Immersive Acts: Information for attendees

Abstract

This workshop will present three inter-related projects that are employing a specific approach to immersive technologies as tools for change and civic action. All three projects have been developed through critical engagement with the polyphonic documentary project (polyphonicdocumentary.com) and all three projects are being delivered through the interactive authoring platform Stornaway.io. Through providing interactive walkthroughs of the projects, we will explain the conceptual thinking that underpins them, the entanglements between us as creative practitioners and researchers, and how our collaborative methods are opening-up space for dialogue about possible and preferred futures. We will then consider with our workshop attendees what it takes to use these methods well, what can go wrong, why creating spaces for generative listening is so important, and where these methods might have wider applicability beyond the examples provided. Join us for a lively exploration of polyphony and otherwise approaches to narrative, grounded in community engagement and core principles of social/environmental justice.Judith Aston is Associate Professor in Film and Digital Arts at UWE Bristol. She is Co-founder of i-Docs, Co-convenor of the Polyphonic Documentary Project, Principal Investigator for the Voices of Avonmouth project and Chair of the RAI Film Committee. She has an interdisciplinary background in media arts, interaction design and visual anthropology, and her research is driven by the desire to put evolving media technologies into the service of promoting multi-perspectival thinking and understanding.

Biography

Karen Boswall (University of Sussex) is a filmmaker, ethnomusicologist and visual anthropologist. Her inter-disciplinary audiovisual research has led her to take an expanded approach to her filmmaking, incorporating non-linear web-based documentaries, live performance and projection and site specific audio-visual installations. She is currently collaborating with Judith Aston on the Voices of Avonmouth polyphonic documentary project, which will be presented as part of this workshop.

Stefano Odorico is a filmmaker, interactive media artist, lecturer and researcher. His creative work focuses on co-creation and community-based media, exploring the intersection of interactive art, storytelling, technology and community engagement with a particular emphasis on polyphonic narratives and participatory media. He lectures at the Limerick School of Art and Design, Technological University of the Shannon, is Co-convenor of the Polyphonic Documentary Project and Co-chair of the Interactive Film and Media Network.

Rengin Gurel Ozmen is a multidisciplinary designer and postgraduate researcher at UWE Bristol. She has a BSc in interior architecture and an MSc in industrial design from Istanbul Technical University (ITU). Her interdisciplinary research focuses on ethnographic methods in user-centred and participatory design. Her PhD research focuses on bringing interactive documentaries to design research and education contexts as a generative method and tool to explore wicked problems.

Abstract

Many digital immersive experiences aim to become an important playgrund to recreate and aestheticize nature. This presentation examines digital virtual nature including immersive VR environments, video games, sound-based simulations, and multisensory interfaces, as an emerging habitat and cultural assemblage that reconfigures human–nature relations.

Drawing on ecofeminist theory, environmental aesthetics, and critical game and media studies, the I will investigate whether digital nature can function not merely as representation or spectacle, but as a site of care, connection, and ethical engagement.

Building on concepts such as technobiophilia (Thomas 2013) assemblage theory (Fitch 2025), and ecofeminist critiques of capitalist patriarchy, I’ll argue that digital environments reproduce many of the same extractive logics found in physical environments: nature is often treated as background, resource, or consumable aesthetic, while care and relationality remain marginal (see Chang 2019). At the same time, empirical findings from virtual nature projects suggest that digitally mediated encounters with natural soundscapes and environments can measurably reduce stress, anxiety, and emotional fatigue, indicating that digital nature possesses affective and restorative capacities traditionally associated with physical ecosystems (e.g. see Mostajeran et al. 2023, Bakk et al. 2023.)
In the presentation I’ll situate these tensions within ecofeminist frameworks that link the exploitation of nature with the systemic devaluation of care, interdependence, and embodied knowledge. From this perspective, digital nature becomes a contested space: it can either reinforce normative ideals of controllable, optimized, and commodified environments, or enable alternative practices grounded in maintenance, reciprocity, and situated ecological knowledge. By applying cognitive and non-cognitive models of environmental aesthetics, the study highlights the importance of regional specificity, interactivity, and evidence-based design in fostering meaningful digital ecological experiences. Ultimately, I’ll propose digital ecofeminism as a speculative yet necessary framework for rethinking how digital technologies might support new forms of ecological responsibility and relational ethics. Rather than replacing physical nature, digital environments should act as tools for reimagining human–nature assemblages in ways that resist extraction and emphasize care. This leads to the central question of my research: can digital virtual nature become a genuine ecofeminist practice of care and ecological solidarity within (and/or against) the structures of digital capitalism?

Biography

Ágnes Karolina Bakk, Ph.D. is the Head and Lead Researcher of the Future Care Lab at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. With a background in narrative design, her work centers around immersive theatrical formats, storytelling, and the science of magic.

Her current research explores romantic relationships in metaverse-like environments, as well as psychological restoration and life quality enhancement through virtual reality (VR). For this groundbreaking work, she was recently awarded a Hu-rizon multiyear research grant for a clinical research trial with VR. Dr. Bakk is the founder of Zip-Scene, and the co-founder of Random Error Studio and the Vektor VR section. She is also a proud member of ARDIN. An internationally recognized speaker and educator, she has shared her expertise around the globe. She is the co-editor of Designing Immersive Environments – Enchanting Spaces, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025.

Abstract

Seeing Through the Walls of Silicon Valley: The Platform was an exhibited immersive artwork that invited the public into the private domain of Meta’s MPK20 campus in Menlo Park, California via digital reconstruction in Unreal Engine. This visual talk will walk through the methods used to create it, proposing a method of immersive and activist research practice between analogue and digital.

The new campuses of Google, Apple and Meta testify to their influence on public life, yet they remain inaccessible to the public. Instead, their architectural presence circulates through the loose, uncurated images that appear across social media - material the companies ultimately benefit from as a form of ambient corporate visibility. Centred in public and civic justice frameworks, The Platform is a digital replica of Meta’s MPK20 Campus, reconstructed using OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) and PAI (Publicly Available Information) methods, utilising over 3000 images and videos from the internet.

This investigative process is situated critically and methodologically alongside work by Forensic Architecture, Mark Lombardi, Harun Farocki and Mike Kelley, to address the asymmetry of tech companies’ digital surveillance online, and the impact of their “fortress architecture” in urban space. The tech campus reproduces power structures, reorganises civic cultures, and disrupts local economic ecologies wherever it is deployed as an urban redevelopment tool.

Inverting the surveillant gaze of social media, the reconstruction relies on compiling thousands of images: many containing only fragments of architectural detail. Furthermore, the slow act of manual collection, categorisation and collage - no machine learning or algorithms are used to create these data sets or drawings - became a method of analogue ‘immersion’ into the architecture.

By reconstructing a digital replica from dispersed public digital media to accurately map out the interior of the building, architecture becomes a lens to tell the story of the power of aggregated data in physical and digital space. The project offers a method for counter-mapping corporations whose influence on public life is significant, yet public scrutiny is restricted, to be used as a tool for civic justice. Format: Performance (short interactive audio-visual, digital/physical event).

Biography

Claude Dutson is a London-based digital artist, writer and educator, trained in architecture, with PhD by Practice from the Royal College of Art.

Working between digital art, architectural research and critical design, she uses videogame engines to examine how architecture structures subjectivity and materialises the ideologies of technology.

Her work has been exhibited internationally including Seeing Through the Walls of Silicon Valley (2024) at Ars Electronica, and The Model Worker (2019) at Watermans Arts Centre.

She teaches MA Cinematic and Videogame Architecture at UCL, and MA Digital Direction at the RCA, where she also led the Object Mediated Interactions platform (2017–22).

Abstract

As immersive technologies proliferate in humanitarian and heritage contexts, their tendency towards extractive practice – aestheticising suffering, externalising expertise, bypassing affected communities – demands critical scrutiny. This paper proposes and tests a justice-led framework for immersive design by evaluating Nobody's Listening (NL), a mobile VR exhibition documenting the Yazidi genocide (ISIS, 2014–2017), deployed across five Iraqi cities.

Using a mixed‑methods design (pre/post surveys, observation, interviews; n = 127), we examine whether NL fosters historical empathy, awareness, and action – and whether its design and governance resist extractive tendencies common in humanitarian XR. Findings reveal sustained impact across cognitive, emotional, and behavioural domains: 85% reported increased genocide awareness; 71% gained new cultural knowledge; over 80% experienced intense emotions including empathy, grief, and shock; 57% demonstrated historical empathy in open responses; and 92% expressed that justice remains unserved, often articulating intentions to support advocacy and recognition. Critically, these effects were mediated by collective memory and analogical recognition – Kurdish participants linking Yazidi suffering to Anfal/Halabja – indicating that immersion alone is insufficient. Cultural specificity and situated testimony catalyse ethically meaningful engagement.

From these findings, we advance a justice-led immersive framework built on four interlocking principles: (1) Co‑creation & consent – survivor testimony and community consultation throughout development and evaluation; (2) Trauma‑informed design that prioritises agency and avoids graphic content; provide content warnings, support protocols, and agency in narrative choice; (3) Situated storytelling that enables historical empathy and multi-perspective witnessing rather than voyeurism; (4) Action pathways connecting experiences to recognition, rights, and material support.

We conclude that justice‑led immersion reframes XR from spectacular extraction to life‑affirming civic engagement. The paper offers a replicable, non‑extractive evaluation protocol and design guidelines for museums, NGOs, and memory institutions deploying immersive responses that prioritise dignity, cultural specificity, and sustainable impact beyond the headset.

Biography

Maria Economou is Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Glasgow, jointly appointed in Information Studies and The Hunterian. She holds a British Academy/Wolfson Research Professorship (2022–26) exploring emotional engagement with museum collections through digital storytelling and participatory approaches. Her career spans academic and museum roles in the UK and Greece, including the University of the Aegean, Manchester, Glasgow, and Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. She co-directs the Digital Cultural Heritage Arts Lab and served as Vice-President of UNIVERSEUM (2017–24). Her research focuses on digital technologies and immersive experiences in cultural heritage, visitor studies, and cultural information organisation. She has led and contributed to major international projects, including Innovate UK Museums in the Metaverse (2023–26), EC Horizon 2020 POEM and EMOTIVE, and initiatives funded by Museums Galleries Scotland, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and UKRI.

Abstract

Ocean Futurisms is a collection of fully animated short films that invites audiences to step into three alternative, science-based futures for the ocean. The project was created as a collaboration between TBA21–Academy, Radical Ocean Futures and Inferstudio and premiered during the UN Oceans Conference in Nice last year. The session will begin with an immersive screening of each of the three films - M.A.N.A, Havsrå, and Matsya - and conclude with a Q+A with the creators.

Blending scientific forecasts with immersive storytelling, each of the three films rehearse questions for the future of ocean policy/governance through speculative scenario making and worldbuilding. These films act as simulated visions of worlds that might yet be…for better, or for worse. In M.A.N.A, we follow a future ocean noise pollution data analyst - working within a new alliance of island states redefining ocean governance as their shores are threatened by the realities of the climate crisis. In Havsrå, a direct action activist organisation mobilises a global audience by live-streaming their operations as they attempt to disrupt illegal deep sea mining. In Matsya, ancient flood mythologies are retold in an ark story for our times, as a converted cargo ship roams earth’s oceans attempting to save creatures, communities, and customs facing existential threat. The films explore issues of ocean governance in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJs), the effects of marine audio pollution on more-than-human lives, the role of live streaming in direct-action activism, and the need to understand the ocean as the common heritage of all humankind. The scenarios oscillate between hopeful and dire futures, acting as environmental fables and inter-disciplinary provocations for our uncertain times.

Biography

Bethany is an editor, writer, and researcher with a background in anthropology and international studies. She worked as a cyber-security analyst and a nuclear security researcher.

Nathan is a designer, technologist, and researcher with a background in architecture. He has worked as an advanced researcher for Forensic Architecture, and has taught in architecture schools internationally, including at UCLA, the Architectural Association (AA), and Strelka Institute.

Bethany and Nathan work together through Inferstudio, a digital worldbuilding and investigative design practice that creates immersive films and images that imagine fictional futures; both aspirational and cautionary. They also develop digital visualisations that interpret and communicate complex environmental realities from our world today. Their projects converge around themes of ecology, land/ocean-scapes, and extended reality. Together, Bethany and Nathan also lead ADS13 in the RCA's MA Architecture programme.

Abstract

Virtual Reality has been heralded as the “ultimate empathy machine”—a technology capable of generating presence so visceral it compels compassion. But what if this promise is fundamentally flawed? This presentation argues that for social justice VR, total immersion becomes the apathy machine: experiences so hermetically closed they paralyze rather than activate.

Visceral Reality, directed by me and created for Brazilian NGO Rede Justiça Criminal, achieved 23+ million views by deliberately fracturing VR’s embodiment paradigm. Addressing prison overcrowding where incarceration exceeds capacity by 171%, the project combined VR film with live performance, but critically used the same individual who appeared as “criminal” in the experience later appearing as presenter and advocate, shattering the closed loop of stereotyping.

This rupture is methodological, not accidental. When VR seals viewers inside suffering with hyperreal presence, it offers no exit strategy, no pathway from witnessing to action. The result: emotional overwhelm followed by withdrawal. By intentionally breaking presence and introducing the mediated body back into physical space, revealing the constructed nature of the experience, Visceral Reality created “thinking distance”, the necessary gap where critical reflection and civic agency emerge.

The presentation documents how this fracture operated across three levels: technological (360° social video vs. isolated headsets, prioritizing shareable virality), narrative (the criminal-turned-advocate disrupting viewer expectations), and spatial (live stunts collapsing virtual/physical boundaries). Impact data demonstrates that broken immersion, not seamless presence, correlates with user engagement and sustained advocacy.

