Academic Session: Art Track #3 Control

Art Paper Session Track #3 Control features 5 presentations. Session Chair: Yuichiro Katsumoto (JP)

1h 30min

Yuichiro Katsumoto

Yuichiro Katsumoto (JP) is an artist and educator based in Saitama, Japan. His practice explores the relationship between letters and images through linear materials such as strings, ribbons, springs, chains, and needles. By releasing lines from the flat surface into physical space, he creates kinetic typography, motion graphics, and poetic systems of movement. Katsumoto earned […]

Art Track #3 Control – Weibin Duan & Chen Weibo: Siphon and Overflow A Curatorial Methodology for Art–Technology Dialogue: A Practice-Based Reflection from the China (Hangzhou) Art and Technology Biennale, Symbiotic Cosmos (2025)

This presentation proposes “siphon and overflow” as a curatorial methodology for art-and-technology biennales, examined through the inaugural China (Hangzhou) Art and Technology Biennale, *Symbiotic Cosmos* (2025). Moving beyond spectacle-driven and showcase-oriented models, the methodology defines siphoning as editorial concentration: creating a disciplined field where heterogeneous practices, discourses, and technological imaginaries encounter one another. Overflow refers to the controlled extension of this field into pedagogical, institutional, and translational contexts. Their methodological force emerges through a cyclical tension between concentration and diffusion. The presentation situates this approach within curatorial studies, biennale discourse, and cosmotechnics, while grounding it in Liangzhu cosmology, Hangzhou’s historical and digital cultures, and the China Academy of Art’s century-long engagement with art and science. Its operation is demonstrated through four thematic sections and selected anchoring works, followed by a reflection on tensions encountered in practice.

15min

Duan Weibin & Chen Weibo

Duan Weibin (CN) is a professor, doctoral supervisor, and Dean of the School of Design and Innovation at China Academy of Art, where he also serves as Deputy Secretary of the School’s Party Committee. Holding a PhD in Art Studies, he has long been engaged in design education, interdisciplinary innovation, and the integration of art, […]

Art Track #3 Control – Magda Hamilton: Solaris: Designing for Unknowability in Interactive Systems

What does it take to build something that genuinely resists being understood — not broken, not random, but governed by logic the viewer cannot reach? This talk presents Solaris, a real-time WebGL simulation of Stanisław Lem's sentient ocean, built around that question. The work argues that unknowability cannot be authored at the surface: aesthetic strangeness wears off, behavioral mystery collapses under interpretation. Instead, it must be constructed at the level of logic — in physics models, response grammars, and communication structures. Three technical decisions are examined as a single argument: a viscoelastic physics model with memory and intent, a gravitational labor visualization, and a mood-governed response system whose parameters shift on a schedule the viewer cannot observe. A fourth subsystem fails, and the failure is instructive. The talk proposes four design resources for building systems that sustain the experience of encountering something whose interior stays closed.

15min

Magda Hamilton

Magda Hamilton (US) is an engineer, artist-researcher, and founder of Velvet Disruption, a New York-based creative technology studio. Her work treats material metaphor as a design principle: building simulations where abstract phenomena — memory, thought, interiority — are given physical substance, and where choices made in code carry philosophical weight. She is drawn to interfaces […]

Art Track #3 Control – Takafumi Morita: MorphFlux: A Kinetic Installation of a Ferrofluid-Based Physical Display Beyond Human Control Through Human–Material Co-Creation

This art paper presents MorphFlux, a kinetic installation of a ferrofluid-based physical display in which the forms and flows of liquid continuously transform through their mutual interaction. By controlling an array of electromagnets, the ferrofluid forms circular protrusions and ripple-like waves whose interference produces dynamic structures across the liquid surface. While human control guides the liquid, its behavior cannot be fully determined by such control alone, but instead emerges from the interaction among human, material, and environment. This relationship is framed as human–material co-creation, in which the material is positioned not as a passive medium but as an active agent that co-produces behavior. Through these behaviors, MorphFlux offers a way to reconsider the relationship between humans and materials from a more-than-human perspective.

