What does it mean to think, to see, to act, to feel and to live through the post-digital? Since the 2010s the boundaries between public and private, online and offline have become increasingly blurred due to digitalization and social media. In contemporary art digitality has assumed a new kind of presence—no longer a mere virtual sphere of sociality, but increasingly as a technological interface that structures our most embodied experiences. Today, contemporary art cannot escape digital image production, circulation, and consumption, so what may it look like to engage it–thematize it even–in the work of art itself? A younger generation of artists is specifically focused on the mass circulation, connectivity, and constructedness of images. The production of artistic content, its circulation, and its reception are thus increasingly intertwined processes that are no longer distributed among different instances: Artistic practice has undergone a drastic transformation: it is shaped by the notion of the presence of the digital even beyond digital media and explores new forms of (post-)digital relationality as well as embodied experiences between on- and offline.
Marie-France Rafael is a Tenure Track professor in the Master program of the Department of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) since 2019. She holds a PhD in Art History. She studied Art History and Film Studies in Berlin and Paris. From 2011 to 2015 she was a research associate at the Free University of Berlin and until 2019 at the Muthesius University Kiel, Department of Spatial Strategies/Curatorial Spaces. Her monograph «Reisen ins Imaginativ. Künstlerische Displays und Situationen» (Cologne: Walther König, 2017), examines artistic strategies of presentation in contemporary art. Other publications include «Brice Dellsperger. On Gender Performance» (Berlin: Floating Opera Press, 2020), «Ari Benjamin Meyers. Music on Display» (Cologne: Walther König, 2016), and «Pierre Huyghe. On Site» (Cologne: Walther König, 2013).
REFRESH is a yearly, international conference on Design, Arts and Technology. It is initiated by the Department of Design (Maike Thies) and the Immersive Arts Space (Christopher Salter) and taking place in different locations within Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).
REFRESH#5
The interdisciplinary festival REFRESH (initiative of the Department of Design and the Immersive Arts Space of ZHdK) took place for the 5th time from November 9th to 12th, 2023. It addressed pressing issues at the intersection of the arts, design and technology in keynotes, masterclasses and a multi-layered exhibition. International designers, artists and researchers provided insights into their work and discussed it with the interested public. The critical topics of this year’s edition were «Immersive Journalism», «Design Realities», «Future Technologies», «Worldbuilding», and «New Ecologies».
With guests such as Nikolaj Schultz (sociologist, author of «On the Emergence of an Ecological Class» (2022) with Bruno Latour and author of «Land Sickness» (2023), Sarah Kenderdine (Head Curator EPFL Pavilions and Professor of Digital Museology at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne EPFL), Ian Cheng (Digital Artist), AATB (artist couple focused on experimental robotics) and Sam Wolson (Visual Features Editoris for the New Yorker and an Emmy award-winning director, photographer and journalist).
The Immersive Arts Space had two Spotlight events on November 9th and 10th. Spotlight I featured an exhibition of three currents projects, that are developed in the lab: Possible Worlds… (Oliver Sahli, Chris Salter), Changing Matters (Lorenz Kleiser, Floris Demandt) and Friendly Fire (Manu Hendry, Florian Bruggisser, Paulina Zybinska uvm.)
Spotlight II on November 10th was be a work exhibition of Zangezi, a Russian Cubo-Futurist poem/play written by the poet Velimir Khlebnikov in 1922. Fragments of Zangezi will be performed as a work in progress that takes the form of a theatrically staged reading within the technical machine of the Immersive Arts Space itself. The work exhibition includes a Q&A with the team members, discussing the usage of AI generated meta humans, environments and characters as well as the usage of a Large Language Model in a artistic project like Zangezi.
REFRESH#4
The fourth edition of REFRESH, from 10th to 14th November 2021, focussed on the topics «Immersive Journalism», «Immersive Play», «Digital Identities», «Digital Doubles» and «Techno-Biological Futures». The conference featured keynote speeches including panel discussions with national and international guests as well as a large exhibition have been part of the conference. Photographs of the conference have been published and can me viewed in this gallery.
The Immersive Arts Space hosted the Lab Insights and a VR exhibition. Team members offered insights into the projects Shifting Realities (Chris Elvis Leisi & Olliver Sahli (Multiuser VR), Martin Fröhlich, Max Kriegleder, Joel Gähwiler, Roman Jurt, Mariana Grüning (Helium Drones/ SAR)), Neural Volumetric Capture (Florian Bruggisser), Digital Twins (development of animated digital avatars based on photogrammetry and Meta Humans) and cineDesk (Norbert Kottmann, Valentin Huber).