I propose “critical immersion” as counter-methodology: strategic incompleteness as design principle. For resource-constrained contexts addressing urgent injustice, the question isn’t “how immersive?” but “where should immersion break?” This reframes VR’s technical limitations as epistemic opportunities, and positions fracture, not fidelity, as the engine of transformation.

Biography

Luiz Evandro is a multimedia director from Vision Lab, which is a new narratives production company based in São Paulo, Brazil. Luiz has worked for 12 years as a copywriter in some of Brazil’s main creative ad agencies, until moving to LA to study graphic design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. As a motion designer, Luiz worked at FOX MGM in California and, back in Brazil, he created and directed opens for Globo TV Network and cable channels. Since then, Luiz became a multimedia director and started a new hybrid model of production house+creative bureau in Brazil. In the last 15 Luiz Evandro has conceived and directed many innovation pieces that encompass creativity, XR, entertainment and technology for Brazil’s main brands which have garnered many industry awards worldwide.

Abstract

In order to succeed, dialogue needs an excluded third," wrote philosopher Michel Serres in his well-known book The Parasite. In Serres’s model of communication, the fundamental relation is not between sender and receiver, but between communication and noise. Crucially, the conditions that allow communication to function are inseparable from those that produce and conceal this excluded third. Following this line, this talk asks: what are the excluded thirds in the twofold becoming of the image, immersive and environmental? And what does their exclusion reveal about the environing character of contemporary media?

I will examine three such exclusions that have been central to my practice, both in solo work and in collaborations with Jussi Parikka. First, I consider the role of wind in the production of moving images, and its contrast with the windless indoor environments in which these images are typically displayed. This tension, I argue, marks a radical moment in the environmental becoming of media. Second, I turn to the process of "atmospheric correction" in aerial imagery, where dust and sand in the air are algorithmically removed. This operation points to a radiant, parasitic regime of the image, defined by ubiquity and toxicity. Finally, I discuss the relationship between snow and the reflectance of its white surfaces through our recent video essay Lumi, which explores the training of a synthetic intelligence designed to study the albedo effect. This case leads to a broader question concerning the exclusions that structure AI-driven image environments.

Thinking through the exclusion of a third allows discussions of elemental media to shift from questions of infrastructure toward the formation of epistemic categories and political frameworks of representation. In this way, wind, dust, and snow feature in this talk as material aggregates through which immersion can be reimagined: not as enclosure, but as a reconfigurable dimension of the environing character of the contemporary image.

Biography

Abelardo Gil-Fournier is an artist and researcher. Originally trained in Physics, he holds a PhD in Art from Winchester School of Art (UK) and has worked as a researcher at FAMU in Prague. He is currently a grantee of a Leonardo scholarship from the BBVA Foundation. His practice addresses the entwining of media and matter and involves different techniques, spanning from installation to image, sound and computational processes. There, so-called natural and planetary temporalities conflate with human visual cultures, knowledge systems and politics.

His work has been exhibited and discussed internationally, including venues such as Transmediale (Berlin), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland), Onassis Stegi (Athens), Design Museum (Shenzhen), Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia (León) and Tabakalera (San Sebastian). He is the author, together with Jussi Parikka, of the book Living Surfaces. Images, Plants and Environments of Media (MIT Press 2024).

Abstract

This research examines the tension between immersive media and environmental crisis. Coastal erosion, accelerated by climate change, is causing the loss of heritage sites like the medieval 'Lost City' of Dunwich, Suffolk. While virtual heritage offers critical preservation, the Extended Reality (XR) sector is entangled in its own unsustainability, with high-carbon tools and a rapid cycle of obsolescence. This research confronts the need to decarbonise immersive practice while addressing crises of climate and social justice.

I propose ReXR (Recycled Extended Reality) as a methodological framework for low-carbon, equitable virtual heritage development. ReXR repurposes abandoned or obsolete hardware and software, leveraging concepts like "Zombie Media" and experimental media archaeology to create accessible experiences. The practice-led XR case study, The Dunwich Rose, a nighttime site specific ghost story, uses an open-source workflow and homebrew tools, embodying a do-it-with-others (DIWO) approach to anti-extractive production.

Crucially, the research draws on critical fabulation (Hartman, 2008) to augment historical archives. By bringing the missing human and more-than-human voices of Dunwich to the surface, this work dismantles the colonial grip on historical archives, reclaiming space for voices long erased and forcing their presence into the digital future through radical acts of rematerialisation.

The findings argue for a guiding charter of principles to hold XR developers accountable, ensuring transparency and advancing environmental and social justice. By breathing new life into abandoned media, ReXR offers a concrete, scalable example of a low-carbon pathway for the XR sector. Sharing stories should not cost the earth. If creative technologists cannot tell stories sustainably then virtual heritage needs to change. There is no reason why we cannot collectively tinker and hack our way to a circular and sustainable immersive storytelling sector.

Biography

Emily works as an Academic, Artist and Creative Technologist in the space of immersive storytelling and social justice. They are the founder and director of Virtually There Studio CIC, set up to support humans with digital literacy and creativity, via events, exhibitions and educational opportunities. They have exhibited works around the UK and beyond, at galleries including but not limited to Somerset House, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Spike Island and Firstsite.

They are Course Director and Senior Lecturer for the Digital Media Production Course at Anglia Ruskin University where they teach across a range of modules, including Immersive Storytelling.

Currently Emily is undertaking a PhD titled: The Dunwich Rose: Exploring Sustainable Approaches to Developing Virtual Heritage with StoryLab. One of their practice-research case studies, The Dunwich Rose, a night-time site-specific XR ghost story for the PhD won the Jury Prize at the Innovate UK Immersive Tech Awards 2025.

Abstract

You’re Unwelcome is a Virtual Reality experience that places participants aboard a small boat crossing the English Channel. Developed to recreate scenarios outlined in a leaked government document in October 2020, the work presents a journey that has become central to contemporary debates around borders, migration, and belonging in the UK. While public discourse often reduces such crossings to statistics or headlines, the experience foregrounds the embodied reality of transit: exposure to the elements, unstable ground, and the suspended time between departure and arrival.

The project functions as an inquiry into the notion of free movement in a post Brexit landscape. By situating audiences within a precarious passage between territories, the experience asks who is permitted mobility, under what conditions, and at what cost. The crossing becomes both literal and symbolic, reflecting shifting borders, contested identities, and the fragile promise of movement in an increasingly regulated world.

Biography

Jason Leo is a technical artist, spatial designer and filmmaker whose work moves between film, performance and installation. His practice examines how technology and design shape contemporary expressions of culture, belonging and resistance, bringing speculative narrative and sensory experience together to explore how political and ecological tensions take spatial and cinematic form.

Educated at the Royal College of Art, Harvard University and the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Jason approaches creative practice as a critical method for rethinking the conditions of the present. His work is grounded in diasporic and ecological inquiry and is developing into xeno-futurism, a framework for imagining futures through the unfamiliar, the hybrid and the otherworldly, considering how cross cultural and interspecies exchanges might open new ways of seeing and coexisting.

He has presented internationally at the Oslo Architecture Triennale, Demanio Marittimo KM 278, Istanbul Bilgi University, MIT Media Lab and The Building Centre, London.

Abstract

The Spaces of Belonging project engages with the cultural in betweenness experienced by migrants: the feeling of not being fully immersed in the culture of the host country whilst having left behind your homeland. This becomes more acute when one has children, and they must navigate this in-betweenness as mother or caregiver. Finding spaces/places of belonging in the host country is essential when migrant mothers try to build a life for them and for their children.

Providing such spaces ensures the strength, the cohesion and the wellbeing of our communities.

Spaces of belonging explores the perception of migrant mothers in terms of spaces/places of belonging within the local community by drawing on memories of homeland as well as everyday experiences. Migrant mothers define in their own terms what these spaces of belonging are and give us the opportunity to engage with their experience through immersive scenes. The immersive scenes created by the migrant mothers using arts-based methods and creative technology enhance our understanding of the importance of such places of belonging within the community.
The project team was selected to give evidence on inclusive cultural spaces in the Citizens Assembly for Culture consultative policymaking process for the West of England Combined Authority September 2025.

Biographies

Dana Lungu is an academic, community and public engagement specialist, focusing on accessibility, inclusion and equity as well as early modern French tragedy, Adaptation and Staging. She is honorary Lecturer in French the School of Modern Languages at Cardiff University, honorary Research Associate in the School of Modern Languages and Research Associate in the Institute for Sociotechnical Cyber Security at the University of Bristol. She uses arts-based methods and community engagement to explore what it means to be a migrant mother today in the Spaces of Belonging project in particular. She works and is interested in projects which engage with marginalised voices in order to tackle barriers to access to culture, make policies or programs more inclusive and reflective of community needs. Her accessibility and inclusion work expands into the field of privacy and cyber security with a view to promoting media literacy and supporting diverse users to make informed choices online.

Dr Harry Robert Wilson is an artist-researcher and Lecturer in Digital Theatre and Performance-Making in the School of Arts at the University of Bristol. Harry’s research and practice focus on interdisciplinary explorations of live art, performance, digital art and creative technologies through critical theory and artistic research. He was Digital Thinker in Residence at National Theatre of Scotland (2018-19) and a Research Associate on the AHRC funded Walking Publics/Walking Arts project at the University of Glasgow (2021-22) (walkcreate.org). Harry currently teaches on the MA Immersive Arts co-taught in Theatre and Computer Science at Bristol. As an artist-researcher Harry has been exploring the possibilities of using 3D scanning technologies, locative AR and creative participatory methods to explore place-making and belonging. You can read more about a locative AR walk Harry made with his daughter Poppy in his article ‘Walking with a 6-year-old and a smartphone’ in Research in Drama Education.

Abstract

This practice-based research investigates how immersive AI environments can unsettle the dominance of the face as a site of recognition, legibility and control. Drawing on Levinas’s ethics of the face and Deleuze & Guattari’s theory of the faciality machine, the project reconceptualises the digital face image not as a representation but as an operative surface where power acts, affects circulate, and subjectivities are modulated. Historically, physiognomy, biometric photography, and machine-vision infrastructures have reduced the face to data, producing racialised hierarchies of appearance and codifying racism as visual knowledge. Contemporary generative AI recodes these dynamics in algorithmic form.

My practical work, using deepfakes, Stable Diffusion and other AI-based image processes, explores immersive strategies that resist the demand for recognisability. Central to this is my recent project Deeptruth, which situates the face within a “field of potential”: a liminal zone of noising and denoising in diffusion models where images hover before taking form. In these suspended states, immersion shifts attention from identification to sensation, from documentation to emergence, opening spaces where images never fully arrive and subjectivity can remain fluid, relational, and in motion.

By holding the face in states of becoming rather than capture, the research positions immersive AI noise and morphing in diffusion models as a method for disrupting normative visibility and for imagining more ethical modes of appearing.

Biography

Yazan Nasrallah is a post-disciplinary artist, creative lead, and academic theorist working at the intersection of architecture, moving image, digital visual effects, and creative AI. His work explores the ethics, politics, and affect of digital technologies, and how they shape human subjectivity, identity, and desire across evolving digital realities. His practice draws on philosophy, media theory, visual culture, and creative technology.

He is currently completing a practice-based PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, focusing on creative technology and digital justice. He also teaches as an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths and works as a Project Lead at Autograph, where he oversees a socially engaged and collaborative art programme.

Abstract

Can the instruments of domination yield reparative justice within the matrices of cultural representation and visual culture? To address this query, this presentation will revisit the scholarly debate advanced by American writer and Black feminist, Audre Lorde, in 'The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House' to consider the possibilities and, conversely, the limitations of co-option, an algorithmic tactic of resistance within artistic interventions into digital surveillance. Drawing from a lineage of cybernetic art, literature, and artistic theory, it will frame tools as politically mediated structures situated between diametrically opposed viewpoints: power and resistance. To support this assertion, it will examine my film Light Years Apart (2021-2025), an interactive mediated performance utilizing the body and AI-powered biometric technology to order information in time. Special attention will be given to its respective genealogy—I/Eye (1993) by Bill Spinhoven, The Dollie Clone Series (1995-1996) by Lynn Hershman Leeson, and The Interaction of Coloreds (2002) by artist duo Keith and Mendi Obadike—and the varying methods of negation employed by each artist to co-opt, resist, and subvert the intended design and function of digital surveillance. Finally, it will investigate the interplay of the body and technology within the cybernetics of interactive mediated performance, drawing a correlation between art made politically, conscious labor, and conceptual comprehension within the phenomenology of the creative exchange.

Light Years Apart (2021-2025)

In Light Years Apart (2021-2025), Fula, an interdimensional being, travels between two dimensions to escape the violence of othering. Her flight or fight, a precarious event negotiated in real-time by the viewer, retools the paradigms of visibility to draw focus to deep-rooted prejudice at the core of digital surveillance. Utilizing edited film sequences, AI-powered biometric technology, the World Wide Web, and the body, Light Years Apart posits multiple trajectories within a branching narrative structure, drawing a distinction and, conversely, muddying the boundaries between my subject’s interiority and the enclosure of white racial framing. To see Fula (the body’s sensitization to the joys, subjectivity, and desires of my subject’s presence) necessitates labor—the transcendent process of conscious reorientation within the labyrinth scheme of cinematic spectatorship.

Biography

Christie Neptune is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher. She received her MS from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in Art, Culture, and Technology and her BA from Fordham University in Visual Arts. Neptune's work has been exhibited at venues including The Museum of Modern Art Medellín (MAMM), Gagosian, Martos Gallery, and the Queens Museum, amongst others. Her work has been widely discussed in publications such as Artforum, Hyperallergic, 4 Columns, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Her numerous awards and residencies include the Backslash at Cornell Tech fund, Light Work Artist-in-Residence, NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Arts, Smack Mellon Studio Residency, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM Fellowship, among others. Neptune is reading for a DPhil in Fine Art Practice at the Ruskin School of Art and St. Hugh’s College at the University of Oxford.

