As a hub for research-creation, the Immersive Arts Space tackles a multifaceted challenge by pursuing and promoting an integrated program of transdisciplinary inquiry in and across research, teaching, service and production. The team members have their professional roots in film, game design, interaction design, music, computer science and engineering, and often members have a background in more than one discipline. The IASpace is part of the research cluster of the Digitalization Initiative of the Zurich Higher Education Institutions (DIZH).
User Testing
Thursday, 6th February 2025, 10:30-17:00 / Immersive Arts Space (1.J30)
We are currently developing two projects and need your help! Be a test user for two interactive projects and help us advance in our research. One project is a multiuser XR experience, that is created for 4 people. The second project is in an earlier stage (preliminary study) for an interactive installation created for the Museum für Gestaltung.
The testing lasts ca. 30 minutes, including the practical usage and a questionnaire in the end. It is held at the Immersive Arts Space and the associate researchers, responsible for the development, will be on site, gladly talk about the projects and their work.
If you are interested, please sign up for a time slot [here]. Feel free to forward the invite!
We thank every one for actively helping us and being part of our research!
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)
Minor Presentations
Intense weeks are behind us, now it’s time to reap the rewards and it is time to see what the students of our two minors, Basic and Advanced, have developed. There are two opportunities to do so.
5 March 2026, 5-8 p.m.
Final Presentation of the Immersive Arts Basic Minor
On Thursday, 5 March 2026, the closing event of Immersive Arts Basic Minor takes place, where students present their interactive works. After intensive introductions to the technical possibilities of the space, the students have developed their own works in transdisciplinary teams, based on motion capture technology, projection mapping, ambisonic sound and much more. The projects can be experienced without registration from 5 p.m. onwards. They will be presented one after the other, with an aperitif providing entertaining breaks between presentations. Prepare to be surprised by surreal talking forests, excerpts from an opera, interactive games and radioactive flowers.
Presentations:
5.30–6.00 p.m: [around] ALCINA by Sebastian Burckhardt, Leonardo Cavalli & Roman Lykov
6.00–6.30 p.m.: Techno-Spiritual Divination by Linda Knoll, Moritz Lienhard, Olivia Menezes & Manon Schnyder
6.30–7.00 p.m.: forest:gaze by Fei Fan, Virginia Guzmán Ellacuría, Crescencia Jiménez, & Valentina Zatevalneva
7.00–7.30 p.m.: Floral Rebound by Timon Daester, Olivier Jutzet, Samantha Pan & Alice Wéry
Where: Immersive Arts Space J1.30
10 March 2026, 6 p.m.
XR-Intervention at Opernhaus Zurich by the Immersive Arts Advanced Minor Students
Next Tuesday, the students of the Immersive Arts Advanced Minor will present their extended reality works at the Zurich Opera House. After intensively studying the production of Cardillac, their works offer visitors insights into Cardillac’s thoughts and actions: walk in a golden cage, visit crime scenes or explore the more than 100-year history of the play itself. One hour before the final performance on Tuesday and during the interval, visitors will have the opportunity to try out the students’ works at various locations in the foyer.
Where: Zurich Opera House, a ticket for the opera is needed to access the installations.
Probing XR’s Futures: Opening Workshop
“Extended reality” (XR) devices like Apple’s recently announced Vision Pro or Meta’s Oculus Quest 3 enable new possibilities for mixing the real world with a computationally generated one, promising to “change interaction as we know it.” What are we to make of this claim?
To tackle this question, Probing XR’s Futures brings together designers, scholars, artists and curators during a 4-year SNF-funded research project. Its opening workshop on Wednesday, 19 June 2024, will bring together project partners, collaborators, and interested researchers at the Immersive Arts Space to take a first stab at core issues relating to XR from contrasting perspectives. These perspectives include design fiction, sensory ethnography, video analysis, critical disability studies, STS and more.
The opening workshop at the IAS offers an apt opportunity to engage interdisciplinary conversation on design fiction, bodily experience, and critical inquiry, while providing a forum for instructive exchange between upcoming scholars and established researchers. Confirmed participants include Sabine Himmelsbach (HeK Basel), David Howes (Concordia), Lorenza Mondada (Basel), Pilar Orero (Barcelona), Andreas Uebelbacher (Zugang für Alle, Zurich).
Workshop participation is upon invitation. For those interested in joining, please contact Joëlle Kost at IAS.
Where: ZHdK | Immersive Arts Space | 1.J30
When: 19.06.2024
Probing XR’s Futures. Design Fiction, Bodily Experience, Critical Inquiry
Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) project, 2023-2027
“Extended reality (XR) devices like Apple’s recently announced Vision Pro or Meta’s Oculus Quest 3 enable new possibilities for mixing the real world with a computationally generated one, promising to “change interaction as we know it.” Yet, there is little research on exactly how XR might reshape bodily subjectivity and experience. Probing XR’s Futures utilizes a critically-historically informed, practice-based design approach to examines how XR technologies reimagine bodily subjectivity, interaction and experience, on the one hand, and how bodily experience could reimagine XR, on the other. The 4-year project employs critical, creative, conceptual and empirical approaches to address three questions: How is everyday interaction in XR achieved? How will XR change interaction and what social reciprocity and mutual access will be enabled? What concrete effects and forms of discipline will be enacted on disabled bodies interacting in XR? The objective is to use design fiction, a design research method that prototypes objects and scenarios to provoke new ways of thinking about the future, as a form of critical inquiry to probe the present and future of social interaction in XR in three different settings and contexts: the lab, public space and in collaboration with disabled researchers and communities. Situated at the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts, the project is at the interdisciplinary intersection of Critical VR studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and experimental media design. It will constitute one of the first in the context of Swiss and German speaking design research to develop alternative thinking and experimental aesthetic-design analysis, reflection and critique of XR directly in situated action and use with the general public.
