The research focus at the Immersive Arts Space aims to promote artistic, technological and social-cultural innovation in the context of a critical technical practice in art and design. The IAS enables challenging research to the status quo within the umbrella of immersive arts. That includes paradigmatic technologies like sensors, machine learning, as well as capture systems and their application areas in XR, AI and interactive media systems. With this broad research field, the Immersive Arts Space aims to situate itself as a network hub within the academic field of Immersive Arts, in Switzerland and internationally.
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!
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)
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.
“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
Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) project, 2023-2027
Midterm Meeting
Tuesday, 30th June & Wednesday 1st July 2026, Immersive Arts Space
Since November 2023, the SNSF-funded project Probing XR’s Futures: Design Fiction, Bodily Experience and Critical Inquiry has brought together an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the Immersive Arts Space (IAS). The project has informed complementary lines of inquiry in and across perceptual experiments, design fiction, and interaction analysis, as well as transversal interest in breaching experiments and engagement with critical disability. In the process, the research team has probed form, fiction, and interaction in various configurations of collaboration and across contrasting settings (the studio lab, street corners, bars, and more). On this basis, many conference presentations and publication projects have seen the light of day, including a several CHI papers, a forthcoming special issue of New Media & Society, and a coedited volume entitled Sensing XR: Bodies, Technology, Interaction (Salter, Mondada & Sormani, in preparation).
This two-day midterm meeting will take stock of the running project, its empirical results and multiple insights, while identifying next moves and promising crossovers for project finalization (until 31 October 2027, the scheduled closing date of Probing XR’s Futures). The meeting program may thus be summarized in three familiar questions: “What have we done? What have we learned? And what’s next?”. In answer to these questions, Day I invites its participants, and the research team members in particular, to assemble and revisit their principal results, insights, and pending questions, be it in terms of form [1], fiction [2], and/or interaction [3], if not breaching experiments, critical disability, and more [4]. On this basis, Day II invites discussion on epistemic implications, aesthetic possibilities, and crossover experimentation – that is, in and across form, fiction, and interaction, the project’s main strands of interdisciplinary inquiry so far.
Find the full program below in the document. Researchers and interested colleagues are invited to participate.
“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)
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/ Principal Investigators:
Anna Jobin (University of Friobourg) Olivier Glassey (University of Lausanne) Takashi Ikegami (University of Tokyo) Christopher Salter (Zurich University of the Arts)
Zurich Based Researchers: Diana Alina Serbanescu: Senior Researcher Alexandre Saunier: Senior Researcher Ilja Mirsky: Research Associate
From Cartographies and Critiques to Reconstructions and Reconfigurations / Reading Group
From Cartographies and Critiques to Reconstructions and Reconfigurations
The reading group revisits key moments in the history of AI in order to develop a critical cartography of the field. Together, we seek to broaden understandings of AI from a multidisciplinary perspective by rigorously examining its technical, epistemological, infrastructural, and social conditions, while attending to the gaps, tensions, and critiques within dominant AI discourse.
Drawing on perspectives from philosophy of technology, cybernetics, phenomenology, science and technology studies (STS), feminist theory, cognitive science, engineering, critical media studies, history of science, and complex systems research, the group approaches AI not simply as a technical domain, but as a historical, ontological, performative, and socio-technical formation.
Alongside critique, we are interested in how AI might be rethought through reflexivity, embodiment, situated knowledge, performance, relationality, and collective forms of sense-making.
Beyond its role as a space for collective study and discussion, the group aims to foster an international community of researchers, artists, theorists, and technologists collectively rethinking the conceptual and methodological boundaries of AI research across disciplines.
Session 1: 01.06.2026, 14:00 (CET) Session 2: 15.06.2026, 15:00 (CET) Duration: approximately 90 minutes Format: Online via Teams (Meeting ID: 368 115 189 235 593, Passcode: 4hH7Mk3w) The reading group will take place every two weeks.
Session 1 Philip Agre — Computation and Human Experience Chapters 1–5 (“Introduction” to “The Digital Abstraction”)
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 2025
Credits: Artist and Development: Chris Elvis Leisi Artist and Sound: Christopher Lloyd Salter Machine Learning: Florian Bruggisser
Past exhibitions: re:publica, 18th to 20th May 2026 at Station Berlin. MESH Festival, 16. to 20. October 2024 at HEK in Basel. More information [here] REFRESH x FANTOCHE, 04.-08. September 2024