Abstract

This paper examines UK arts practitioners' critical navigation of narrow AI automation amid Big Tech's extractive data practices, drawing on thematic analysis of fourteen interviews and focus groups with independent artists, curators, and an arts organiser. The purpose of this ‘Patterns in Practice’ AI study was to understand the interplay of values, beliefs, and emotions on the cultural dynamics of narrow AI use by arts practitioners.

Three themes emerged from this qualitative study: (1) a critical perspective on tech-driven artistic automation including scepticism toward tech-hype and complete automation of the arts, with arts practitioners prioritising human creativity and authenticity over efficiency; (2) advocacy for ethical human-machine collaboration using tactics of resistance, such as small, personal datasets and open-source tools to mitigate against discrimination, high energy usage and e-waste which largely impacts the Global Majority; (3) resolving emotional tensions (‘where the magic happens’) that arise from personal values, beliefs and emotional responses to narrow AI, often balancing joy in innovative outputs with anxiety over societal and ecological disruption.

In this study, arts practitioners often experimented to subvert narrow AI tools for critical reflection on AI design, use and adoption. As immersive technologies become increasingly entangled with AI-driven creative processes, this study therefore plants the seeds for reimagining the role that immersive practices might play in confronting Big Tech digital colonialism - ie social and environmental extraction - including the discriminatory loss of cultural sovereignty and the environmental costs of data centres. A few artists mentioned that they would like to use less energy-intensive technologies and are experimenting with this, but it is not always possible.

At a time of polycrisis - rising inequality, climate crisis and ecological collapse - this is a crucial intervention that is value-aligned with low-power immersive arts practices that use repairable technologies, reusable local materials and centre accessibility, care, and slow, attentive engagement with existing architectures and more-than-human environments.

We therefore position independent AI arts practice as a counterbalance to the slow violence of surveillance and platform capitalism, where practitioners’ values, beliefs, and emotions reorient narrow AI use away from the profit-driven extractivism of Big Tech towards justice. Patterns in Practice was funded by UKRI-AHRC.

Biography

Erinma Ochu is Watershed's inaugural Researcher in Residence: storyteller & queer biologist experimenting with how collective consciousness materialises through participatory practices and creative technologies as a form of earthmaking. Erinma is Associate Professor, Immersive Media in the School of Arts, UWE Bristol and Factory International Fellowship alumni.

Abstract

In this contribution Dr Maria Oshodi tracks erasure and invisibilism within interdisciplinary teams, led by disabled artists evolving the form of immersive theatre in the UK. This is through the work of Britains leading professional theatre company of visually impaired artists, Extant. Frictions receive an in-depth analysis through two Extant ‘art, science and technology’ (AST) R and D productions, The Question (2010) and Flatland (2015), termed ‘HapPerformance’ projects. Both featured bespoke Extant haptic hand-held prototype devices (Lotus and Animotus), to assist journeying audiences to navigate dark dramatic installations, and interact with tactile sets and intricate soundscapes. While The Question exhibited PresenceIng, its successor, Flatland, demonstrated active invisibilism in the form of erasure and a colonising practice by the project’s nondisabled evaluation partner. In identifying their published works (Wiseman et al., 2017), a discounting of the disability-led, full artistic intention and broader immersive theatre context is evidenced, while a lack of socio-political awareness (Terret and Selwyn, 2018), and unconscious enactment (Nuetzel, 2000) are sourced as possible reasons. Despite this, Flatland transformed immersive practice by challenging ocularcentrism in the field through utilising the dark to minimise visual objectification, replacing this with a visually impaired PresenceIng of tactile and novel wayfinding navigation, that shifted politics through universalising of audience experience. This together with disclosing the team dynamics for the first time in this study, reasserted a PresenceIng of disability leadership that had absurdly become invisibilised from within its own project.

Biography

Dr. Maria Oshodi is a writer, arts consultant, disability/performance researcher, and the Artistic Director of Extant. Maria Oshodi’s first play, The S Bend, was produced as part of the Royal Court Theatre’s young Writers Festival in 1984 and later by the Cockpit Theatre in 1985. She went on to write four more plays including, Blood, Sweat and Fears, From Choices to Chocolate, and Here Comes a Candle, that all toured nationally and were published by Longmans, Metheuen and John Murray. In 1992 she graduated from Middlesex University with a 1st BA honors in Drama and English. Since then she has worked in arts development,, for BBC drama production and in 1997 she founded Extant, the award winning, leading performing arts company of visually impaired artists in the UK.

Abstract

Dr Julia Scott-Stevenson will discuss her creative practice research prototype, Future Echoes - a collaborative, interactive mixed-reality documentary experience imagining resilient climate futures. Employing mixed-reality glasses, participants encounter life-size volumetric recordings of diverse Australian women as they share their visions for living through and beyond the climate crisis. These futures unfold around the women via 3D landscapes and images, inviting participants to move, explore, and walk “through” the volumetric recordings and point clouds. The prototype was tested with public audiences at the Vivid Festival in Sydney in June 2025, and a second iteration is currently in development.

The project asks: What does it feel like to encounter a virtual, holographic human sharing her climate story? And how might the material experience of inhabiting augmented space support a sense of connection to desirable futures? Future Echoes sits within Julia’s broader research on how immersive media can help audiences engage with the climate crisis, and contributes to discussions of collective experience, layered realities and expanded documentary.

Biography

Dr Julia Scott-Stevenson is a researcher and maker of interactive and immersive media. She is a Chancellor’s Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, where she explores how XR/VR/AR can address the climate crisis. Julia is also a lead researcher on the MIT Open Documentary Lab’s partnership with the IDFA DocLab R&D Network. She authored the 2024 report on embodiment, AI, and the perception of the real, and continues as lead researcher on the current investigation into XR distribution, which has expanded into the establishment of the Independent XR Distribution Coalition.

Roots to the Universe is an immersive Virtual Reality retelling of the story of creation in the indigenous Gond community’s tradition as narrated by the Pardhans, reimagined in context of the contemporary challenges facing the community. The story reimagines the creation of the world by Bada Dev (the divine Creator) and the impact of human greed on the planet. ‘Roots’ is an allegorical tale that reflects upon contemporary issues facing the indigenous people, with themes of sustainability, indigenous learnings, displacement and greed, through Gond culture’s rich artistic and musical traditions.

Roots has been developed as an artistic collaboration with Dhira Chakraborty, and with artwork and guidance from the Pradhans Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam.

Biography

Janmejay Singh is a UK-based filmmaker, immersive storyteller and activist exploring narratives through Virtual Reality, AI and interactive media. His work ""Whale Fall"" (Terra Carta Design Lab 2024 finalist) addresses plastic pollution in marine ecosystems, showcased at IRCAM Paris, SXSW, Outernet Global and BBC TV Centre. ""Roots to the Universe"" examines indigenous displacement through Gond narratives, selected for London Breeze Film Festival and Frameless residency.

As Global Representative (Asia) on ILC's Youth Advisory Board, he advocates for sustainable land governance. His activism includes walking over 2,000 kilometres across seven countries for peace and climate justice campaigns. He serves as Vice-President of RCA Students' Union and artist-in-residence at IJAD Dance Company's OOT.

Recognised by NISAU India-UK Achievers Honours (Arts, Culture and Entertainment, 2025) and Patrika's '40 Under 40' (2023), Janmejay continues developing innovative immersive experiences for social and environmental justice.

Abstract

A case study of Future River Soundings, a creative workshop/performance that uses speculative storytelling and immersive audio to materialise futures co-created with communities in situ. In the project a mobile app guides participants on a walk through their local environment, inviting them to imagine and describe how their surroundings might look, feel and sound in the future. Their collective responses are immediately gathered and transformed into a singular narration, which is then performed back to the participants with a spatial soundscape that allows possible future worlds to emerge around them.

Biography

Dr. Duncan Speakman is an artist based at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. His practice centres around sonic experiences that engage audiences in uncontrolled public and private space. From installations on trains in Guangzhou, loudspeaker symphonies in Christchurch to audio walks in Saitama and compositions for Radio 4. He is a senior lecturer at the RCA School Of Communication and his research is focused on sound in futures and foresight studies.

Dr. Paul Clarke is Professor of Performance and Creative Technologies at University of Bristol, co-director of the Centre for Creative Technologies, and a co-investigator on Immersive Arts, which supports artists to explore the creative potential of extended reality technologies. He leads on design futures in theCentre for Sociodigital Futures and directs Bristol’s MA Immersive. He is co-artistic director of theatre company Uninvited Guests, with which his practice-as-research explores applications of technologies in participatory futuring and place-based performance.

Abstract

My presentation, titled 'Immersive Subversive', will go over my current immersive work-in-progress, titled 'East British Company'. 'East British Company' is a satirical Augmented Reality project responding to the recent anti-immigration march in London (with 100,000+ people participating). The title is a play on the 'East India Company' that began its activities in India in the 1600s under the guise of trade before dissolving into the British Empire. My project will digitally render the far-right's worst fears by 'showing' that us immigrants are trying to do exactly that to the UK. I will also go over my 2022 AR commission for b-side festival, titled 'Requital.', and funded through the British Council International Collaboration Grant.

Biography

Babar Suleman is an artist and writer, and holds a practice-led Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Art from the University of Oxford. A Fulbright scholar, they graduated with an MFA from Parsons School of Design (New York). Recent commissions and grants include The Elephant Trust, British Council’s International Collaboration Grant awarded via b-side festival, Platform Art Projects, Art Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice, and Compton Verney Art Gallery’s Inclusive Histories Research Fellowship. They have been invited to speak at various institutions including The Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge. Suleman is a Senior Lecturer in Filmmaking at the Manchester School of Art.

Abstract

Re:arctic presents a near-future scenario of a warming Arctic where humans are ex-communicated and the region is autonomous. Through the eyes of a new self-governing intelligence the film portrays the decisions enacted in it’s own Interest.

Biographies

Hadin(He/Him), Deborah( She/Her), Romea ( She/Her), Francisco (He/Him).

Pareid approaches design from various fields and contexts addressing topics related to climate, ecology, human perception, machine sentience, and their capacity for altering current modes of existence. Led by Déborah López and Hadin Charbel, both Associate Professors at the Bartlett School of Architecture, practice and pedagogy intermingle under a research agenda entitled “Monumental Wastelands” where climate fiction (Cli-Fi) is used as a vehicle for engaging various ecologies and challenging current economically profitable models through imminent fictions (if). Through research and interdisciplinary techno-bashing, projects are narrative driven while varying in scales and mediums, often positioning themselves within a socio-political discourse as a tool for disruption.

Abstract

GONE is an eleven-minute virtual reality experience that imagines a world after the end — a place where extinction and rebirth coexist, and the boundaries between human, animal, and machine dissolve. Set within the Tablelands of Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland and Labrador — one of the few places on Earth where the planet’s mantle is exposed — the work immerses viewers in a liminal environment where geological, biological, and digital time converge.

The story follows Jane, a woman alone in a shifting landscape who encounters an emaciated sabre-tooth cat, a drug-peddling shrub-ox, and a herd of ghostly mammoths, in search of a magical egg. The egg serves as both a literal and symbolic core of the work — a reminder of life’s capacity to renew itself amid collapse.

Technologically, GONE integrates volumetric video performance capture, 360° photogrammetry scans, and 3D animation within Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) to create a richly immersive environment. Real human performances are merged with digitally reconstructed landscapes from Newfoundland’s terrain, producing a world that hovers between the organic and the artificial. This synthesis mirrors the ecological tension between the natural world and the technological systems that both document and endanger it.

Through its layered narrative and visual design, GONE explores questions of extinction, memory, and continuity — imagining a future that circles back to the past, where decay and rebirth coexist, and where technology becomes both witness and participant in the planet’s ongoing transformation.

Viewer Experience

Audiences experience GONE through an Oculus Quest headset connected to a high-performance gaming computer. Wearing the headset, viewers are fully surrounded by the virtual landscape, with spatial sound and detailed environmental rendering creating an intimate and immersive encounter. The work is typically presented in a seated format, allowing one viewer at a time to journey through the piece in full 360°, experiencing its atmosphere of stillness, digital decay, and ecological renewal.

Biographies

Andrea Cooper is an interdisciplinary artist based in Newfoundland and Labrador whose practice spans performance, video, animation, and virtual reality. Rooted in performance, her work explores the intersection of ecology, technology, and identity — examining how digital systems and natural environments shape our sense of isolation, memory, and belonging. Through embodied performance and the merging of human presence with digital space, Cooper constructs immersive worlds that hover between the real and the imagined, reflecting on existence, transformation, and the future of the planet.

Her video Strange Things premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival’s Forum Expanded and received the National Film Board of Canada’s Emerging Filmmaker Award at the Images Festival in Toronto. Her subsequent video Honey also premiered at the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded, solidifying her reputation for blending performance, narrative, and experimental form.

Cooper’s most recent virtual reality project, GONE, premiered at the Fine Arts Film Festival in Venice, California; was presented at FIVARS (Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality) in Toronto, Ontario; and received an Honourable Mention from the Digital Arts Zurich Awards (DAZ) in Switzerland. A preview version of GONE was also showcased at SXSW in Austin and the Annecy International Animation Festival in France.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including The Rooms, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Extra City in Antwerp. She holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto and continues to innovate at the intersection of performance, immersive technology, and the future of the planet.

Abstract

Inspired by microorganisms called extremophiles that live on the edge of habitability, in some of earth’s most inhospitable environments, Hinterlands is a mixed reality headset experience on the speculative futures of human evolution. Movement, spatial sound and mixed reality create a space that unfolds differently for you and the dancers. Through an invitation to move, you will explore our entanglement with the natural and digital world and possibilities for surviving, evolving and becoming.