15min

Takafumi Morita

Takafumi Morita (JP) is a media artist, HCI researcher, and Assistant Professor at The University of Tokyo. Liquids have no fixed form and continuously transform in response to their surroundings. Fascinated by this fluidity, he explores new forms of expression through liquids. Through his works, he creates spaces where human control and natural phenomena intersect, […]

Art Track #3 Control – Takayuki Todo: Dynamics of a Dog on a Leash

In this presentation, I trace how my installation "Dynamics of a Dog on a Leash" developed from its initial conception around 2010 to its realization in 2025. I reflect on how the project changed through fifteen years of technological, social, and artistic shifts, and on how making the work transformed its original premise. Presenting the installation as practice-based research, I examine how animacy and empathic stress emerged through the material and performative relations among a quadruped robot, chain, floor surface, posture-control system, concealed operator, and audience. Rather than being scripted or anthropomorphically designed, the robot’s animal-like behavior arose through minimal control, physical constraint, entanglement, balance correction, sound, and motor overheating and shutdown. I then consider how these dynamics made viewers perceive intention, vulnerability, and suffering in a machine without a face or eyes, and how the work shifted from representing danger to staging ethical discomfort through direct encounter.

15min

Takayuki Todo

Takayuki Todo (JP) is a media artist based in Japan. He holds a master’s degree from the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), and his practice explores how people perceive animacy, agency, and otherness through gaze, movement, and nonverbal interaction. Working primarily with robotics and embodied systems, he creates installations that examine the […]

Expanded Play – Exhibition of Playful Media

Now in its third edition, the Expanded Play Gallery features a curated selection of interactive works that address a wide range of topics through the medium of play. From dynamic shadow worlds inspired by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, to the sonification of urban data or conversations with an artificial messiah, the exhibition spans a diverse range of artistic positions and technological approaches. Together, the works invite participants to engage directly with the evolving relationships between humans and machines, challenging conventional understandings of interaction, perception and digital culture.

8h 30min

Atelierhaus Salzamt, Linz

Art Track #3 Control – Pei-Ying Lin, Hsianghua Chang, Tzumu Yang, Yiwen Huang, Bingchen Kao & Tsunhung Tsai: Role Shift: A VR Trolley Problem on Identity Framing, Forced Embodiment, and Moral Discomfort

Role Shift is a virtual reality artwork that reinterprets the Trolley Problem as an embodied, moral encounter. Rather than presenting moral choice as a disembodied trade-off, the work asks the audience to make three successive switch-lever decisions about a runaway train, each followed by a forced viewpoint switch onto the tracks where they experience the consequence. Information about the people on the tracks is disclosed progressively, culminating in a moral reversal before the final decision. The piece combines a haptic vibration vest, and high-contrast halftone visuals to attach somatic markers to each decision. Where most VR perspective-taking works invite empathic identification with a victim, Role Shift lets the audience act as the one who decides, then forces them to occupy the position of the harmed. This paper situates the work, articulates its three intertwined design strategies, and reflects on what we learned from showing it to fourteen audience members.

15min

Tzu-Mu Yang, Pei-Yin Lin, Hsiang-Hua Chang, Yi-Wen Huang & Bing-Cheng Kao

We are a student team from National Tsing Hua University, studying in Graduate Institute of Art and Technology and International Intercollegiate Ph.D. Program. Our team consists of students with various specialties, forming a team with diverse interests and unique vision in VR and its usage.

Academic Session: Art Track #4 Embodiment

Art Paper Session Track #4 Embodiment features 5 presentations. Session Chair: Katja Zibrek (SI/FR)

1h 30min

Katja Zibrek

Katja Zibrek (SI/FR) is an ISFP Researcher at Inria Rennes, France. Her main area of investigation is the perception of virtual humans in Virtual Reality. She uses methods from psychology and computer science to understand the impact of virtual humans on users’ subjective and behavioral responses.

Art Track #4 Embodiment – Danqi Yao, Anita Lam & Andrew Stokes: Wolf and Tahr: Designing Mixed Reality Dance Performances for Expanded Theatre

This presentation introduces Wolf and Tahr, a mixed reality dance performance developed as a practice-based research project through cross-disciplinary collaboration. It shares the concept, design and implementation process of the work, including our design approaches to key challenges in MR dance performance, and explores the possibilities of MR for expanded theatre, functioning as one section of the performance rather than its sole or dominant format.

