHMIDT
VOICES ARDENNES ORNATI, DMITRY SMIRNOV, ALEKSANDRA SUCUR, CHI HIM CHIK, SAIKO SASAKI, STEPHAN TEUWISSEN, OLGA ANTONOVA
STRINGS MAX BAILLIE, ALESSANDRO RUISI, GRETTA MUTLU, OLI LANFORD, HÉLÈNE CLEMENT, ANNE BEILBY, KIRSTEN JENSON, COLIN ALEXANDER
MUSIC CONTRACTOR ELEONORE, SUSIE GILLIS
RECORDED BY JOHN BARRETT AT ABBEY ROADS STUDIO 2
Zangezi and Doppelgänger at HEK Basel
Two projects – Zangezi and Doppelgänger – by the IAS will be part of this year`s Mesh Festival at HEK Basel. The festival is taking place for the very first time and aims to showcase art works, installations and performances that use and interact with AI, Mixed Reality and robots and asks questions about the possibilities of interaction and co-creation between artist and technology.
Zangezi will be performed on 17th October 2024.
Doppelgänger is part of the exhibition and will be on display from 16th to 20th October 2024.
Further information about Mesh Festival and ticket sales [here]
reconFIGURE will be showcased at KiKK Festival in Namur (Belgium)
Founded in 2011, Kikk International Festival of Digital & Creative Cultures is a city-wide exhibition space and market place for designer, scientists, makers, entrepreneus, artists, musicians and many more.
This year`s festival asks the questions “Can we still believe in visuals?” and “Can we distinguish between true and false in the digital age and the development of generative AI?” We live more and more in a world, where the line between reality and illusion is blurred. Our online presence has become a meticulously curated representation—a manifestation of the “selfie society.” Social networks thrive on self-promotion and the relentless pursuit of validation through likes and followers. The content we consume and create is standardized, shaped by influencers and algorithms, creating a disjunction between our digital personas and authentic identities (see more here).
Our project reconFIGURE will be part of the exhibition from 24th to 27th October 2024.
More infos [here].
On this page you can find the Immersive Arts Space upcoming projects. We develop and host a variety of projects, such as graduation student projects, internal research projects and collaborations with external partners.
International Workshop, 12. & 13.09.2024
How do skilled practices in current domains of art, science, and technology engage with new forms of digital remediation? What contemporary “dialectic[s] of de- and re-skilling” (Bishop 2017) are at play? This workshop sets out with tackling the raised question. Therefore, it brings together qualitative researchers in the social sciences, arts practitioners, and education scholars approaching and reflecting upon Bodies Remediated in and beyond their current work.
The international two-day workshop takes place at Kino Toni (3.G02) and is open to the public. For further information, please contact Philippe Sormani
Unraveling distributed space through 3D-audio, embodiment and Spatial Augmented Reality. SNSF-project by the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology (ICST), 2020-2024.
Telematic performances connect two or more geographically distant stages via communication technologies in such a way that performers can interact with each other. The audience experiences a specific insight into the overall event at each of the different locations, with the real presence of the local and virtual presence of the performers simultaneously overlapping.
Previous research has focused on technological developments that enable a high-quality connection with low latency, as well as the minimization or artistic handling of latency, i.e. the delay in the transmission of audio and video signals. Due to the mostly flat representation of the remote performers on a static screen (video) and in stereo monitoring (audio), the spatial information of the remote stage is largely lost. The research project investigates how spatial characteristics from the stages involved are superimposed. It draws on current technologies such as 3D audio (where sounds are reproduced in high spatial resolution) and spatial augmented reality techniques (where visual information from the remote stage is integrated into the local scenography by means of motion tracking and video mapping). Particular attention is paid to forms of embodiment and communication processes that enable an immersive experience.
Credits:
Patrick Müller (ICST, project lead)
Benjamin Burger (ICST)
Joel de Giovanni (ICST)
Martin Fröhlich (IAS, ICST)
Roman Haefeli (ICST)
Johannes Schütt (ICST)
Matthias Ziegler (ICST)
Hannah Walter (MA Transdiciplinary)
Immersive Arts: Performative Perspectives on Immersion
The immersive arts lecture series for Spring Semester 2024 investigates questions of immersion from the perspectives of the performing arts including dance, theater and even real time animation. Our exciting list of five guest lecturers includes Prof. Juergen Hagler (the head of the Ars Electronica animation jury), Arnd Wesemann (journalist and long-time editor of tanz), Corinne Soland (performing artist in film, theatre and interactive media arts), Dr. Ramona Mosse (head of the theater program at the ZHdK) as well as Gilles Jobin and Susana Panadés Diaz (world renowned choreographer and collaborating dance artist working with real time motion capture).
The pubic lecture series take place at the Kino Toni (room 3.G02, Pfingstweidstrasse 96) from 17:15-18:30h. They will be also available via live stream.
