Author: kjungic

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Captured! Zwischen Aufmerksamkeit und Überwachung

Festival from 14.-15. February 2026, 11-18:00
Kornhausforum, Kornhausplatz 18, Stadtsaal, 1. OG, Bern

A two-day festival all about sensors! At “Captured!”, visitors can explore the impact of sensor technology on our daily lives. They can experience provocative artworks and audience interventions using digital capture technologies firsthand.

Sensors are everywhere—from the clothes we wear to the cars we drive to the spaces where we work, exercise, drink, play, and sleep. Combined with artificial intelligence, these sensors constantly collect and analyze data about us, blurring the boundaries between our bodies and our devices. “Captured!” at the Kornhausforum explores how these sensor and data collection devices are changing our understanding and perception of the world around us.

The festival presents artistic projects from Switzerland, India, South and North America that deal with how sensors are increasingly shaping our bodies and lives and collecting more and more of our data. The festival’s works focus on the themes of sensor technology, surveillance, and hacking and include video projections and installations, VR works, audio, and a live performance in which visitors can hear and see their biosignals in real time. The artistic works are complemented by short workshops with the audience and interactive discussions with artists, experts, and Swiss activist organizations.

The participants in “Captured!” are part of “Bodies-Machines-Publics,” a two-year art-science-technology project funded by Pro Helvetia that brings together the Kornhausforum (Bern), the Immersive Arts Space/ZHdK (Zurich), Khoj Studios (New Delhi), and the Nave Center for Artistic Residencies and Creation (Santiago de Chile) to explore the artistic use of new technologies and their sociocultural impact. Captured! is supported by the AGORA program of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

The festival is the closure event of the 2 year long project BODIES-MACHINES-PUBLICS, a project funded by Pro Helvetia Synergies.

Credits:
Christopher Salter (curation)
Jana Eske (curation)
Fabio Ballinari (concept and production)
Atelier Pol (key visual)

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AI Futures in the Performing Arts

Roundtable discussion, Thursday, 19th June 2025, 18:30-20:00
Hybrid event

On Thursday, June 19, 2025, 18:30-20:00, a public roundtable discussion on “AI Futures in the Performing Arts” will take place in the Immersive Arts Space. Internationally renowned experts will discuss the future of artificial intelligence in the performing arts. The event can also be followed online. Participants include Ulf Otto (Ludwig Maximilian University Munich), Tina Lorenz (Zentrum f. Kunst & Medien Karlsruhe), Katerina El Raheb (University of the Peloponnese, Greece), Maria Chatzichristodolou (University of Arts London). Moderated by Chris Salter (IAS) and Ramona Mosse (DDK).

The discussion is part of an international workshop that aims to lay the foundation for a European research cooperation in the field of “Small Generative AI in the Performing Arts”. The aim is to establish a pan-European network of scientists, technologists, artists and cultural institutions that deals with the use of “small”, data-saving AI models in theater and dance. These locally executable systems offer new possibilities for the interactive, embodied practice of the performing arts.

If you want to join on site, please register via Eventfrog
If you want to join online, the link will be published here soon before the event.

*Photo credit: Regula Bearth, ZHdK 2020

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MESH – Festival of Art and Technology

Zangezi-Experiments and doppelgaenger:apparatus at HEK Basel

We are delighted to be part of the first edition of MESH Festival! The new festival for digital art and technology, a cooperation between HEK (House of Electronic Arts), iarts and HGK Basel. You can expect exhibitions, screenings, talks, performances and a two-day conference.

Doppelgänger, screenshot by Chris Elvis Leisi

Two projects – Zangezi-Experiments and doppelgaenger:apparatus – 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.
doppelgaenger:apparatus 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]

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Mugen

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

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Kikk Festival

24th to 27th October 2024
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).


More infos [here].

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Current Projects

On this page you can find current and upcoming projects. We develop and host a variety of projects, such as graduation student projects, internal research projects and collaborations with external partners.

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Instructions for Use

Instructions for Use is a participatory performance for four members of the general public who wear mixed reality headsets and interact with each other in a real physical space. The headsets’ embedded cameras show visitors the real world around them, in contrast to the computer-generated worlds favored by VR experiences.