15min

Danqi Yao, Anita Lam & Andy Stokes

Danqi Yao (HK) is a Creative Technologist and Media Artist from The Collective, a cross-disciplinary creative studio based in Hong Kong specialising in digital experiences with a focus on mixed reality performances. Anita Lam (Curator) and Andy Stokes (Creative Technology Director) are from A.L.A.N (Artists who Love Animals and Nature), a Hong Kong-based charity that […]

Art Track #4 Embodiment – Keon Ju Maverick Lee & Philippe Pasquier: Revival: Metacreation, Co-Creation, and Digital Afterlife with Musical Agents

Revival explores how artificial intelligence, improvisation, and historical musical traces can be brought into relation within a live audiovisual performance. Created by the artist collective K-Phi-A, the work unfolds through structured improvisation among human performers, musical agents, and generative visual systems. Drawing on curated small datasets, including fragments associated with deceased composers and the collective's own materials, Revival reactivates historical traces through agents that transform and recombine these materials without reproducing them directly. In doing so, the project challenges fixed notions of authorship, liveness, and creative control, framing expanded performance as a site of distributed agency through avant-garde percussion sounds, live electroacoustic music, live electronics, and interactive audiovisual production. As an artwork and case study, Revival demonstrates how human and artificial agents can co-produce emergent audiovisual form, reanimating historical materials as active forces within present performance.

15min

Keon Ju Maverick Lee & Philippe Pasquier

Keon Ju Maverick Lee (KR/CA) is a Korean-Canadian electroacoustic and acousmatic artist-researcher, electronic percussionist, composer, and audiovisual creator working across avant-garde electronic music and immersive media. Their practice treats timbre, sound diffusion, and spatial motion as central compositional materials, using loudspeaker arrays and binaural headphones as complementary listening environments. As a research-creation PhD candidate at […]

Art Track #4 Embodiment – Albert Barqué-Duran & Ada Llauradó-Crespo: SYNAPTICON: Creative Alignment at the Brain–AI Model Interface

SYNAPTICON is an artistic-research project at the brain–AI model interface that combines human-computer interaction (HCI),brain-computer interfaces (BCI), advanced AI language models, and a creative multimodal audiovisual performance environment.This article presents the project as both an artwork and apparatus, offering a methodological framework for understanding creativealignment: the negotiated relationship among performer intention, noisy neural capture, model priors, authored audiovisual mappings,and audience interpretation. Rather than treating decoded text as transparent access to inner speech, we argue that it functions as acreative index that organizes transitions, narratives, and perceptual dynamics in real time. Building on this case study, we introduce afour-layer creative alignment framework—signal, semantic, narrative, and social alignment—to describe how neural activity becomestechnically processable, aesthetically structured, and culturally legible in public performance. In this view, uncertainty is not merely atechnical limitation to be minimized, but a constitutive condition that shapes co-agency, co-authorship, and interpretability. The papercontributes a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing expressive neuro-AI systems, a research-through-practice account of how creativealignment can be staged and examined in live performance, and an ethical perspective on cognitive liberty, mental privacy, and the responsible design of brain-AI-based interfaces.

15min

Albert Barqué-Duran & Ada Llauradó-Crespo

Albert Barqué-Duran, PhD (ES), is a cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and artist exploring cognition, creativity, and ethics in Human-AI interactions. He is the Lead Research Scientist at IASlab, La Salle Barcelona (Ramon Llull University), coordinating graduate programs in Creative Technologies. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Science from City St George’s, University of London, with […]

Art Track #4 Embodiment – Shahma Abdulla: OUROBOROS_v:init – The Anti-Game: Diagnosing the Achievement Subject through Real-Time EEG

"OUROBOROS_v:init is a brain-computer interface installation that inverts the reward gradient of the interactive systems it draws from. Beta-band activity, the established neurological correlate of focused, goal-directed cognition, is mapped to an inverse function of visual stability: as the participant intensifies effort, the rendered environment fragments. Stabilisation requires the suspension of the very reflex the participant has been culturally trained to amplify. In preliminary sessions with fourteen participants, every one responded to the discovery that effort was producing collapse by intensifying effort further. Prior briefing did not interrupt the response. The reflex ran faster than the cognitive recognition of it. This talk presents the installation as a practice-based study of Han's achievement subject and Fisher's privatisation of stress, rendered legible in real-time neural data. It proposes a category of designed environment, diagnostic rather than optimising, that turns the measurement instrument on the person supplying the data."

15min

Shahma Abdulla

Shahma Abdulla (BH/SG) is a multidisciplinary artist, designer and researcher whose practice sits at the intersection of interactive installation, critical design, and cognitive science. Her work is guided by a philosophy she calls Plain Bridge Reverence: the belief that creativity is both a grounding force and a bridge between people. She holds a BFA (Visual […]

Yoichiro Kawaguchi: The Next Singularity. The Intelligence of Life.