Performance is a word that evokes a multitude of interpretations. In the simplest terms, performance describes the act of executing a task or function, but it also encompasses the staging and presentation of the act itself. As a form of artistic expression, such an act can be a play, a piece of music, a dance choreography, or in the case of this lecture, live animation. In contrast to animated films, performative acts are typically unique, and though they can be repeated, each differs in some way. Immediacy and unpredictability, among many other qualities, are the building blocks of performance in this context. But all animations, whether pre-recorded or live, are essentially a composition of static elements brought to life as a performative act.
Jürgen Hagler (AT) studied art education, experimental visual design, and cultural studies at the University for Art and Design in Linz, Austria. He currently works as a professor of Computer Animation and Animation Studies in the Digital Media department at the Hagenberg Campus of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. Since 2014 he a leading researcher of the research group Playful Interactive Environments with a focus on the investigation of new and natural playful forms of interaction and the use of playful mechanisms to encourage specific behavioral patterns. Since 2009 he is the curator of the Ars Electronica Animation Festival and initiator and organizer of the symposium Expanded Animation
It’s funny: All theatres, next to their museum function, assert a claim to political realism. For example, a theatre that only would like to see poverty represented on the stage by the poor would therefore be a Poor Theatre. Likewise, a theatre that would only allows digital artificiality would therefore be called an Artificial Theatre. Are either of these true? Can a theatre become a place where even non-human sensors, data and artificial intelligence play a role? Or isn’t the theatre the place where precisely everything plays a role, in this case, even technologies. In this sense, Theatre would therefore be the place where we would no longer blindly trust the calculations of models or the actions of autonomous software. This talk proposes therefore the question: Don’t we owe technology one thing above all else: a playful approach to it? Raise the curtain on a theatre of true virtuality which will allow us to experience all kinds of possibilities.
Arnd Wesemann (DE) is long-time editor of the German magazine tanz. He studied Applied Theatre Studies, a then newly formed professional education program of the University of Giessen, graduating in 1987. In 1990 he became a free-lance writer on advanced theatre and arts phenomena, publishing essays and reports on contemporary theatre, dance and New Media events in magazines such as tanz, Theater der Zeit and the Swiss-printed magazine Musik & Theater. He has been a regular contributor to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, reporting about new tendencies in European theatres. In the field of electronic media, dance and the respecting performing arts, he freelanced for Die Zeit, Frankfurter Rundschau and Screen Multimedia. In October 1994 he published a monograph on the Flemish avant garde stage director Jan Fabre with Fischer-Verlag and the book Data dummies & Net nomades with Fannei & Walz, Berlin. Since 1997 he is editing Europe’s Leading Dance Magazine, tanz, now in his 25th year and now the Global dance platform tanz.dance. He has been lecturing, teaching on Dance und New Media as well as serving on numerous juries and panels.
In the world of performing arts, actors and performers are not exclusively in demand for theater, film or circus. Characters are also brought to life in video games, interactive installations and virtual reality films. Corinne Soland leads us through movement exercises to understand the process of training locomotion for “the Volume” – the capture stage. What are differences in Game movement versus Narrative 360° Stories? The Immersive Arts Space researcher gives insights on how to teach performance with MoCap technologies and if (& how) this technology can shape and shift a performance. With a focus on acting, the lecture provides key concepts and current topics of Corinnes research at the IASpace in chosen past and current projects as well as accumulated knowledge of production at the intersection with performers’ needs in the Volume.
Corinne Soland (CH) is a performing artist in film, theatre and interactive media arts. After completing a Motion Capture training with Performance Captured Academy (PCA UK) in 2019, Corinne has recorded movement for both 2D and 3D programs. Selected projects include Kusunda VR (NowHere Media, GER/INDIA), The Conspiracy (Third Party Film, USA), Amazing Monster! (wowl!, SmallCreative CH/FR) and LimitsVR (Tell Me the Story Prod. CH/FR). A freelance actor and voice over talent for both animation as well as live-action projects, Corinne’s latest roles are Dimitri in the TV Series “Guetnachtgschichtli” (SRF) and Anna in Neumatt (SRF, Zodiac, Netflix). Since 2019 Corinne is part of the Immersive Arts Space team as a research associate. Corinne teaches students coming from different disciplines how to translate their movement into a characters’ body narrative through the MoCap technology in Workshops and ZHdK seminars.
Theatres of the future are frequently invoked in the German-speaking cultural landscape to mark a crisis of institutions and to question theatre’s mandate in a publicly funded system. Yet, in this talk, Ramona Mosse would like to coin the futurity of theatre along a different trajectory and map the digital dramaturgies of the networked stage, i.e. a radically expanded theatre in which digital technologies have reshaped the space of performance and in which our established concepts of agency and authorship no longer hold. What is at stake, then, in such a hybrid future of theatre that had been so frequently called upon during the COVID pandemic? How does the reality differ from the manifestoes for a digital theatre future, spurred on by the 772% increase in digital theatre ticket sales (ETC Digital Theatre Study) during the pandemic? To explore these questions, Mosse will use the founding of and artistic programming at the HAU4, the digital stage of the HAU Hebbel-am-Ufer Theater in Berlin, as a case study. In particular, its resident artist group Interrobang moves into focus with their recent work “Commune AI” (2023), in which a digital audience sets out to build a virtual community, moderated by an AI.