Biography

Teeming with life and ways of being yet to be discovered, entities appear, shift and change around you. Fixed points and end goals are in flux, the space continually transforms allowing for joyful coexistence. Looping, overlapping, migrating, moving, divining, separating, coalescing, sliding, growing…we discover nonlinear lifespans, time shaped by different ways of being. They are boundariless, the product of symbiosis leading to new technological ecologies that are more than human.

Hinterlands utilizes live motion capture streamed to 3 headsets to move a non-humanoid entity in mixed reality using passthrough mode to multiple untethered Pico 4 's. Wearing a headset you will see both the world around you and a mixed reality layer. At certain points , the da ncers' movements move and affect the augmented layers through the use of a motion capture suit. An experience that considers how extending participants' kinesthetic and spatial awareness in MR changes their appreciation and connection to self, other and environment.Rebecca Evans has created digital experiences in UK and abroad since 2014. Her work uses interactive and immersive technologies combined with dance. Through her work Rebecca explores how digital and movement offer ways to appreciate our mutual dependency as part of a human, environmental and technological ecology to speculate on new futures and ways of being. This is often done through dystopian/utopian worlds that play with time underpinned by a neurodiverse perspective considering different intelligences and ways of sensing.

Abstract

This presentation proposes an exploration of how interactive counter-cartography can operate as an immersive, more-than-human method for reframing ecological relations in the Tagus River estuary. Drawing from Research through Design and anthropological fieldwork, the Tagus Multispecies Atlas (TMA) is a map-based, multimedia environment that invites participants to encounter the estuary’s shifting tidal ecologies through spatialised, sensory storytelling. Developed from the author’s long-term autoethnographic engagement with the intertidal zone and extended collaborations with biologists and conservationists, TMA assembles field reports, video fragments, quotations, bird songs, and site-specific scientific information into a subjective, pluriversal atlas that resists the fixed and static nature of conventional cartographic practice.

Situated within the symposium’s track on More-Than-Human Realities, the project investigates how immersive digital environments can support radically inclusive modes of sensing and imagining ecological interdependence. Inspired by the Feral Atlas’ articulation of the patchy Anthropocene, TMA adopts a tidalectical approach, drawn from Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of tidalectics, treating the cyclical movement of water as a model of thought for an island philosophy. Rather than positioning humans as central agents, the platform foregrounds the agencies and temporalities of native and invasive salt marsh species.

By enabling users to navigate the estuary through the researcher’s embodied walking itinerary, TMA cultivates an immersive encounter with multispecies relationality through the intricate structure of the salt pans. Its counter-cartographic framing translates environmental processes into visual, sonic, and narrative forms that render otherwise inaccessible dynamics perceptible. The proposed contribution will reflect on the methodological and ethical dimensions of designing immersive, multispecies mapping environments, and on how such platforms can foster imagination and public dialogue.

Biography

Katerina Iglezaki is an architect and urbanist currently based in Lisbon and working as a PhD researcher at the Interactive Technologies Institute. Situated at the intersection of landscape ecology and urban design, her work explores interspecies interactions and human-nonhuman synergies through a posthumanistic lens. She collaborates extensively with natural scientists to translate field-based ethnographies into visual representations that capture the relational dynamics of ecological systems using spatial storytelling. She holds degrees in Urbanism from TU Delft (NL) and Architectural Engineering from DUTH (GR). She is a recipient of the LARSyS Laboratory scholarship and is part of the collective team of the Bauhaus of the Seas program.

Abstract

The Boschi di Carrega project proposes a transformative model for integrating immersive technologies, cultural heritage restoration, and ecological awareness within a historically significant yet abandoned landscape. Located in the Parchi del Ducato region, this initiative centers on the restoration of Maria Luigia's 19th-century palace and surrounding parklands, transforming them into a public commons that bridges historical preservation with contemporary environmental concerns.

At the heart of this proposal is the creation of a hypogeum—an underground space dedicated to immersive digital arts—that functions as both experimental laboratory and production center for site-responsive installations. This subterranean venue will host exhibitions and experiences that render visible the intricate ecological relationships within the park's forest ecosystem, translating the lifeworlds of plants, fungi, microorganisms, and wildlife into multisensory immersive narratives.

Drawing on the park's unique environmental characteristics and historical layers, the project employs immersive technologies to disrupt anthropocentric frameworks and cultivate more-than-human perspectives. Through spatial computing, volumetric capture, environmental sensing, and speculative storytelling, visitors encounter the forest as a protagonist—a complex living system with its own temporalities, agencies, and forms of communication. These experiences make audible the chemical signals between trees, visible the mycelial networks beneath soil, and tangible the atmospheric exchanges between organisms.

The initiative addresses critical questions of environmental stewardship by creating a repeatable model for heritage sites facing abandonment. Rather than preserving the palace as static monument, the project activates it as catalyst for ongoing ecological dialogue. The hypogeum serves as interface between above-ground natural processes and below-ground technological experimentation, metaphorically and literally rooting digital innovation within living ecosystems.

By combining restoration architecture, immersive art production, environmental science, and public engagement, Boschi di Carrega demonstrates how cultural institutions can become laboratories for multispecies futures. The project challenges extractive relationships with both natural and cultural resources, instead proposing collaborative models where technology amplifies rather than replaces direct ecological encounter. This synthesis of historical stewardship and speculative practice positions the site as testing ground for how immersive experiences can nurture collective environmental imagination and responsibility within communities.
The project is in conceived by Monica Manganelli with Marco Bennicelli (architect) + Gabriele Righi (project Manager) for MAGAZZINO61 (Parma). The project is in progress together the regional and local institutions.

Biography

Monica Manganelli is an award-winning director, screenwriter, set designer, and digital multidisciplinary visual artist, active in both musical theater (opera theater) and film productions. As a set designer and visual artist, she has contributed to various productions in some of Europe's most prestigious theaters. In film production, she collaborated with the Wachowski sisters on the artistic direction of "Cloud Atlas". In recent years, she has directed and designed projects that have participated in 200 festivals and won 50 awards with her short films: (The Ballad Of The Homeless, Butterflies In Berlin, The Atlas Of Wonders, The BLACK ChristS. Far from Justice).

Abstract

The recent more-than-human turn in design calls for "designing-with" other species and ecologies beyond humans. Yet-as Thomas Nagel's famous "What is it like to be a bat?" thought experiment highlights-human experience is constrained by our own sensorium and an irreducible gap in phenomenal access to nonhuman lifeworlds. This paper proposes More-than-Human through Human Augmentation (MtHtHA, denoted ">HtH+") as a design approach that repurposes human augmentation technologies-typically aimed at enhancing human capabilities-away from human optimization and exceptionalism but toward eco-phenomenological awareness. Grounded in somaesthetic design and eco-somatics, MtHtHA entails creating temporary, embodied experiences that modulate the human Umwelt to re-sensitize us to pluriversal more-than-human perceptions. We articulate seven design principles and report five design cases-EchoVision (bat-like echolocation), FeltSight (star-nosed-mole tactile navigation), FungiSync (fungal network attunement), TentacUs (octopus-like distributed agency), and City of Sparkles (urban data from AI's perspective). We demonstrate that such experiential "designing-with" can cultivate ecological awareness, empathy and obligations of care across species boundaries.

Biography

Botao ‘Amber’ Hu is a social computing researcher and experiential futures designer. He is a PhD candidate in Human Centred Computing group at University of Oxford's Department of Computer Science. As a researcher, his research focuses on Decentralized AI (DeAI), specifically through Trustworthy Agentic Web, Agent Ethology, and Agentive Commoning, involving Protocol Studies, Artificial Life, Collective Intelligence, Trust Systems, Human-AI Symbiosis thinking. As a designer, he creates experiential futures using social mixed reality as his primary medium. His work has been featured at leading conferences including SIGGRAPH, CSCW, CHI, UbiComp, WWW, TEI, ISEA, IEEEVR, IEEEVIS, ISMAR, ALIFE, Ars Electronica, SXSW, and TEDx. He has received numerous accolades, including the SIGGRAPH Best in Show, CHI Best Interactivity, Webby, Red Dot, iF Design, Good Design, A' Design, Core77 Design Award, and grants from the Ethereum Foundation. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Tsinghua University and a master's degree in computer science with AI concentration from Stanford University.

Abstract

Digital and immersive art practices are frequently structured around human-centred agency, instrumental control, and a foregrounding of the digital technological system itself, reinforcing ontological separations between maker, material, and machine. These approaches often marginalise embodied, relational, and more-than-human modes of making and research, for which I seek to counter with an interdisciplinary approach that looks to the ancient practice of food fermentation as a framework.

‘Kneading Breathe Through Technology’ is an immersive motion-capture performance developed as a practical outcome of my PhD research into digital puppetry, robotics, and practice-as-research methodologies grounded in ritual and more-than-human collaboration. The performance will be delivered as a performance lecture, and centres on breadmaking, specifically the act of kneading sourdough, as a live interface through which embodied knowledge, nonhuman agency, and digital systems are entangled and made perceptible through real-time digital technologies (Arduino, Unreal Engine).

The work uses motion capture technology to translate the gestures, rhythms, and resistances of kneading into a responsive digital environment. Dough functions simultaneously as puppet, interface, and collaborator: an elastic, temporal material animated by microbial life, environmental conditions, and human touch. Drawing on my ongoing collaboration with a sourdough starter named Richard the First, the performance foregrounds fermentation as a process of co-production between human and nonhuman actors, centering improvisation and incidental making within immersive art.

The performance is structured as a ritual, informed by Byung-Chul Han’s framing of ritual as a symbolic technique for making oneself at home in the world. Kneading becomes a means of grounding the body within a digital-technology space, reframing immersion as something felt through labour, care, and vulnerability rather than spectacle. The relational dynamics between kneader and dough are positioned alongside those of puppeteer and puppet, human and robot, emphasising an entangled spectatorship in which agency circulates.

By combining motion capture, ritualised breadmaking, and immersive visualisation, this performance proposes alternative frameworks for digital art practice that privilege co-emergence, embodied knowledge, and attunement to unseen worlds. It offers the symposium a live demonstration of how ancient material practices can meaningfully contribute to immersive technological environments.

Biography

Joseph Whitmore is an artist-animator working across 3D animation, VFX, VR/Virtual Production, interactive installation, and game design. Currently undertaking a PhD in Digital Puppetry at UAL’s Creative Computing Institute, he is developing critical frameworks that combine traditional puppetry with robotics, motion capture, and embodied interaction. His practice is motivated by exploring hybrid lifeforms/spaces, and how human and more-than-human presences co-exist through performance, technology, ritual, and movement.

Selected past works include; being selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2014); Into the Midst (2019), an immersive exhibition exploring techno-spiritual relationships; co-animating VR f ilm To Miss The Ending (2020), awarded Best XR Film at London Film Festival and screened at Sundance Film Festival; and God Bless You (2023), a 3D animated short about memory and alcoholism, screened internationally at film festivals (LIAF, LSFF, BFF). This film used motion capture as a memory excavation tool for practice-based research, and puppetry as a thematic tool to highlight notions of control, and acts as a precursor to his current research.

Abstract

Morphogenic Angels: Alchemy of Perspectives is an single player video game presentable as an installation. It is a research-led game prototype exploring how bodies, sensory difference, and interdependent technologies can reshape narrative design. Set 1,000 years in the future, the Morphogenic Angels universe imagines a speculative world where humans have evolved into post-human, angelic beings that are shifting forms, senses, and modes of communication entirely. This distant-future framework allows us to ask how sensory experience, translation, and perception might continue to evolve, and how future worlds could be built through the meeting of radically different embodiments.

The project extends this universe by collaboratively developing “Monkey Rabbit,” a new character created with DeafBlind haptic artist Sakura Sky (Hayato Tabata) and a wider network of Deaf, Blind, and DeafBlind contributors in Japan and Norway. Through this process we investigate how immersive technologies can move beyond representation toward shared authorship, inclusive-led mechanics, and multi-perspective worldbuilding.

The installation presents a playable slice of the Monkey Rabbit prototype: an environment where the world is explored through energy exchange.. This mechanic, inspired by Sakura Sky’s lived experience of communication and perception, invites participants to encounter the bridge between expectation and sensory reality. It foregrounds how inner worlds are constructed differently across bodies, and how immersive systems can mediate these encounters; asking what perception might feel like for future beings whose senses have evolved alongside new forms of technology, care, and connection.

Biography

Keiken (経験), meaning “experience” in Japanese, is an artist collective pioneering a collaborative approach to creating immersive worlds through embodied storytelling, empathetic technologies, and deep world-building. Their work moves fluidly between games, films, installations, and performance, crafting experiences that prototype speculative futures. Keiken create deeply interconnected experiences that invite audiences to feel, connect, and transform.

Keiken are a winner of The Lumen Prize (2024) and the Chanel Next Prize (2021), and are artists in residence at Somerset House, London. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: PHI, Montréal (CA), Manchester International Festival (UK), Le Cube Garges (FR), Zeppelin Museum (DE) (2025), Amos Rex, Helsinki (FL) (2024), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (JP), KANAL–Centre Pompidou, Brussels (BE), Helsinki Biennial (FL), HAU, Berlin (DE) (2023), CO Berlin (DE); Wellcome Collection, London (UK); ARKO Art Centre, Seoul (KR); Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf (DE); Onassis, Athens (GR) (2022); Thailand Biennale, Korat (TH); HEK, Basel (CH); 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice (IT); Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo (JP) (2021); FACT, Liverpool (UK); transmediale, Berlin (DE) (2020); ICA, London (UK); Jerwood Arts, London (UK) (2019).

Abstract

The Garden Says...' is an interactive audiovisual multi-user mixed reality experience using Quest3 headsets, projection mapping, and directional sound. It is a semi-guided drop-in installation for 2-4 people at a time exploring human encounters as ecological acts through immersive experiences of the sublime.