30min

Ars Electronica Center, Deep Space 8K

Yoichiro Kawaguchi

Art Track #4 Embodiment – Oliver Gingrich, Alain Renaud & Erika Mondria: KIMA: Resonance – Humming in Harmony and Resonance for Creative Health Outcomes

Research points to a sustained effect of humming on mental health and wellbeing. Research across public health, participatory arts and creative health foregrounds the wellbeing effects of humming on diverse populations including infants and young mothers, elderly and groups with mild cognitive impairment and the general public. The art science project KIMA: Resonance by the art collective Analema Group builds on this research. KIMA: Resonance provides an interface for humming, visualizing vocal harmonies between two singers and the effect of humming on the human mind. Measuring harmonic intervals between two interactants alongside its effect on brainwave of a third person, the artwork provides a visual and sonic representation of humming and its effect on the audio-visual cortex. Participatory art has shown to affect human stress levels, and with it its effect on health. This art paper describes cultural context, genesis of the work and its exhibition at Ars Electronica Festival.

15min

Oliver Gingrich, Alain Renaud & Erika Mondria

Dr. Oliver Gingrich (UK/AT) is the programme lead for the BA (Hons) Animation at the School of Design, University of Greenwich, a media arts practitioner and researcher. With an Engineering Doctorate in Digital Media, and 15 years of professional practice in the Creative Industries as Creative Director and Art Director, Olive’s practice centres around holographic […]

Birds of a Feather – Connecting Media Art

Connecting Media Art Research is a Birds of a Feather session that brings together representatives from leading media art communities and conferences. The session offers a platform to introduce their respective initiatives, exchange perspectives on current developments in the field and explore opportunities for future collaboration. Session Chair: Juergen Hagler (AT)

1h 30min

Juergen Hagler

Juergen Hagler (AT) studied art education, experimental visual design, and cultural studies at the University for Art and Design in Linz, Austria. He currently works as a professor of Computer Animation and Animation Studies in the Digital Media department at the Hagenberg Campus of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. Since 2014 he a […]

Birds of a Feather – Victoria Szabo: ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community and possible future directions for computational media arts research

Introduction of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community and possible future directions for computational media arts research.

15min

Victoria Szabo

Victoria E. Szabo (US) is a Research Professor in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University, where she works at the intersection of digital humanities, visual culture, computational media, and immersive technologies. She is a founding director of Duke’s Computational Media, Arts & Cultures PhD program and has held several […]

Doctoral Consortium Session 1

Session 1 of the Doctoral Consortium features 4 presentations. Session Chairs: Simone Kriglstein (AT/CZ), Günter Wallner (AT), Marcel Zaes Sagesser (CH/AT)

1h 30min

Ars Electronica Project Space

Marcel Zaes Sagesser

Marcel Zaes Sagesser (he/him) is an artist and researcher investigating how humans are increasingly intertwined with their technologies. Focusing on the material qualities of sonic media, his work reimagines environments that let us listen to human-technological relations. Mixed practice-based and academic methods enrich this critical practice. The ongoing series, High & Low Tech Sonic Materialities, […]

Simone Kriglstein

Simone Kriglstein (AT) is associate professor at Masaryk University and senior scientist at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology. She specializes in designing and evaluating user interfaces and interaction methods in different fields, including games, VR/MR/XR, and training/learning methods for schools, universities, and companies. Simone has been deeply committed to exploring the intersection of technology, […]

Günter Wallner

Günter Wallner (AT) is Professor for Game Computing at the Johannes Kepler University Linz and holds positions at the Eindhoven University of Technology and Ontario Tech University. His research interests lie at the intersection of games user research, data analytics, and information visualization. His work particularly centers on understanding player behavior in games and on […]

Doctoral Consortium Session 1 – Welcome

Simone Kriglstein (AT/CZ), Günter Wallner (AT), and Marcel Zaes Sagesser (CH/AT) open the Doctoral Consortium sessions.