Further Credits: Sound Design: Luca Magni Lights: Sébastien Schiesser Project Lead: Martin Fröhlich Production: Kristina Jungic Head of Unit: Christian Iseli Photography: Regula Bearth
REFRESH #3 took place from 17th to 20th September 2020 featuring keynotes, workshops, performances and an exhibition. Due to the Covid 19 pandemic it was designed as a hybrid event with online presentations of many speakers. The third edition was devoted to the topics «Digital Evidence», «Digital Humans», «Immersive Worlds», «Extended Realities» and «Imagine New Tomorrows».
REFRESH#2 took place from September 26th to 28th at the Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK, featuring keynotes, workshops, performances and exhibitions. The second edition focussed on the topic of Experimental Futures and Immersive Experiences. In close cooperation with Digital Festival and Hack Zurich at neighboring venues.
Selected speakers: Thomas Oberender, curator and artistic director @Berliner Festspiele Sarah Ellis, director of Digital Development @Royal Shakespeare Company Kevin Curran, vision director @Space10 Gayatri Parameswaran, immersive journalist @NowHere Media Andreas Refsgaard, artist & creative coder Galit Ariel, future tech expert @Wondarland Yakeshi Yamada, recruiter @teamLab Yasaman Sheri, creative director, designer and researcher Tobias Gremmler, visual artist
Dancing Digital performance on September 26th 2019. (Photo by Davide Arizzoli, ZHdK 2019).
In this series, concepts of immersion as well as embodiment were explored from the different perspectives of fine arts, design, film, performing arts and music, with concrete examples of artistic practices and research projects.
Digital characters have been around for decades. In mainstream cinema, photorealism proved to be a cost-intensive challenge and a long road through the Uncanny Valley. In the game universe, the need for real-time rendering required simplification and abstraction. Meanwhile however, with the help of ever-faster computers, game characters have come closer to their movie siblings and with the real-time capacity of game engines, digital avatars have now entered the live environment of the stage. In this lecture, the development of digital characters in the media context will be outlined, in order to then address the specific problems that arise when doubles and twins enter the universe of theater and performances. Here, the audience needs to be able to see both the actor (in a motion capture suit) and his or her avatar so as to confirm that the avatar’s performance is indeed being created live, and not the result of a pre-recording. However, the double appearance also has its downside. The spectators need to constantly decide whom to look at: The actor or his or her digital avatar. The research project Presence and Absence of the Immersive Arts Space addressed this specific problem and focused on alternatives to the twin appearance. The outcome of the artistic explorations are discussed in detail.
Christian Iseli has been teaching and researching at the Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK since 1995. He holds a professorship for Immersive Arts, heads the Immersive Arts Space and teaches in the MA Film program. After studying history, German and English literature at the University of Bern, Iseli was a director of documentary films and worked in editing and cinematography on feature films and documentaries.
Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken, Institute for Design Research
Powerful technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR) take sports, fitness and rehabilitation to a next level. Traditional movement concepts are expanded through interactive technologies and blended with immersive and playful experiences: Gamified fitness training, physical esports, and immersive rehabilitation are pointing us towards the future of physical activity. In this context, the multisensory and -modal involvement of the user’s body becomes a crucial component and quality feature of these body-centered experiences. However, there is still a lot of untapped potential in the area of attractive and effective mixed reality training applications. In this lecture, approaches, results and learnings from various interdisciplinary R&D projects in the fields of fitness, rehabilitation and (e)sports will be presented and possible directions for future sports design will be outlined. In particular, topics such as technology-based balance of fun and exertion, empowerment, and social immersion will be highlighted and discussed as potential enhancers of immersion and embodiment in mixed reality sports.
Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken is head of the Institute for Design Research as well as Senior Researcher at the Subject Area Game Design, Department of Design at Zurich University of the Arts. With her background in sports science (PhD, Institute of Sports Science, Technical University of Darmstadt) and her expertise in game research, Anna’s research and teaching activities mainly focus on the design and evaluation of Serious & Applied Games for health, (e)sports, fitness and rehabilitation, as well as health design. Besides her job in academia, Anna is Co-Founder and CEO of the ZHdK spinoff Sphery Ltd, a fitness gaming startup, which received multiple prestigious awards for their research-based core product, the ExerCube, as well as for the establishment of the world’s first physical inclusive eSports league, the ExerCube League.
Olav Lervik, Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology
Games in Concert was a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the ZHdK from 2016-2018. The goal was to explore the possibilities of musical environments for musicians in VR and to look for the artistic potentials that lie in the implementation of mechanics more known to the world of game design. An visual VR environment was programmed with virtual instruments specifically designed to use the advantages of VR. Unto three musicians were able to interact musically with each other in VR while a forth character was used to lead the public through the performance while it was happening. Finally the project was presented at SigGraph Asia 2018 shortly after its conclusion. During this lecture, while diving into the in and outs of “Games in Concert” the question arises which mechanics and which concepts hold potential for future musical VR environments and which challenges and lessons unfolded during this project.