My research bridges three interconnected areas of contemporary animation and documentary practice. The practice-based PhD focuses on Expanded Worldbuilding for Environmental Storytelling, investigating how audiences make meaning from immersive experiences through phenomenological and mindfulness approaches. Alongside this, I develop curatorial, pedagogical, and artistic work in animated documentary through the ANIDOX programme, facilitating international collaboration through professional training, development residencies, and XR exhibitions. Working as an artistic duo with my partner Uri Kranot, I also investigate ethical and pedagogical dimensions of hybrid workflows integrating traditional and emerging animation techniques. These areas are distinct in their theoretical frameworks and outputs, but converge naturally through artistic practice, creative production, and teaching.

Biography

I am an established filmmaker, educator, and multi-media artist with a background in fine arts and technology, based in Viborg, Denmark since 2007. I am currently a PhD candidate at IT University of Copenhagen, researching immersive environmental storytelling and audience meaning-making processes. My work expands beyond traditional animation, fusing painting, drawing, and new technologies into contemporary immersive experiences.

I am a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma, ACM SIGGRAPH, and the EU Creative Climate Leadership Programme. I lead educational and professional programmes at The Animation Workshop / VIA University College with Creative Europe MEDIA support.

Together with Uri Kranot, I co-founded TinDrum, a research and development studio. Our work has received top industry honours including the Grand Jury Prize at Venice Biennale, Best Immersive Work at Cannes, and the Eurimages Innovation Award.

Abstract

Last Light Call is a musician and multi-species performance exercise developed from my Sonic Contamination research, which treats ‘contamination’ as encounter and collaboration across beings and scales. The performed score emerges from a sonic–soil survey of Croydon: soil chromatography relationship “maps” from listening sites provide the visual/structural score, while resonant frequencies from each site anchor a final grounding notation or chord where human and more-than-human voices meet in collaborative polyphony. Designed for outdoors, the work re-amplifies usually unheard entities (e.g. Moss, concrete, water) into the performance environment. Indoors, these sources are streamed live or presented from pre-recordings, infrasonic reinforcement through sub-speakers invites embodied listening to vibrations beyond ordinary perception. Score, soil mappings and macro visuals of recorded sites are projected. The live non-human sources amplification feed (often contact-mic’d sphagnum moss) functions as an additional performer and cueing for 3–5 instrumentalists (cello, violin, sax and synth). The piece unfolds through three concise phases that move from solo attunement to collective entanglement: Multiplicity, Contamination and Entangle. Last Light Call proposes immersive listening as a shared interface - where score, site and species co-author a temporary commons - and asks how collective, multi-sensory attention can become accountable mediation rather than extraction.

Biography

Laura Selby is a sonic experience designer, interdisciplinary artist and researcher, whose work investigates sonic contamination and the biological networks within and beyond us. Using listening-led methods, to define immersive experiences that nurture deeper relational understanding and care across varied scales of time and being. Laura works across field recording, music composition, interactive sculpture, textiles, performance, film, spatial sound and XR. Her practice integrates scientific methods - such as chromatography, microscopy and sonic machine learning - to amplify non-human perspectives. Through community collaboration and sensory engagement, she engages dialogue around ecology, perception and shared environments. Selby’s work spans exhibition, performance, film and public engagement, and has been presented at leading institutions and festivals across the UK and Europe, including Ars Electronica, the V&A, IRCAM at Centre Pompidou, the Design Museum, and Tate Modern.

Abstract

'Natura 2040' draws its inspiration from Edward O. Wilson’s provocative Half-Earth theory, which reserving half of the planet as nature reserves to address the crises of ecological degradation and species extinction. The project envisions an alternative reality where the fictional organization Natura 2040 has compressed sprawling farmland into two 100-meter high walls that demarcate the boundaries between city and nature in the artificially constructed land of Flevopolder, Netherlands. This bold move leaves half of the polder to rewild, becoming an extension of the Oostvaardersplassen Nature Reserve.

'Natura 2040' does not aim to present a utopian or dystopian vision of the future of farming. Instead, it offers a series of visual narratives that probe the blending of these contrasting elements. By questioning the essence and definition of nature when placed on a man-made foundation, the film invites viewers to ponder the motivations and implications behind such ambitious ecological experiments.

What does it mean to preserve nature on artificially constructed land? Is this still nature, or merely an artificial illusion? How can we reconcile the relationship between human-made infrastructures and the natural ecosystems they are meant to support? Are the potential consequences of such drastic interventions foreseeable? These questions are central to the film's inquiry, challenging the audience to reflect on the impact of these interventions and the future they could forge.

Biography

Hantao Li is a visual artist, architectural designer, and filmmaker based in London. He intertwines real footage with computer-generated imagery to critically explore and situate today’s society and technology. Through radical and speculative fictions, Hantao envisions and interrogates the environments and landscapes that shape the human condition. His primary tools include narrative films co-produced with real-time game engines, actual footage, and scientific foundations, all aimed at immersing audiences in these speculative worlds.

Influenced by video games, architectural visualization, and simulations, he utilizes CGI environments to symbolize structures of power. This approach allows him to craft surreal sequences that unveil hidden realities and probe into potential futures.

Abstract

Artists: teamLab, Studio Drift, Ryoji Ikeda, Keiken, Josefina Nelimarkka, Natasha Tontey, Anne Duk Hee Jordan

Embodied visions asks how museums can disrupt linear, universalising and human-centric narratives by supporting new artistic narratives and centring the body in the experience. As a contemporary art museum with a future-focused outlook, Amos Rex approaches art as “thought from the future” [Timothy Morton]: a generative space for exploring emerging ideas and conditions. Our curatorial thinking embraces the not-yet-known, inviting audiences into collective, experiential encounters with art, and positions the museum as a civic platform for imagination. Living in a climate catastrophe with its vast geological time scales is unimaginable- art emerges as the language of survival and meaning making.

Space and body play a key role in engaging with art - how do we stage meaningful immersive experiences without creating isolation or collective immersion that is mere eye-candy? Embodied immersion offers a path forward, set in a subterranean underground cave, Amos Rex’s space carries an older viewing logic than the white cube or Wunderkammer, and is more aligned with prehistoric storytelling. In reference to Yuk Hui’s thinking around how technologies reflect the worldviews that engender them [Cosmotechnics], I will connect artistic practices engaging with emerging technologies, involving the senses and the body to tell stories that foreground and imagine other agencies, epistemologies, and temporalities. Through these practices museums can diversify their storytelling and interrogate their own humanist tradition as they navigate the Anthropocene.

Biography

Itha O’Neill is Head of Curation at Amos Rex where she oversees curatorial matters in alignment with the institution’s focus on Art, Technology and Society and Art in the Public Realm  She is an experienced curator with a special interest in new media and advanced technologies that bring art closer to the public, engage with pressing topics of our times and nurture new forms of expression. She holds degrees in media, film and cultural studies from the University of Greenwich, and in art history from the University of Helsinki. Over a career spanning 20 years, she has curated projects including Jeppe Hein, Studio Drift, Bill Viola, Tadashi Kawamata, Yinka Ilori, and contributed to solo shows by teamLab, Larissa Sansour, 24-h with Tony Cokes and the experiential installation “Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊*·̊'' by artist collective Keiken. She is currently co-curating a solo show in Venice 2026 with Amos Rex and LAS art foundation, and curating a solo show of Anne Duk Hee Jordan at Amos Rex.

Abstract

Establishing deep ecological awareness is not only an end in itself but also a social tool for recognition and trust between alienated communities. In this work, immersion is approached not as a technological condition but as a conceptual and pedagogical practice. We define ecological immersion as a designed shift of perspective and embodied attention that may occur with or without digital mediation. Through immersive design that produces experiential displacement and trains participants to internalize multispecies perspectives, participants develop a dual capacity for empathy toward both humans and non-humans.

We introduce PADLab (Post-Anthropocentric Design Lab), a design-research initiative that develops practices for transitioning toward a post-anthropocentric worldview. We demonstrate this through two ecological immersions. Human-Wheat is an installation in which participants embody a wheat crop, shifting perception from grain as resource to wheat as a living entity. The More-Than-Human City Guide enables participants to interpret the urban environment not as a purely human construct but as a multispecies habitat.
We then show how this ecological training operates in human conflict contexts through Common Habitat, a workshop in which Jewish and Arab participants assume the identities of local non-human species. This species embodiment establishes a protected dialogical space, inviting participants to negotiate shared environments through ecosystemic needs rather than fixed group positions. We conclude with RiverViews, an AI-supported installation that reframes borders as ecological continuities. By visualizing waterways that physically connect contested regions, participants co-create hybrid cultural objects and shared future rituals.

Biography

Michal Pauzner is a designer-researcher, curator, and senior lecturer in Visual Communication at Shenkar – Engineering. Design. Art. Her work investigates how design can mediate relationships between people, environments, and other forms of life. Through participatory and sensory-based practices, she develops educational and spatial frameworks that use design as a tool for reflection, collective learning, and shared responsibility. Pauzner is co-founder and co-director of PADLab, where she leads collaborative projects, courses, and exhibitions that connect academic research with public engagement. She also heads Shenkar’s Center for Teaching Excellence, initiating interdisciplinary learning initiatives across institutions. Her research in social design and health—supported, among others, by the Sandberg Grant from the Israel Museum—includes collaborations with Sheba Medical Center, the Faculty of Medicine at Bar-Ilan University, and the Technion. Her work has been presented in exhibitions, workshops, and conferences internationally.

Oded Kutok is a multidisciplinary creator, senior lecturer, architect, urban planner, designer, and design activist. He co-founded and co-directs the Post Anthropocentric Design Laboratory at Shenkar, where he develops design-based pedagogy for expanding perspectives and capabilities. He also founded The Utopia Workshop, pioneering methodologies for future visioning and public dreaming. Oded’s artistic and curatorial projects have been presented at international platforms including the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. He is active in public initiatives such as the Palestinian-Israeli planners’ group Between the Mediterranean and the Sea. Alongside his creative, activist, and academic work, Oded has led major planning and urban design initiatives at regional and city scales, from large-scale masterplans to applied research on spatial readiness for the technological and geopolitical transformations shaping the 21st century.

Abstract

Fragments of Perception: An Autistic Odyssey” is an immersive installation exploring the porous boundary between human consciousness and the natural world. Rooted in autistic lived experience (particularly duality, doubling, dissociation, multiplicity) the work reframes these states not as pathology but as portals into more-than-human ways of sensing and relating.

Funded by Immersive Arts, the project encompasses a series of immersive, projection-mapped environments inviting participants to inhabit the complexity of autistic perception. It centres the claustrophobic intensity of being held inside a body and the sensual, awe-filled expansion that arises when autistic attention meets the natural world.

Participants experience two interconnected scenes (Forest and Water), each unfolding as a sensory dialogue between human and environment. Projection mapping, responsive sound and atmospheric textures present nature as active collaborator rather than passive backdrop. The installation foregrounds autistic modes of perception: intuitive, rhythmic, unbuffered and deeply relational.

In Forest, a dynamically-shifting woodland is projected around participants, who influence the space through movement, gesture and spatial presence. This environment reframes autistic stimming as creative expression, a method of thinking, feeling and communicating through repetition, rhythm and bodily resonance. Forest becomes a site where internal sensation and environmental signal merge: shared choreography between participant and landscape.

The Water environment extends this exploration of duality and permeability. Layered projections ripple and refract across walls and surfaces, accompanied by internal dialogues expressed through spatial audio. Voices - echoing self-questioning, intrusive thoughts, sensory overwhelm or inner companionship - are presented not as symptoms but as manifestations of layered consciousness and multiplicity. The environment responds subtly to participants: a sense of being both grounded in the body and diffused into the surrounding elements.

Fragments of Perception invites participants to inhabit states often pathologised (dissociation, doubling, sensory flooding) as forms of ecological attunement. The installation offers a more-than-human experience of embodiment, revealing how autistic perception can generate alternative pathways into connection, relationality and the living world.

By bringing this immersive exploration of autistic perception and more-than-human relationality into dialogue with the RCA Symposium, we aim to inspire new conversations about embodiment, ecological attunement and the creative potential of neurodivergent ways of knowing.

Biography

I am a Disabled/Neurodivergent artist and PhD candidate at the Artistic Research Centre (Nottingham Trent University), working across somatics, drawing, photography, audio-video, immersive technologies and land-based ecologies. My research centres the crip body as a site of knowledge, exploring darkness, dissociation and sensation through dreamy world-building. My installations explore collectivity, ritual and sensory perception. Drawing on stimming and autistic, ADHD and synaesthetic experiences, I use rhythmic gesture and layered sound with nature imagery to create immersive, phantasmagorical environments. I co-research the autistic sensorium, investigating stimming as an artistic methodology through autoethnographic-fictional practice, and create immersive, walking-based and multi-sensory experiences that engage queer temporalities and embodied knowledges. Recent projects include Fragments of Perception (Immersive Arts) and Retelling of the Wild Woods (Arts Council DYCP), developing large multiscreen installations with technologist Jim Brouwer. My work has been supported by Arts Council, Tate Modern, Shape Arts, LADA, Supporting Act Foundation, and others.

Abstract

What does it mean to curate with water, rather than about it?

In this talk, I will present two site-responsive curatorial projects--"Waterlines: Stories of Urban Ebb and Flow" and "Reservoir: What the Water Knows"--to explore how curatorial practice can create immersive, ecological encounters that disrupt traditional exhibition frameworks. Both projects examine water as a living system, an archive, and a collaborator, using interdisciplinary art and public programming to heighten visitors’ sensory engagement with place.

"Waterlines," developed for the Somerville Museum in Massachusetts, was conceived in direct response to Miller’s River, a waterway that once defined the region’s industrial landscape and now flows unseen beneath the museum itself (see link below for "Confluere"). This buried river shaped the conceptual and spatial development of the exhibition. Through video installation, soundscapes, data-driven mappings, and reflective sculptural works, the project sought to reveal the hydrological and historical layers beneath the museum floorboards. The exhibition’s programming--guided meditations, neighborhood water walks, and community conversations--invited audiences to experience the museum not as a static space but as a porous threshold to the hidden river below.