The work is inspired by Fluxus performance and by artist Bruce Nauman’s repetitive, ritualistic endurance videos from the 1960s, in which language is used to instruct physical action. Here, visitors hear instructions generated by large language models that analyze what the headset cameras see in the environment, then send voiced-over instructions to the visitors in real time. These instructions ask visitors to explore the room with their bodies and to engage and interact with other visitors — and eventually begin to insult the visitors and visually censor what they see in the real environment. The AI-produced instructions provoke surprising actions and interactions between visitors, creating a strange performance in which human beings execute instructions imagined by a machine. The work asks a simple yet profound question in an age confronted by so-called “machine intelligence”: what happens when AI tells humans how to perform being human?

Exhibitions

Credits

Oliver Sahli (Artist)
Chris Salter (Artist)
Stavros Balis (Scenography)

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Conversations with Puppets

Part of the exhibition “The Museum of the Future – 17 Digital Experiments”
29th August 2025 untill 1st February 2026, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich


The exhibition ‘The Museum of the Future – 17 Digital Experiments’ examined the potential, areas of application, forms of content expansion and implementation options relating to digitality in forward-looking museum and educational work.

About the project
The Immersive Arts Space` contributing project is called ‘Conversations with Puppets’. It offers an innovative and interactive experience in which the visitors become an integral part of Fred Schneckenburger’s puppet cabaret. After World War II, the versatile artist Fred Schneckenburger founded the “Puppencabaret Fred Schneckenburger” in Zurich and enjoyed success throughout Europe with his sketches. His expressionistic, surreal stick puppets were characterized by their idiosyncratic and unique design. In terms of content, his pieces criticized the hypocrisy and contradictions of the conservative bourgeoisie, with stereotypical Swiss characters in the form of puppets.

Technical architecture
Three of the original stick puppets – Kaspar, der Polizist and die Moral/das Fräulein – from the collection of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich have been photogrammetrically captured and digitized. 3D artists worked out the details of the textures and cloths to recreate and animate the physical appearance of the puppets surfaces. In addition, Motion Capture recordings were used to add more puppet-like movement to the avatars.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI form the basis of the interaction and conversations. In order to create a character prompt for each puppet, the original audio recordings of the pieces in which the specific puppets appeared, were transcribed and analyzed. The result of the analysis were distillations of the most characteristic words and/or expressions of the puppets, which were then inserted in the prompt. In addition, to the character references the prompts were further developed to fit the role of each puppets within the exhibition and its dramaturgy.

Further, the interaction is supported by different systems, aiming at a flawless interaction and conversation. SAR motion, a system internally developed by Florian Bruggisser, detects via a camera the movement and body of a visitor. This triggers the interaction and the puppet starts to talk.

Photo credits: Chris Elvis Leisi, ©ZHdK 2025
Photo credits: Chris Elvis Leisi, ©ZHdK 2025


Team:
Florian Bruggisser: Technical Lead and Software Development
Oliver Sahli: Idea, Interaction and System Integration
Chris Elvis Leisi: Interaction and Experience Design  
Stella Speziali: 3D Artist, Animation
Johannes Köberle: 3D Artist
Corinne Soland: Motion Capture 
Pascal Lund-Jensen: Audio Engineering     
Sébastien Schiesser: Technical support
Kristina Jungić: Project coordination
Prof. Christopher Salter: Initiative / Director IAS

Photo credits: Chris Elvis Leisi, ©ZHdK 2025

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Val Mucilaginosa

XR-Installation, Botanical Garden (UZH) until 11th October 26

Val Mucilaginosa brings together the knowledge of herbal practitioners and scientists, ethnobotanical and biochemical research, sensory media, and artistic speculation to create an immersive experience. Rather than presenting knowledge as a series of conclusions or explanations, the installation frames healing with plants as a relational, situated, and embodied process that is continuously negotiated between different forms of knowledge. At the heart of Val Mucilaginosa is the question of how healing knowledge can emerge when scientific research, traditional plant-based practices, and artistic research are allowed to intersect without one system of knowledge being subordinated to another.