Team:
Christopher Salter (Project Lead)
Philippe Sormani (Senior Researcher)
Puneet Jain (PhD Candidate)
Chris Elvis Leisi (Researcher)
Oliver Sahli (Researcher)
Stella Speziali (Researcher)
Pascal Lund-Jensen (Researcher)
Project Partners:
Andreas Uebelbacher (Access for All Foundation)
John David Howes (Concordia University Montreal, Sociology/Anthropology)
Sabine Himmelsbach (Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, HeK)
Pilar Orero (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Transmedia Research Group)
Lorenza Mondada (Universität Basel, Institut für Französische Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft)
SNF-project: Performing Artificial Intelligence
Swiss National Science Fund (SNSF) project, 2025-2029
Performing AI’s goal is to contextualize AI as a dynamic social and cultural artifact that is discursively and practically constituted (that is, performed) in specific contexts and situations. In other words, what does “AI” do, why and how does it do what it does, and what effects does it produce across different disciplines? The project takes the theoretical and conceptual lenses of performance and performativity for navigating AI’s messy entanglements between the social and political, technical and aesthetic.
The project has three core objectives: 1) understand how AI is performed differently in its multiple constitutions (discursive, material, situated) and in/across disciplines; 2) provide interdisciplinary research and training opportunities for a next generation of researchers to grapple with the complex, multi-scalar nature of AI; and (3) explore new forms of critical public engagement with AI across arts, science, policy and technology.
Performing AI will thus study AI’s performances in the making in three sites – the policy space, experimental scientific and artistic research labs, and otherwise mundane spaces. Examining AI in the making, the project explores how AI is discursively enacted in policy and governance and examines the material agency of AI in robotics, artificial life and digital arts where human actors have to interact with machinic systems in real time. It also draws upon and develops ethnographic and ethnomethodological approaches to trace the situated action and production of AI in public settings of the everyday including a museum as well as in hybrid art, science and technology laboratories.
Project Partners:
Anna Jobin (University of Friobourg)
Olivier Glassey (University of Lausanne)
Takashi Ikegami (University of Tokyo)
Christopher Salter (Zurich University of the Arts)
Zurich Art Weekend @ Immersive Arts Space
At the Zurich Art Weekend, the Immersive Arts Space will provide insights into two ongoing research projects that deal with the transfer of the visitor’s body into the digital domain in different ways. The multiuser mixed reality experience Doppelgänger invites visitors to a confrontation with their own self as a three-dimensional double in a real environment. In the installation A Hero’s Return, the viewers’ bodies provide the starting point for generative heroic images in real time.
When: 07.06.24 | 17:00 – 21:00
08.06.24 | 13:00 – 17:00
09.06.24 | 13:00 – 16:00
Where: ZHdK | Immersive Arts Space | 1.J30
Hero’s Return
The interactive installation A Hero’s Return transforms visitors’ poses into a digitally generated alter ego. The creation of the character and its background is realized in real-time by artificial intelligence models. This installation prototype explores the capabilities of these models (such as Stable Diffusion) and focuses on the technical and aesthetic possibilities in combination with the performative interaction with visitors. The installation also incorporates popular film representation techniques: a virtual camera performs a circular tracking shot around the scanned visitor’s body, reminiscent of scenes from numerous action hero films.
Credits:
Artists: Martin Fröhlich, Stella Speziali
Thanks to: Ege Seçgin
doppelgaenger:apparatus
doppelgaenger:apparatus is a multiuser mixed reality experience that enables participants to confront their computer generated 3D doubles in a real physical surrounding. Enabled by a custom designed AI-based process, a frontal 2D image of the participants is taken and quickly transformed into an animated 3D reconstruction. From the moment the visitors put on the headset, they see the real environment captured by a camera on the headset. Gradually, this familiar space shfits, with the appearance of the visitors’ double standing before them. Co-present with other participants, visitors intimately interact with their ‘mirror image’ while observing and interacting with others doing the same. While at first the participants get the feeling of controlling their ‘mirror image’, this rapidly shifts as their doubles, free from the constraints of the original bodies, start to invade the participants’ personal space, leading to a disturbing and uncanny play between them. Historically, a doppelgänger was seen as a ghostly counterpart for a living person, seen as an omen or sign of death. Freud later argued that encountering one’s double produces an experience of “doubling, dividing and interchanging the self.” This installation thus takes the next step in exploring how new digital sytems increasingly produce uncanny tensions between our bodies and their captured other.
Credits:
Artist and Development: Chris Elvis Leisi
Artist and Sound: Christopher Lloyd Salter
Machine Learning: Florian Bruggisser
Past exhibitions:
MESH Festival, 16. to 20. October 2024 at HEK in Basel. More information [here]
REFRESH x FANTOCHE, 04.-08. September 2024