"Reservoir," presented at the historic Metropolitan Waterworks Museum beside the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, extended this inquiry into the relationship between infrastructure, environment, and lived experience. In collaboration with six artists, I transformed the former pumping station into a dynamic environment where sound, sculpture, performance, and data visualizations interacted with the building’s industrial past and the reservoir’s presence. Public programs played a central role to activate both the water station and its surrounding grounds with site-specific interventions.

By reframing immersion as ethical recalibration rather than technological saturation, this talk argues for a practice that redistributes perception across human and nonhuman actors. To curate with water is to recognize that we are never outside these systems–only more or less aware of them.

Biography

Arlinda Shtuni is an Albanian-born, Boston-based curator and artist whose cross-disciplinary practice explores how immersive, sensorial experiences can deepen our relationship with the living world. Guided by the belief that meaningful discoveries emerge in the “in-between” spaces where disciplines and ecologies intersect, her work invites audiences into states of heightened receptivity as a way to imagine more attuned collective futures.

Shtuni’s environmentally focused interventions have been presented at institutions including the Nave Annex Gallery, the French Cultural Center, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum. Her projects unfold as participatory encounters, site-responsive installations, and contemplative environments that bridge embodied perception, environmental inquiry, and artistic research.

Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mass Humanities, the Mass Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council, and the French Consulate in Boston.

Abstract

This presentation examines immersive environments as sites for more-than-human dramaturgy, where ecological systems, animals, robots, sensors, and computational agents participate as active contributors to shared narrative worlds. Drawing on the XR-as-Stage framework and practice-based research across Fish Phone Booth, MuMu: The Multispecies Multiplex, and LARRP (Live-Action Robotic Role Play), the talk reframes immersive media not as tools for representing nature, but as relational stages that enable humans to rehearse coexistence with other forms of life and intelligence.

Across these projects, immersion emerges through intra-action—where meaning and agency arise through relations rather than between pre-existing subjects and objects— rather than simulation. In Fish Phone Booth, participants enter a darkened, spatial-audio environment where oceanographic data and animal vocalizations invite them to “sing with a fish and a whale.” Rather than decoding non-human communication, the dramaturgy reverses the usual direction of inquiry: humans attempt to become acoustically intelligible, cultivating ecological attunement through breath, vibration, and shared sonic timing. In MuMu, multispecies roleplay and speculative worldbuilding position humans, robots, animals, and environmental systems within a shared farm ecology, using play and systems thinking to unsettle anthropocentric assumptions about agency, labor, and care. In LARRP, robotic companion intelligences shape scenes of vulnerability through movement, pacing, and micro-prompts, redistributing facilitation and reframing care as a shared, more-than-human practice.

Informed by research on creative AI as a dramaturgical partner, the presentation situates AI not as a dominant intelligence but as one participant within a broader ecology of agencies. Across all three projects, immersive systems are designed to listen, respond, and perform back—holding memory, shaping tempo, and enabling reversible participation. These environments foreground queer ecologies and non-binary ways of sensing by allowing identities, perspectives, and roles to remain fluid rather than fixed.

The talk argues that immersive dramaturgies can foster environmental imagination and shared stewardship by staging encounters that are ethical, participatory, and unresolved—inviting participants to rehearse multispecies futures rather than consume representations of them.

Biography

Ash Eliza Smith is an artist, designer, and educator whose work uses storytelling and speculative design to rehearse new realities. Her practice spans cinema, theater, games, live-action roleplay, and extended reality, creating worlds, scenarios, and interactive narratives that reimagine pasts, presents, and possible futures.
Smith was founding faculty at the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts, where she helped establish the program’s interdisciplinary approach to emerging media and storytelling. She is a visiting fellow in the MA Narrative Environments program at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and currently holds a position at the University of Georgia, where she leads XR storytelling and ArtScience research through the Speculative Devices Lab.

Abstract

The Blind is an immersive artwork that investigates how disorientation, sensory instability and ecological transformation can become tools for shared awareness. This presentation introduces the conceptual and dramaturgical framework of the project, which is inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck’s play about a group of blind figures waiting in a forest for a guide who never returns. In this contemporary interpretation, blindness is not understood as a lack of vision but as a collective condition in which human perception becomes dependent on fragile ecological and technological systems.

The presentation focuses on the use of portals as liminal structures. In The Blind, visitors pass through five successive thresholds in which a hyperreal forest gradually dissolves into nervous systems, filaments and generative patterns. What begins as a stable and recognisable ecosystem slowly loses coherence. Biodiversity fades, spatial order collapses and the environment becomes increasingly unstable. This transformation makes ecological vulnerability experientially legible, not through representation but through embodied perception.

Rather than centring the human viewpoint, the work foregrounds more than human agency. Sound, tactility, spatial resonance and generative software shape the experience as active forces. Artificial intelligence functions as an invisible dramaturgical presence that continuously rewrites the environment, creating a world that appears responsive yet ultimately unreliable. In parallel, each visitor hears an individual voice that gradually merges into a collective polyphony, shifting the experience from isolation towards shared ecological sensing.

During the presentation, visual documentation, spatial diagrams and short audiovisual excerpts are used to explain how immersive technologies are combined with symbolist dramaturgy to produce a state of liminal blindness. This condition destabilises anthropocentric orientation and invites alternative modes of sensing, knowing and relating to ecological systems.

The presentation argues that immersive art can function as a space for ecological imagination by staging moments of disorientation in which visitors learn to navigate uncertainty together. The Blind proposes immersion not as escape or spectacle, but as a threshold practice that reveals the fragility of living systems and the necessity of shared orientation within more than human worlds.

Biography

Kristof Timmerman is an artist-researcher whose work explores the relationship between body, technology and hybrid environments.

With his collective studio POC he creates performances and installations that use VR, motion capture, sensors and projection within tangible scenographies that function as portals into digital spaces. His projects investigate how shifting sensory conditions transform perception and presence. He is chair of the Research Council of the Royal Conservatoire and Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, head of the research group Intermatter and co-initiator of the Immersive Lab at AP University of Applied Sciences and Arts, where he also teaches Immersive Storytelling. His doctoral research 'Sense of Wonder. Artists Portals between the Real and the Virtual' examines how transitions between physical and virtual worlds generate intensified immersion and altered subjectivity. His work has been presented at international conferences and festivals including TEI and IEEE VR.

Abstract

I will screen three recent video works and introduce them with a short performative talk, which will include extracts from my ongoing artist’s book project The Book of the Machines. The first screening, Elemental Feelings (2025), is voiced by a posthuman lifeforce that outlines a plan for an all‑consuming future machine. The work proposes a vast assemblage that exceeds current notions of extraction, drawing diverse materials—flesh, rock, precious metals, skin, plants, soil—and their distinct temporalities into its operational system. This machine performs affective interventions on bodies of all kinds, enabling new modes of sensation and influence.

Secondly, I will screen Umwelt/4470 – Part I (2024), part of a new series of text‑ and video‑based works that imagine speculative eco‑technological environments. In these spaces, relations between human, non‑human and machine are reconfigured through experimental amalgamations and emerging forms of interconnectedness. Images and materials shift between digital and physical processes; collaborations with AI neural networks generate visual responses that reshape and re‑narrate the work. Fragmented, liminal and continually transforming, these images extend my exploration of digital waste as a critical and creative resource. The title references Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the “umwelt”—the unique perceptual world experienced by every living being—set in contrast with Ursula Le Guin’s imagined World 4470, a sentient environment composed of intelligent plant life.

Finally, I will screen Erewhon (2025), titled after Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel describing a society that has destroyed its machines after recognising their potential dangers. Butler was among the first to question the risks of advanced technologies and the possibility of machine consciousness. Using this as a point of departure, the video proposes a contemporary vision of Erewhon: a speculative island whose surface is composed of vast accumulations of discarded technologies and the remnants of a former hyper‑technological civilisation. Here, technology appears to possess its own emergent consciousness, and although the landscape is littered with remnants, other processes unfold beneath the surface. Rather than serving extractive or dominating functions, technology is reimagined as a collaborative force offering possibilities for alternative futures and new amalgamations between humans, nonhumans and machines. From this terrain, speculative bodies emerge, formed from the waste materials that cover the island.

Biography

Charlie Tweed is a media artist and researcher working across video, text, digital media and performance. His work interrogates relationships between human technologies and the earth, exploring themes of control, extraction, waste and more‑than‑human intelligence. Through strategies of re‑appropriation and speculative fiction, he adopts personas of anonymous collectives and hybrid machines to propose alternate technological futures and expanded interspecies relations.

He holds an MA in Electronic Media, an MFA in Art Practice from Goldsmiths College, London, and a PhD in Art, and is Subject Leader in Art at Bath School of Art, Film and Media. His work has been exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Spike Island, Animate Projects and Aspex. His films have featured in festivals and group shows including Gjon Mili International Video Festival, Rencontres Internationales, Oberhausen Short Film Festival, WRO Media Art Biennale, the ICA, Whitechapel Gallery and Zentrum Paul Klee.

Residencies and awards include the EarthArt Fellowship, a Wellcome Trust Large Arts Award, AHRC funding, and programmes with Grizedale Arts and the Zentrum Paul Klee.

Abstract

Based on several years of research with mycelium and multisensory structures, including the strange conditionings of weather, atmosphere, light, and sound, Symbiotic Intelligence (SI) has developed a completely new way to experience 'immersivity'.

SI proposes immersivity as a collective, emergent phenomenon co-created through the collision of multiple perceptual worlds or Umwelten: the lived, experiential, sensual world of organisms. This challenges conventional understandings of immersive experience as simply an adventure of individual human engagement with technological, closed environments like VR or screen-based sensory saturation as representational enclosure.

SI has found that immersive environments instead function as poetic zones of encounter where different modes of perception interfere, resonate, and generate emergent forms of collective intelligence. Rather than designing experiences for human subjects, our installations create conditions in which participants move through affectual fields shaped by bodily presence, mycelial electrical activity, environmental data, and algorithmic responses. Drawing participants into a kind of metabolism of Umwelten, these installations evoke uncanny senses of belonging where aesthetic and material encounters with more-than-human entities unfold as sensuous ecologies of co-creation.

For our presentation, SI will detail the research behind these relational fields, where human, fungal, machinic, and environmental sensing agents co-constitute shared atmospheric conditions in real time. We will share how an immersive environment, where all the senses converge to generate an experience at once plural and unified, becomes capable of transporting participants into different perceptual states. Immersivity here is not a passive condition but a co-created process emerging through reciprocal interactions between bodies, materials, and environmental forces. It unfolds as multiplicity and multi-temporality intertwine, producing a dynamic and unpredictable ecology that continuously sustains and reshapes experience and narrative.

The presentation will conclude by offering a new approach to both the relational structure and the palpable aesthetic mark, which we name 'dispositif': the movable, emergent material scaffolding through which multiplicity and multi-temporality take form and become unified into a cohesive experience. We will demonstrate how practice-led research with more-than-human systems reveals immersivity as a temporal-material phenomenon, atmospheric, distributed, and co-created, challenging anthropocentric paradigms while opening new methodologies for designing multispecies, ecological, and post-human immersive experiences.

Biography

Symbiotic Intelligence (SI) is a practice-led artistic research collective developed by Drs Shira Wachsmann and John Wild. SI creates immersive installations fostering encounters that challenge anthropocentric hierarchies by exploring intelligence as a co-constituted emergent process, one that foregrounds multispecies encounters and synergistic ontologies.

The Symbiotic Intelligence collective began three years ago during postdoctoral research at the Real World Narrative Ecologies AiDesign Lab, in partnership with Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Royal College of Art, London.

The artworks and installations of Symbiotic Intelligence have been exhibited across Europe, the UK, and the Global South, including at Cromwell Place, London, AIL-Angewandte, Vienna, Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre (JCCAC) Hong Kong, and in the caves at Mittweida in Germany. Symbiotic Intelligence has been published in peer-reviewed journals and has given workshops both internationally and locally, with the most recent invitation at the Peckham Digital Festival and Iklectik-Peckham with over 700 in attendance.

Abstract

Narrated and programmed in real-time, Embodied/Misembodied is a performance lecture exploring movement in virtual reality through a disabled lens. Through personal storytelling, immersive artist Ben Joseph Andrews (accompanied by a performer in a VR headset) interrogates the promise of ‘seamless’ embodiment in virtual reality as a window into his experience with vestibular migraine, a chronic movement processing disorder.

While we might often think of VR in terms of its visual, aural or interactive affordances, less often do we consider how the headset is, at its centre, a fundamentally vestibular device: it relies on the detection and processing of movement in order to accurately determine our position and orientation within space. But when this motion data is misprocessed - when tracking breaks down, sending vision spinning or your virtual arm metres away from your body, it reveals as much about our own frail processing as it does about the headset’s function. By critically deconstructing the tenets and assumptions of embodiment, the performance shines a light on biological and technological anatomies of movement as they expand and fall apart together.

Expanding the artist’s award-winning VR work Turbulence: Jamais Vu, Embodied/Misembodied celebrates glitch and jank as a way to understand the beauty and fragility of our ever-moving world.

Biography

Ben Joseph Andrews (b.1991) is a disabled new-media artist based between the UK and the unceded lands of the Wathaurong people in regional Australia. His work - spanning installation/lecture-performance/projection/immersive theatre - interrogates the liminal space between physical and digital. He has presented and been commissioned by Sundance, SxSW, IDFA, Khoj, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Experimenta, the Wales Millennium Centre, Watershed, Arts House Melbourne, Adelaide Festival, and the Best of VR program at the Venice Biennale of Cinema. Prizes include Best Immersive at IDFA, two Australian Directors’ Guild awards and nomination for the inaugural Annwn prize for immersive art.