Val Mucilaginosa is a a Mixed Reality installation in which biochemical and relational ways of knowing how plants heal meet in the mucilaginous in-between. A speculative valley where two knowledge systems slip into one another.

EXHIBITION & TOUR

The experience is part of the exhibition “PLANTS AS PLANTS AS MEDICINE – DIVERSITY MEDICINE – DIVERSITY IN SWITZERLAND” on display until 11th October 2026.
Botanical Garden University of Zurich, Zollikerstrasse 107, 8008 Zürich

Guided tour for ZHdK members (students and employees) on 1st October, 18-19:30
Please register, as space is limited: Eventfrog

CREDITS

The art work was created by the artist Isabell Bullerschen together with Chris Elvis Leisi (Experience Design), Florian Baumann (3D Design), Magda Drozd (Composition/Sound Design) and Hannah Mehler (Voice Over/Singing Voice).

Realised with Andreas Wilhelm (Scent), Benjamin Creek (3D Printing), Glas Keller Basel and Neonatelier Bern (Glass works) and Jordis Fellfrau (Art Assistant).

The project was developed in close exchange with herbal practitioners and scientists: Dr. Manuela Dahinden (Plant Science Center), Dr. Maja Dal Cero (University of Zurich), Elsbeth Frei (gardener and herbal practitioner), Prof. Jürg Gertsch (University of Bern), Dr. Andreas Lardos (ZHAW), Dr. med. Maja Oberholzer von Tolnai (herbal practitioner), Eidg. dipl. Apothekerin Nelly Richina (Berg-Apotheke), Dr. med. Dorin Ritzmann (herbal practitioner and researcher) and PD Dr. Caroline Weckerle (University of Zurich).

We were also honoured to work with 3D data provided by the CellarchLab at the Biozentrum, University of Basel. Special thanks go to Prof. Ben Engel, Dr. Ricardo Diogo Righetto, Dr. Annemarie Perez Boerema and Dr. Wojciech Wietrzysnki.

Curators: Martina Huber, We Are AIA; Dr. Manuela Dahinden and PD Dr. Caroline Weckerle, Botanical Garden of the University of Zurich.

Commissioned by We Are AIA for their project “Botanical Memories – On Healing and Care” & the Botanical Garden of the University of Zurich for “Plants as Medicine – Diversity in Switzerland”.

Co-creation: Immersive Art Space, Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

Funded by Vontobel Stiftung, Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Kanton Zürich Fachstelle Kultur, Stiftung Erna und Curt Burgauer.

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Wilding AI

Collective in Residency, 21st to 26th September 2026


Wilding AI is a nomadic research-creation lab. It questions the current domestication of artificial intelligence into predefined operational modes, aiming instead to foster new avenues for creative expression, particularly in technology-driven performances and installations. 

As a collective of artist-researchers, Wilding AI rejects the commodification of technology. Instead, we engage with it poetically and experimentally by (mis)using, hijacking, or outright breaking machine-learning media generators to explore new forms of human-machine collaboration.

Centering on public engagement, the collective focuses on research-creation residencies and open-studio presentations at international venues, including MUTEK and SAT Montreal, MUTEK Mexico, MONOM Studios for CTM Festival Berlin, and 4DSOUND for FIBER Festival in Amsterdam.

From September 21 to 26, the Immersive Art Space will host Wilding AI’s Pía Baltazar, Beth Coleman, Sahar Homami, Daniela Huerta, Maurice Jones, Tegan Maharaj, Gadi Sassoon, Debashis Sinha, and Alexandre Saunier (Senior Researcher at the IAS/ZHdK). 

This creation residency will be the occasion for them to give insights on the development of their work in two evenings of open studios and a final performance presentation of the residency’s outcome. 
Website: https://wilding.ai/

Public events

Wednesday, 23.09, 18h-20h: Artist discussion and open studio
Thursday, 24.09, 18h-20h: Artist discussion and open studio
Saturday, 26.09, 16h-18h: Performance

Space is limited. First come, first served, or register by sending an email to alexandre.saunier@zhdk.ch