Thursday, 6th February 2025, 10-18:00 / 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 to 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!
“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
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).
This interdisciplinary project brings together two internationally recognized labs working at the intersection of arts and sciences – the Immersive Arts Space and the Visualization Research Center (VRC) at the Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). The project will develop a pilot prototype for a new kind of multi-user interactive performance where the audience can individually and collectively influence the dramaturgical evolution of the event. Through a major Hong Kong government innovation grant, the VRC under the leadership of Jeffrey Shaw, a pioneer in the development of immersive technological environments, has developed a world-leading interactive multimedia visualization system called nVis.
‘Leading Houses’ are intended as start-up funding for international research projects. These are competence networks mandated by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SBFI).
Collaborating Reseachers: Martin Fröhlich, Stella Speziali, Chris Salter
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) Puneet Jain (PhD Candidate) Eric Larrieux (Researcher) Chris Elvis Leisi (Researcher) Oliver Sahli (Researcher) Philippe Sormani (Senior Researcher) Stella Speziali (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)
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).
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.
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 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.
Video Copyright ZHdK 2024
Credits: Artist and Development: Chris Elvis Leisi Artist and Sound: Christopher Lloyd Salter Machine Learning: Florian Bruggisser
Next presentation: MESH Festival, 16. to 20. October at HEK in Basel. More information [here]
Recent exhibition: REFRESH x FANTOCHE, 04.-08. September 2024 from noon to 8pm.
A glocal network exploring bodies in the age of computer mediated reality
BODIES-MACHINES-PUBLICS brings together a “glocal” (global and local) network of cultural and research partners in Switzerland, India and Chile that seek to provide time and space for artists to develop prototypes and works exploring the sensitive body and technical mediation in relation to public space. The project is a two-year collaborative initiative between NAVE (Chile), KHOJ Studios (India), Immersive Arts Space/ZHdK (Zurich, Switzerland) and Kornhausforum (Bern, Switzerland) and is supported by the Pro Helvetia Synergies Program.
People increasingly interact with technologies such as wearable sensors, VR/AR headsets or other data gathering systems on an intimate, bodily level which successfully blurs the lines between the physical and the digital; the body and its interaction with its environment. At the same time, the involuntary data collection and machine-led decisions that arise from these sensing technologies exacerbates historical inequalities, particularly affecting marginalized groups. Addressing the capture of human motion, thoughts and experience through new technologies is therefore an ongoing challenge that requires new kinds of creative and imaginative practices.
Residency 2024
The project starts this year with the combined residencies at the Immersive Arts Space and Kornhausforum. The two part residency starts on 9th September at the IAS and moves then into the Kornhausforum until 5th October 2024, where there will be a public presentation of the projects. Two artists – one from Switzerland, and another one from Chile – will share the spaces and work on their projects with the aim to exchange artistically as well as culturally.
The Swiss artist is Ludovica Galleani d`Agliano, who graduated in 2023 from Interaction Design (ZHdK) with her project Syntia_CAM. In the month long residency she aims on developing Syntia_CAM into a live performance and therefore interactive installation between the main characters and audiences.
Javier Muñoz Bravo is a composer within the field of instrumental and electronic music. Javier was trained at The University of Chile (Santiago) and Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (Ircam) in Paris. Today, Javier is based in Paris and works together with choreographer Stefanie Inhelder and the cie glitch company creating immersive dance performances. During the residency the duo will develop Une saison en métavers – an immersive piece, with a female singer in combination with AI driven visuals, motion capture and live electronics. https://javiermunozbravo.com/
Are you an artist and /or researcher working on the relationship between sensing technologies, XR, the body and space? Spend up two weeks in May 2025 at Centro Nave (Chile) where you can deepen your practices, and explore new territories, in and beyond technologies, bodies and publics. Proposals for installations, and/or performative interventions indoors and outdoors which successfully blurs the lines between the physical and digital – the body and the physical environment – are particularly welcome. The call is open for applicants living and working in Switzerland, Chile or other countries in Latin America. It is part of the project ‘Bodies, Machines, Publics’ supported by the Pro Helvetia synergies program around art, science and technology. In Chile, the project also counts with the collaboration of Goethe-Institut Chile, Museo, Interactivo Mirador , Fundación Mar Adentro and Museo del Sonido. Artists-in Residence from Switzerland will be invited to present their works in February 2026 at Kornhausforum Bern.
We seek for your proposals for installations, and / or performative interventions. Apply now through an open call until January 30, 2025.