Andrews is a current National Australian Regional Arts fellow, has spoken for NYU Tisch, MIT, WA Museum boola bardip, Heide, and Experimenta, and mentored for Immersive Arts UK, CPH:LAB, Expand Lab, and Screenwest. He is a current practice-led PhD candidate between the University of Melbourne and the Victorian College of the Arts, Australia.

Abstract

I believe that progressive designers using technologies intimately linked with extreme ethical issues including privacy violations as well as environmentally destructive production processes and worker human rights abuses have a moral responsibility to materially address and seek to amend these problems through their design. The reality is we live in an era of rampant surveillance capitalism, encroaching technofacism, and massive human and planetary suffering instigated by technological production. When we design VR games using biometrical tracking devices controlled by institutions with massive surveillance advertising arms, such as Meta, or links to global military contractors, such as Varjo, we are actively participating in these abuses and placing our players, especially marginalized folks, in potential danger.

But that doesn’t mean that immersive tech is beyond redemption. VR should not be relinquished to techno-oligarchs and the sociopolitical machines that enable them. Instead we need radical tech reclamation.

To this end I am proposing an approach to immersive design that critically addresses the urgent threat of technological surveillance and offers material political and artistic interventions against the contemporary techno-fascist regime. This approach builds on core concepts from trans* political theory such as anarchitecture and solidarity and protest to develop design practices that improve player privacy protections, expand artistic ownership, and engage the political agency and expression of gamers. In my presentation I will offer a breakdown of the current state of immersive tech privacy concerns, explore the political theories informing my design practice, and use my own immersive VR project “Outfoxed” as a case study to explore the practical application of the theory and encourage more experimentation.

Biography

Nina "Neen" Attinello is a designer and artist working at the intersection of gaming, theatre, and immersive experiences. Their recent work explores themes of technological surveillance and collective resistance against technofacism, responding to our current sociotechnical landscape of coerced hyper exposure with playful paths of cooperative evasion. Inspired by the writing of Jack Halberstam, Marijam Did, and Cory Doctorow and trans* feminist theories of illegibility, Neen’s projects ask players to practice radical acts of technological unbuilding, modeling the revolutionary potential of politically engaged gamer communities.

Abstract

Traditional immersive media often treats the digital environment as a representational window—a place to look at. This presentation argues for a fundamental paradigm shift: treating XR as a cognitive system—an active agent that reorganizes perception, mediates inner narratives, and reshapes the emotional and perceptual loops of human experience.

Drawing from a decade of Research through Design—a practice spanning industrial, product, and experiential projects focused on the biological, social, and psychological construction of human flourishing—this trajectory explores the constant pendulum between the internal self and the externalized system. Grounded in the Perception–Emotion–Behavior (PEB) cycle (Affective Feedback Loop) and a Biopsychosocial-Environmental framework, my work investigates how we might project our invisible psychological architectures into navigable, embodied space.

The pinnacle of this research, Insight Realm, rejects the pursuit of a "perfect virtual world" in favor of visualizing the "imperfect yet so, constantly flourishing human interior". I demonstrate how cognitive biases and emotional spirals are spatially and metaphorically implemented—not as technical tasks, but as experiential mirrors of the subconscious. By designing for psychobiosocially engaged built environments that foster a state of continuous, reciprocal phenomenal engagement, I argue that technical precision (from Unity physics to sensor data) only finds meaning when it serves the user’s constructive Self-perception and Agency autonomy. This approach moves beyond 'world-building' to define a space that is not a neutral container, but an active participant in the user's Perception–Emotion–Behavior cycle.

This methodology utilizes game engine-based sensors to tap into the homunculus, Vestibular, and Proprioceptive systems, transforming XR into a Cognitive Interface. I propose an ethical, human-centric interaction model where XR acts as both a tool for psychological well-being and an epistemological proving ground. Ultimately, I challenge the track of "Bodies, Sensors, and New Narratives" to move beyond worldbuilding toward sensory systems that foster "Perceptual Literacy"—allowing us to navigate, manipulate, and clarify the internal landscapes of our own minds.

Biography

Binna Lee is an Adjunct Professor at Parsons School of Design and the founder of Team Echo, specializing in the synthesis of embodied cognition, spatial perception, and systemic immersive design. Drawing from a decade of Research through Design—spanning industrial, product, and experiential education—her work investigates the body as a primary cognitive interface within hybrid digital-physical environments. As the Vice Chair of IDSA NYC Women in Design and a volunteer researcher for the XRSI Child Safety Initiative, she develops ethical, human-centric interaction models that bridge cognitive science with immersive innovation. Her research trajectory—including Insight Realm, Echo, and I feel many things during the day—utilizes game engines and sensor-based media to tap into sensorimotor systems and their interplay with non-neutral environmental influences. Treating the immersive experience as an epistemological tool for human flourishing in a nuanced technological era, Lee advocates for "Perceptual Literacy," moving beyond representational world-building toward sensory systems that clarify the internal landscapes of the mind.

Abstract

As design and creation are increasingly delegated to AI, The Second Agent questions what agency the human brain still possesses and how the human body is redefined. This immersive project re-embodies tacit knowledge and cognitive states through Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)-driven robotic light painting. The project utilises a system logic where cognitive states (the mind) and motion capture (the body) dictate robotic outputs. First, a BCI extracts mind states – such as relaxation (alpha waves) or focus (beta waves) – and translates these values into the colour temperature, brightness, and jitter rate of a light trail. Second, motion tracking captures craft gestures to form a pure Gesture Vector. This bodily capture draws context from the unrecorded labor and standardized repair routines found in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen. These dual inputs direct a robotic arm holding LED light sticks. Instead of mimicking actions in real time, the robotic performance employs a Delayed Trajectory, engaging in a temporal dialogue that conveys human essence. Finally, a long-exposure photograph lasting 30 to 90 seconds captures the robotic movements, synthesising a physical Body of Light. The resulting artwork forms a Craft Signature, defined as the intersection of gesture and mindset, effectively archiving invisible labour. Ultimately, The Second Agent blurs the identity of the creator, examines the tension inherent in collaborative creation, and grants visual agency to underrepresented technological communities.

Biography

Jianing Luo graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and holds a Master of Architecture degree. As a former researcher at Tsinghua University, his research focuses on digital fabrication, sustainable building design and construction, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), and the application of reclaimed materials in generative design and construction. His works won the B-Pro Show Bronze Prize from the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL).

Abstract

Digital content for families is usually designed to keep the child busy and offer free time to the adult.

Unfortunately, research highlights that replacing a moment of social interactions with a solitary time negatively affects the development of kids. So, as designers, what can we do about it?

In this talk, I will develop on these issues and use our interactive tales app The Storyteller (EN/FR) and our podcast Au bout du village (FR) as case studies to show how we can rethink the way we approach digital content for families in terms of narrative, interactive, motion, sound and graphic design to provoke the gathering of families around it.

And since business and design always go together, we will end on why that kind of content is currently held back by the predatory business model of mobile games and why the future might be brighter than we think.

Biography

Hi! This is Adrien Fernandez.

In the past 13 years, I've spent my days (and nights) exploring how new media and technologies allow us to rethink the way we tell stories — acting both as a producer and narrative designer.

I founded the transmedia studio Esprits Productions to carry my explorations and develop the Esprits IP. With Esprits, I aim to bring parents and children together around digital media and inspire hope in our ability to build a better world. You can read more about it in our manifesto (https://shorturl.at/lr6wP).

Over time, the studio has grown beyond the Esprits project. I created an interactive animated movie called Our Footsteps, produced a 360° live-mixed (DJ/VJ) immersive experience for the 50th anniversary of Les Grignoux and we are currently working on the art direction of the video game Packed Lair.

Abstract

Airships XR is an innovative educational initiative that utilizes immersive technologies – including VR, AR, Game Play, and mixed reality – to transform the complex engineering principles and historical legacy of the British Imperial Airships – which came to an end with the crash of the R101 on 5 October 1930 – into an emotionally resonant, story-driven experience designed to inspire future STEAM professionals.

Using archive, digital and 3D assets in a multiplicity of ways, for story-based teaching and learning, where multiple perspectives are held, power in use is revealed, conflict and contradictions are present.

• Heritage - Public History
• Engineering Focused Teaching and Learning
• Story-Driven Entertainment

The SNAP Visualisation Lab presentation will focus on the projection of our 360 video R101: End of Empire AI Generated project trailer (produced by Creative Director Martin Percy) and our HTC VIVERSE Cardington Digital Museum.

Biography

Dr Atif Mohammed Ghani, Royal College of Art

I’m an XR producer, educator, and storyteller working across film, design, games, immersive installations, and emerging media. My practice is rooted in interdisciplinarity and in building narratives that move fluidly across formats – from single‑screen and web‑based experiences to MR/VR/AR and location‑based environments. I prioritise multimodal design and interoperability, ensuring audiences can engage without specialist hardware, with headsets used to deepen embodiment rather than gatekeep access.

I’ve spent 30 years producing popular content, including 15 feature films, and since 2018 I’ve developed award‑winning teaching and learning solutions in the education and technology space. In 2025, Innovate UK named me XR Educator of the Year.

I hold a PhD from the London School of Economics and am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. I teach in the School of Communication at the Royal College of Art and am currently producing a major project on the legacy of British airships.

Abstract

The Whale is a hybrid immersive performance co-directed by Jack Hardiker-Bresson and Sharon Clark. Produced by Jack’s practice, Office of Everyone, alongside Bristol-based Raucous, and supported by an Immersive Arts Expand award, the project is a proof of concept for large-scale, access-centred immersive storytelling.

Staged within a vast projection gallery, the work brings performers and audiences inside a shared 180° visual and audio field. Moving image and spatial sound envelop physical environments and bodies, dissolving the conventional separation between stage and screen, physical and digital. Live performance unfolds within and against projected environments, accompanied by spatial sound, a constructed set and an original score. The scale of projection is not a backdrop but an active partner, surrounding both audience and performer..

Embedded within this environment is a newly developed system of spatial creative captioning, built in collaboration with deaf, deafened and hard of hearing artists and audiences. Rather than occupying a fixed, peripheral position, captions are integrated into the projected world. Text travels across surfaces, shifts scale and tempo, and interacts with performers and sound, operating as part of the scenography and dramaturgy. Creative access informed not only how the work is received, but how it is structured and composed from the outset. As Ben Glover, who led on captioning, put it, “the captions become a character”.

The Whale was developed through a multidisciplinary process spanning theatre, design, 3D animation and sound composition, and moves between commercial production and research contexts. Partnerships across cultural organisations and research institutions have enabled the project to function simultaneously as performance and inquiry.

In this short talk, Jack reflects on the practical and conceptual process of bringing together large-scale projection, spatial audio, physical environments, live bodies and access-led design. Drawing on both established theatrical practice and contemporary digital systems, Jack considers how immersive communication can be expanded through cross-disciplinary collaboration, where familiar methods and emerging technologies meet at scale.

Biography

Jack Hardiker-Bresson is an artist, creative director and researcher. Jack leads Office of Everyone, an award-winning collaborative practice pioneering new, more equitable ways to tell great stories. Jack is a Tutor (Research) on the Digital Direction MA at the Royal College of Art, and PhD Candidate in PTEQ at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Office of Everyone creates work that spans hybrid performance, critical immersive research, large-scale installation, and intimate at-home AR theatre, including a narrated experience voiced by Sir Ian McKellen.

Abstract

Drawing Lines is a live performance exploring the relationship between the moving body, sound, and technology, asking not what technology can do, but what it should do in creative practice.

The title works on different levels. Literally, the work is about drawing: a dancer's and violinist's movement is captured in real-time through motion tracking and rendered on screen as trails of dots and lines, transforming the body into a living drawing tool. Each mark is a residue of a moment, fleeting and shaped entirely by kinaesthetic impulse.

But Drawing Lines also speaks to thresholds. In a century where technology increasingly mediates how we inhabit our bodies and spaces, the project asks where we draw the line, between human expression and machine representation, between authentic movement and performed novelty. Rather than chasing the spectacle of new tools, the work positions technology as an enabler that surfaces stimuli already latent within the body.

At its core, Drawing Lines is a dialogue. A dancer and violinist engage in live collaborative improvisation, each responding to the other in real time. The system deliberately restricts what it sees, observing only three specific features of the dancer's body at a time, directing attention toward what remains: the quality, texture, and intention of movement. These visual traces feed back into the performance, becoming new source material for performers and supporting the creative exchange without overriding it.

Rooted in Rudolf Laban's movement philosophy and the expanded possibilities of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Drawing Lines treats the body as the primary material and technology as a collaborator that listens rather than leads. It is a space to explore new stimuli, not through innovation for its own sake, but through careful, considered constraint.

Biography

Drawing Lines is led by Freddie Hong, visual artist and Senior Lecturer at Kingston School of Art, whose practice spans interactive art, installation, and HCI research; Giacomo Pini, dance artist and Lecturer at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, trained at London Contemporary Dance School, whose work has been shown across theatres, galleries, and festivals; and Sue In Kang, violinist and sound artist based in London, whose career bridges international classical performance and experimental practice in spatial music and multimedia.

The team is completed by creative technologists Alex Xi and Rian Stephen, who support the technical realisation of the work, and Ali Mohammed, who leads project management.

All three lead artists come from deeply traditional backgrounds in their disciplines, and approach this collaboration with a critical eye, asking how technology can enrich performance without overtaking it.