Ramona Mosse (DE/CH) is the Head of Theatre at the Zurich University of the Arts. She has taught at the Free University Berlin, the Goethe University Frankfurt, Bard College Berlin, and Columbia University. In her research, she explores digitality in performance, genre and media in/of the theatre, and contemporary political performance practices. From 2021-2022, she headed up the VolkswagenFoundation funded research project Viral Theatres, which documents the aesthetic shifts of pandemic theatre-making.
Cie Gilles Jobin is focusing on technology and innovation for real time performances at a distance. Creating multiple groundbreaking projects Gilles Jobin is recognized as one of a leading creative force in the XR world. Gilles is regularly invited as an international guest lecturer on dance and technology in Europe, Asia and Americas. Geneva’s company studio is equipped for motion capture and digital creation and structured as an affordable research and production center for motion capture and digital technology from the point of view of the performing arts. In this talk, Jobin and his main dancer/collaborator Susana Panadés Diaz will discuss the company’s artistic process working with technologies like Motion Capture and Virtual Reality.
Gilles Jobin (CH) is a choreographer living and working in Geneva whose productions have been performed all over the world since 1995. Based in London from 1997 to 2004 he created the groundbreaking pieces A+B=X (1997), Braindance (1999), The Moebius Strip (2001) and Under Construction (2002), relying on choreographic language outside of established aesthetic frameworks that included forays into visual arts and live art. In 2003 he created TWO-THOUSAND-AND-THREE for the 22 dancers of the Ballet of the Grand Théâtre de Genève for a performance that “transcends both classical and contemporary dance” (Libération). His creations are being presented in major film festivals such as the Sundance Film Festival (2018 and 2020) and the Venice Film Biennial (2018 and 2020), leading dance festivals such as the Lyon Dance Biennial (2018) or BAM (2019) in New York or museums such as Haus For Electronishe Kunst / HEK in Basel. With the same creative team and dancers behind Magic Window (2019) and Dance Trail (2020), two augmented reality dance pieces, followed by La Comédie Virtuelle a multiuser VR piece and La Comédie Virtuelle – live show a real time multiuser performance in VR. In 2021 he created Cosmogony, a dance piece motion captured live in the company’s studios and streamed in real time globally.
Susana Panadés Diaz (CH) studied classical and contemporary dance at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona, before entering the P.A.R.T.S.programme in Brussels, directed by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. She worked with Caterina Sagna’s dance company in 2001 on the creation of Sorelline. From 1999 to 2004 she worked as a performer with Fabienne Berger in: Azur Blues, Natal, Océane Lili and Avril en mai. Since 2005 she has worked with Cie Gilles Jobin as a performer in a variety of projects. She was part of the cast for The Moebius Strip (Pachuca 2007) and A+B=X (Paris 2010) re-runs and has also worked as artistic assistant and multimedia manager for the company. Susana Panades Diaz is Cie Gilles Jobin’s main dance artist. She is an expert in digital motion capture. Member of the Cie Gilles Jobin since 2005, Susana is extremely familiar with the company’s dance style. Her role is to resolve issues related to the optimisation of motion capture from the point of view of the performers.
Zangezi is a Russian Cubo-Futurist poem/play written by the poet Velimir Khlebnikov 101 years ago in 1922. The story revolves around Zangezi, a prophet who speaks in the language ZAUM, a Russian word that is translated as “beyondsense.” Zangezi speaks with and can understand the birds, the gods, the stars and speaks in those languages as well as in poetic and also what K. called “ordinary” language. The Immersive Arts Space is working on this text because as a futurist work, Zangezi deals with is a fundamental human question which is increasingly becoming a problem for machines – what is the basis of language? Is language only about meaning based on syntax? Is it about predictable sequences? Rules and probabilities? Or is there something else going on that is universal and cosmic about language not as words and their meanings but as an act of sound?
Indeed, Khlebnikov, who had a mystical belief in the power of words, thought that the connections between sounds and meaning were lost during mankind’s history, and it was up to those in the future to rediscover them. 101 years later we ask how we might be able to approach Zangezi’s operations on multiple levels – cosmological, political, historical, technological – in a moment where we are increasingly surrounded by machines that produce something that appears like human language but in which there is no speaker, no body and no sound.
The Immersive Arts Space recreated fragments of the play as a work in progress for the REFRESH#5 festival, that took the form of a theatrically staged reading within the technical machine of the Immersive Arts Space itself.
Credits:
Chris Salter (Direction, Sound Design, Performance)
Corinne Soland (performer)
Stella Speziali (Development Meta Human)
Valentin Huber (Visual Design/Unreal Engine)
Norbert Kottmann (Visual Design/Unreal Engine)
Martin Fröhlich (Show control)
Eric Larrieux (Sound Design)
Sébastien Schiesser (Light Design)
Ania Nova (Russian voice over)