Olav Lervik is a classically trained freelance composer and pianist who studied in Weimar, Stuttgart and Zurich. His works cover a wide variety of disciplines including scoring music for games and films and sound design for VR/AR applications but also classical orchestration. Olav is currently a lecturer in composition for film, theatre and media and also in sound design at the Zurich University of Arts.
Marie-France Rafael, Department of Fine Arts
What does it mean to think, to see, to act, to feel and to live through the post-digital? Since the 2010s the boundaries between public and private, online and offline have become increasingly blurred due to digitalization and social media. In contemporary art digitality has assumed a new kind of presence—no longer a mere virtual sphere of sociality, but increasingly as a technological interface that structures our most embodied experiences. Today, contemporary art cannot escape digital image production, circulation, and consumption, so what may it look like to engage it–thematize it even–in the work of art itself? A younger generation of artists is specifically focused on the mass circulation, connectivity, and constructedness of images. The production of artistic content, its circulation, and its reception are thus increasingly intertwined processes that are no longer distributed among different instances: Artistic practice has undergone a drastic transformation: it is shaped by the notion of the presence of the digital even beyond digital media and explores new forms of (post-)digital relationality as well as embodied experiences between on- and offline.
Marie-France Rafael is a Tenure Track professor in the Master program of the Department of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) since 2019. She holds a PhD in Art History. She studied Art History and Film Studies in Berlin and Paris. From 2011 to 2015 she was a research associate at the Free University of Berlin and until 2019 at the Muthesius University Kiel, Department of Spatial Strategies/Curatorial Spaces. Her monograph «Reisen ins Imaginativ. Künstlerische Displays und Situationen» (Cologne: Walther König, 2017), examines artistic strategies of presentation in contemporary art. Other publications include «Brice Dellsperger. On Gender Performance» (Berlin: Floating Opera Press, 2020), «Ari Benjamin Meyers. Music on Display» (Cologne: Walther König, 2016), and «Pierre Huyghe. On Site» (Cologne: Walther König, 2013).
Melody Chua, Master of Arts in Transdisciplinary Studies
The improvisation machine is an elusive figure. It has no universally agreed-upon form but is instead in a state of continuous fluidity of audiovisual representations. Throughout the performance, it shifts between being treated as a distinct musical agent to being regarded as an embodied posthuman extension to its human counterpart. It is always in tension between the attempt to recognize it as a distinctly encapsulated entity and at the same time as a synergy of independent entities, the fluctuations between which are shaped through immersive representations of itself and the performance environment. The development of and performance with an improvisation machine can, with careful reflection, serve as a practical method upon which to be relinquished from our traditional understandings of embodiment. The form of the improvisation machine—fragmented through spatially separated electronic devices and mediums—is inherently discombobulated. Indeed, the fragmentation of the improvisation machine reflects a mindbody conceptualization offered by media artist and researcher Lisa Blackman: “We are never a singular body, but are multiple bodies that are brought into being and held together through complex practices of self-production.” In this lecture, I reflect upon the facets of immersion and embodiment as they manifest in the field of improvised music performance between human and nonhuman agents, using my work black box fading as a case study. How do immersive representations of and experiences between such agents on both audio and visual levels instigate different considerations of what embodiment can be? How can these reflect our biases concerning control, (dis)orientation, and vulnerability in immersive environments?
Melody Chua is an interdisciplinary artist working with interactive technologies in improvisation settings as both vehicles of narrative expression and as opportunities to destabilize the normatives present in one’s relationship with such technologies. The aesthetics of her work gravitate towards immersive futuristic fictions with undertones of nostalgia and introspection, pulling audiences into intimate worlds. Awarded a Fulbright-Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship for the development of a sensor-augmented flute (Chaosflöte), Melody has performed and guest-lectured internationally at festivals and institutions such as the Swiss Digital Day, Network Music Festival, Atlantic Music Festival Future Music Lab, La Côte Flute Festival, Performing Media Festival, Montreal Contemporary Music Lab, New Interfaces for Music Expression (NIME) Conference, University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart, University of South Florida, and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, among others.
NEVO is a processing pipeline that combines multiple machine learning models to convert a two-dimensional images of a human into a volumetric animation. With the help of a database containing numerous 3D-models of humans, the algorithm is able to create sketchy virtual humans in 3D. The conversion is fully automatic and can be used to efficiently create sequences of three-dimensional digital humans.
Members of the ZHdK can find additional information on technical equipment, support services and project registration here: https://intern.zhdk.ch/iaspace
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