Abstract

This technical demo introduces the beginnings of a cross-institutional collaborative research project titled ‘Biometric Bodies Breathe: Exploring Heart Rate Synchrony and Embodied Feedback Loops Using Real-Time Data Capture in Immersive XR Virtual Production’. Supported by XR Network+ (using funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and UK Research and Innovation), the project is expanding upon early-stage prototypes developed through collaborative R&D conducted by Dr Kath Hughes and Dr Daniel Bacchus, which explored how the phenomenological and affective affordances of immersive XR technologies could be utilised to shape visually, spatially and sensorially responsive data representations/ avatars of biometric bodies in immersive XR contexts. Biometric Bodies Breathe explores how the intersections of biometric data, immersive XR technologies, neuropsychology, the visual and sonic arts could develop innovative XR prototypes that aim to advance understanding of how biometric data can shape XR interaction design, to affect heart-rate synchrony, relationality, and embodied feedback-loops in real-time. Anticipations of the project’s social impact include contributing to current debates on accessibility and embodied representation in XR; contributing to debates around data ethics, privacy, and ownership of the use of sensitive biometric information, working to inform best practices for handling biometric data in immersive XR; providing new ways to explore embodied connection and shared relational experiences across distributed physical/ virtual sites; and creating pathways for collaboration with healthcare, creative tech, and cultural sectors by pioneering new approaches to socially-connected immersive experience, collaborative XR performance, and/or therapeutic wellbeing interventions (e.g. stress regulation, group mindfulness experiences, rehabilitation, etc.).

Biography

Dr Kath Hughes is a researcher and lecturer in Visual Culture at the University of the West of England. Her doctoral research critiqued the biopolitical implications of popular contemporary self-tracking practices and how our embodied lives are becoming increasingly entangled in digitally-mediated online cultures through biometric wearable devices. Kath’s research has been disseminated in the UK and internationally, and developed into a supra-curricular Arts & Humanities course ('Self-Surveillance in the Digital Age: Is digital self-tracking good for our health?’), for The Brilliant Club university-access education charity. Most recently, she is the recipient of an XR+ Network (UKRI EPSRC) funding award, to research-lead the collaborative project ‘Biometric Bodies Breathe: Exploring Heart Rate Synchrony and Embodied Feedback Loops Using Real-Time Data Capture in Immersive XR Virtual Production’, with digital artist Dr Daniel Bacchus, Professor of Neuropsychology Iain Gilchrist (University of Bristol) and sound artist Joanna Penso.

Exploring Affordances of Virtual Reality Technology with Contemporary Embodied Actor Training Practices.

Embodied Cybernetic Actor Training (ECAT) is a proposal for an emergent framework of actor training that utilizes contemporary actor training techniques with virtual reality (VR) technologies. In this research, VR head-mounted displays (HMDs) were used to explore the concept. Utilizing a workshop-based actor training Practice-As-Research methodology supplemented by additional mixed methods of data collection and analysis, ECAT was developed through exploratory actor training workshops with volunteer participants, in which Khairul performed both roles of actor training practitioner and PhD researcher.

ECAT utilizes the affordances that actor training techniques bring to embodying virtual experiences and equally, the vast potential of imaginative scenarios and emotions that VR brings to actor training practices. Within the framework, a methodology for virtual embodiment was developed through the modification of existing actor training techniques and a recontextualization of Gordon Calleja’s Six Dimensions of Involvement. Calleja’s concepts, originally produced for video game design theory, was adapted into a framework that can identify, qualitatively analyse and cultivate aspects of focus, presence, psychomotor control and context navigation for the actor. The adaptation of Calleja’s original six dimensions of involvement for the ECAT context, consisted of expanding existing dimensions, or the creation of new concepts: Cybernetic Assimilation, Virtual Object Permanence, Virtual Space Permanence, Alterbiography, Ludic Matching and Emotional Affect.

Through the exploratory application of actor training techniques while cybernetically assimilated within virtual reality environments, specific modifications for the Meisner Repetition and Michael Chekhov techniques were discovered that provided systematic approaches towards achieving and cultivating visceral virtual embodiment. Upon continuous experiencing and practice of virtual embodiment, further affordances of ECAT were found: Imaginative Specificity, Training Cognitive Capacity and Efficiency, Imaginative Accumulation and Experiential Blending.

Biography

Khairul Kamsani is a London-based theatre-maker, performer, and researcher working at the intersection of actor training, embodiment, and immersive performance. He recently completed a PhD on scholarship, developing Embodied Cybernetic Actor Training (ECAT), a practice-as-research methodology examining how performers adapt within virtual, augmented, and blended realities. His current research expands into the Neurophysical Actor framework, integrating cognitive science and physical training to explore attention, energy allocation, and presence in complex performance systems.

He was previously a Drama Industry Fellow at the University of Hull and has created immersive performance-research funded by the Singapore National Arts Council (NAC). Alongside his research, Khairul uses dance theatre as a means of investigating embodiment across technological systems and intercultural contexts.

Khairul holds an MA in Actor Training & Coaching from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and brings an intercultural perspective shaped by his practice across Southeast Asia and the UK.

Abstract

Artists describe creative flow as absorption, lost time, effortless action, yet almost everything we know about its neuroscience comes from studies on video games and close ended exercises, not the open-ended, materially rich making that defines artistic practice. This research asks: what does the body reveal about creative flow during genuine artmaking, and does the medium change it?

Using a triangulated biometric framework that simultaneously reads brain activity, heart rate, and skin conductance alongside video observation and post-session self-report, skilled practitioners sculpted masks in clay and VR during uninterrupted 30-minute sessions. A pilot study validated the approach; the ongoing main study expanded the sensing to capture the whole body's response.

The findings challenge the assumption that creative flow is a single state. Clay sculpting produced deeper reported flow and dramatically stronger sensorimotor brain activation showing the body's response to physical touch and material resistance. VR, by contrast, drove higher focused cognitive processing in every participant, even those who reported feeling less in flow. Heart data revealed that artists with comparable flow experiences showed radically opposite cardiac signatures; each body finding its own pathway into the work. Skin conductance confirmed the pattern: clay flow is physiologically calm; VR flow is more stimulating.

Triangulation also uncovered hidden dimensions invisible to questionnaires alone: creative flow operating below conscious awareness in experienced practitioners, and effortful engagement mistaken for flow in retrospect. Together, these findings suggest that the medium does not simply support or hinder flow, it produces a qualitatively different kind of creative experience inside the body.

Biography

Maritina Keleri is an artist-researcher whose doctoral work at the University of Westminster investigates creativity in virtual reality environments, comparing traditional and digital artmaking practices. Her research integrates cognitive neuroscience, immersive technology, and creative practice, employing multi-modal data collection methods. Her interdisciplinary background spans architecture (Architect Engineer Diploma, University of Patras, Greece), and fine art (MA Art & Science, UAL). She has exhibited at Tate Exchage and the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and has created interactive installations and performances exploring the intersection of art and technology. Maritina founded and directed the Studio Lab of Art & Science, facilitating cross-disciplinary collaboration between art and computer science students. She currently lectures in Computer Science at University of Westminster foundation programme.

Abstract

A video version of the original interactive experience will be played. As well as presentation of the interactive framework and incorporating interactivity into the immersive experience.

The work is no longer satisfied with interactions only being used as triggers, but progressive and collaborative clues pushing storytelling forward. In this work, Galaxy Orchestra, visitor interactions are tightly bound to the ancient Chinese belief of the harmony between the sky and earth, where the accumulation of interactivity are eventually converted into visual elements of the universe.

Biography

Born in Beijing in 1988, Seph Li has a mixed background in technology and design, and his keen interest in interactive artworks led him into the field of media arts. Seph studied Computer Science and Entertainment Design in Tsinghua University and continued his M.F.A. study in Design | Media Arts at UCLA in the United States. Seph instances technology to create poetic interactive experience within defined systems. His works have been showed internationally including New National Art Center Tokyo, Museo do Amanha Rio de Janeiro, ArtScience Museum Singapore, etc. He has also received grants from the Art Council England.

Abstract

We are in a dynamic relationship with our surroundings. Our thoughts and feelings are constantly shaped by the external stimuli coming from spaces we inhabit. Yet, this relationship remains translucent. The stimuli goes unnoticed. Spaces create enclosures; artificial domains, with fragmented sensual qualities far removed from traditional environments we have once inhabited. In this synthetic shift, how can we objectively measure the sensuality of space?

Image of the Forest explores how, with the use of sensory technologies and insights from data, we can create scientific evidence for the governance of the elusive and fleeting. By creating the biosensing wearable technology, project explores how the XR experiences can understand and respond in real time to the sensory information from the human body.

The aim is to create immersive spaces enriching at the most fundamental, subconscious level of human perception, encouraging a dialogue about the values we should nourish to create the digital experiences of the future.

Biography

Sonia Litwin is a biomedical engineer and designer. With a career spanning seven countries she has held roles in academia, management consulting, robotics and medical technology. Her current research combines computer and neuroscience to create agents that are not only intelligent but also sensible and adaptive to the most visceral of human experiences. Sonia has been recognised as a Global Talent by the Royal Academy of Engineering. Her research has been exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival and 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, published by the ACM and earned first-place honors from IEEE.

Abstract

Wild Sounds of Wales: Life in the Trees (WSoW) is a multidisciplinary XR project that addresses isolation and health inequalities in social care by returning nature and concert music to people who can no longer easily access either. It brings together Welsh National Opera Orchestra, immersive technologists, nature partners and health practitioners to create a restorative experience for dementia care residents and older adults with limited mobility, combining bespoke orchestral writing, VR360 and spatial audio wildlife sound from Welsh landscapes.​​

The project aligns with creative health priorities by supporting preventative, community-based care and exploring how immersive cultural experiences might complement existing dementia and aging pathways. In a pilot at Bryn Seiont Newydd Dementia Care Home in Caernarfon, residents experienced WSoW seated in their familiar chairs, in small groups spanning early to advanced dementia, supported closely by specialist carers and with adaptations that allowed participation with or without a headset using a multichannel loudspeaker setup. Observational notes from residents and staff point to a heightened sense of having been outdoors and to immersive encounters that triggered autobiographical memories of cherished landscapes and family visits.​​

Artistically, WSoW is grounded in what is likely the first commissioned professional concert orchestra works written specifically for the VR360 and spatial audio medium, positioning bespoke orchestral work as an engine of immersive innovation. This proof of concept, and the technical workflow around it, sets out a reusable model for future orchestral XR projects that can travel between public venues and health and social care settings while remaining accessible and inclusive in their design.​​

The presentation will discuss the commissioning, design and multidisciplinary process at the heart of WSoW, technical innovation in VR360 orchestral music production and accessibility, real-world outcomes from public showcases and dementia care, and emerging lessons for inclusive immersive experience design in social care contexts.

Biography

Dr Owain Llwyd is an award-winning Welsh composer, arranger, orchestrator and Executive Producer whose practice spans concert music, film and television, immersive arts and commercial production. He has collaborated with the Welsh National Opera Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales and London Concert Orchestra, recording at Abbey Road and Air Studios.
As Founder, Composer and Executive Producer of 'Wild Sounds of Wales: Life in the Trees', the world's first orchestral concert music for VR360 and Spatial Audio, he led a 20+ partner project winning the Immersive Category at the International Media Festival of Wales 2025, with selections at New Media Film Festival LA and SONA 2026. He is also composer on 'Our Silent Anthem', a British Council supported immersive experience exploring the emotional impacts of conflict through data-driven composition and AI.
Owain is the only composer to have won all five Composer's Medals at both the Urdd and National Eisteddfod of Wales, and holds a PhD from Bangor University.

Abstract

Theatrics of Interspace (TOIS) is a practice-based inquiry into how immersive technologies can cultivate shared, reflexive, and equitable modes of spatial engagement. It is curious about the gap between bodies, sensors, and the environment and explores these interstitial spaces as both catalyst and conceptual metaphor that shape relationships among the entities of the space. Inspired by the immersive theatre production Sleep No More, the project was staged inside the historic Lehár Theatre in Bad Ischl, Austria, a culturally significant yet politically contested building on the brink of demolition or redevelopment. TOIS transformed this dormant theatre into a hybrid sensorium that redistributed agency among participants, architectural matter, and computational systems, reopening the question of what a theatre can be, and whom it can serve, in a technologically mediated present. By removing the seats, decentralising attention, and integrating Kinect-driven body-tracking, two projection-mapping, and two VR installations as distinct stages/performances, the project constructed a cohesive immersive environment. These installations intentionally disrupt the traditional theatre reconfiguring spatial hierarchies, disorienting spectatorship, and queering the conventional actor–audience divide. Participants navigated a fluctuating interspace, shifting continuously between the roles of actor, viewer, and co-creator, traversing physical and virtual worlds while negotiating collective bodily awareness and emergent forms of co-creation. Individually crafted yet collectively orchestrated, the installations create a pensive, thrilling, and sensorially charged environment. The immersive atmosphere amplified when multiple visitors were present: their movement, gaze and improvised behaviours activated shifting perspectives that challenged fixed notions. This interplay metaphorically illustrated the theatre’s broader socio-political context, in which local residents deeply attached to its classical identity encountered a speculative reimagining of its future cultural role. Responses ranged from wonder and curiosity to disorientation and direct resistance, revealing the layered politics of spatial memory and immersive transformation within a small-town community. TOIS argues that VR, sensing technologies, and spatial computing function as epistemic tools and relational mediators that compel a transposition of experience and perception into critical inquiry. They disrupt power structures, expand perceptual horizons, and catalyse imaginaries for more inclusive, socially responsive futures.

Biography

Anirudhan Iyengar is an architect, world builder, researcher and educator based in Innsbruck, Austria. He holds a PhD in architecture from Studio 2, Institute of Design, Faculty of Architecture, University of Innsbruck, titled Synthetic Environments. His work explores the intersection of immersive technologies, spatial design, and embodied cognition. Originally from Mumbai, Anirudhan studied at The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and has exhibited work in London, Moscow, Beijing, Mumbai, Barcelona, Linz, Austin, Scotland and Innsbruck.

TBA