10min

Ars Electronica Project Space

Marcel Zaes Sagesser

Marcel Zaes Sagesser (he/him) is an artist and researcher investigating how humans are increasingly intertwined with their technologies. Focusing on the material qualities of sonic media, his work reimagines environments that let us listen to human-technological relations. Mixed practice-based and academic methods enrich this critical practice. The ongoing series, High & Low Tech Sonic Materialities, […]

Simone Kriglstein

Simone Kriglstein (AT) is associate professor at Masaryk University and senior scientist at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology. She specializes in designing and evaluating user interfaces and interaction methods in different fields, including games, VR/MR/XR, and training/learning methods for schools, universities, and companies. Simone has been deeply committed to exploring the intersection of technology, […]

Günter Wallner

Günter Wallner (AT) is Professor for Game Computing at the Johannes Kepler University Linz and holds positions at the Eindhoven University of Technology and Ontario Tech University. His research interests lie at the intersection of games user research, data analytics, and information visualization. His work particularly centers on understanding player behavior in games and on […]

Doctoral Consortium Session 1 – Rose Ansari: Embodied Infrastructures: Rethinking Perception, Control, and Agency in Computational System

This talk presents my doctoral research on how computational systems reshape perception, agency, and embodiment across human and nonhuman contexts. I introduce Speculative Reconstruction Prototyping, a practice-based methodology that moves from embodied participation in biomedical research to archival study of historical medical instruments and the creation of speculative interactive devices. Through two case studies, Intimate Circuits and Autonexis, I examine the paradox of technological intimacy: as technologies move closer to the body, they also transform bodily experience into externalized data, signals, and feedback systems. Intimate Circuits explores the body as a wearable interface through touch, exposed circuitry, and real-time visual feedback. Autonexis shifts toward a human-decentered robotic ecology where perception circulates among machines, plants, screens, and viewers. Together, these works develop the concept of embodied infrastructures, where bodies, machines, environments, and institutions co-produce perception, control, and knowledge. The presentation asks how artistic practice can critically reconfigure computational infrastructures today, collectively.

20min

Rose Ansari

Rose Ansari (US) is a creative technologist & researcher, and Ph.D. student in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures at Duke University. She received her BFA in Studio Art from Alzahra University in Tehran and her MFA in Art & Technology / Sound Practices from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she also […]

Birds of a Feather – Erandy Vergara & Everardo Reyes: ISEA International

The presentation focuses on ISEA International, an international non-profit organisation fostering interdisciplinary discussion and knowledge exchange among culturally diverse organisations and individuals working at the intersection of art, science, and technology. The organisation’s main activity is the International Symposium on Electronic/Emerging Art (ISEA).

15min

Erandy Vergara-Vargas & Everardo Reyes

Erandy Vergara-Vargas (MX/CA) curates, teaches and writes on contemporary and media arts. She is Assistant Professor in the École des médias, UQAM. Her main research interests include global art histories, climate responsibility, curatorial studies, equity, internet cultures and widespread bias in algorithms. She earned a MA at Concordia University and a PhD in Art History […]

Birds of a Feather – Everardo Reyes: In-Betweens: Inside the ACM SIGGRAPH 2026 Art Gallery

This presentation offers a guided look at In-Betweens, the ACM SIGGRAPH 2026 Art Gallery, bringing together fourteen installations that explored relationships between space, time, technology, and generations. We will revisit the curatorial concept behind the exhibition and explore the selected artworks to discover the diversity of media, approaches, and questions: from interactive installations and robotics to bio art, data visualization, screens, projections, and experimental devices. In this talk, we will also reflect on how the exhibition came together: the selection process, spatial and technical constraints, collaboration with artists, and the challenges of presenting technologically complex works within a large conference environment. We will conclude with lessons learned from chairing the gallery, including observations about exhibition design, communication, accessibility, installation workflows, and the role of art within SIGGRAPH as a space for experimentation, critique, creative exchange, and encounters between communities.

15min

Everardo Reyes

Everardo Reyes (MX/FR) is a Professor of Information and Communication Sciences in the Faculty of Sciences and Technologies at Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. He leads the Master’s in Digital Humanities, focusing on creative computing, data analysis, digital archives, and hybrid environments. His research spans digital culture, visual information, media art, and the intersections of art, […]

Doctoral Consortium Session 1 – Chung Yi Wang: Technoetic Individuation: VR as Virtual Temenos and AI-Mediated Collective Symbolic Fields in Spiritual Practice

This presentation introduces Technoetic Individuation, a practice-based doctoral research framework investigating how virtual reality, biofeedback, and artificial intelligence can mediate spiritual experience and processes of Jungian individuation. It examines three artistic research projects as complementary probes. AUM: Breath of Bardo uses breath-responsive VR to construct a virtual temenos for embodied transition and self-reflection. Spiritual AI explores AI-mediated collective symbolic fields through Shared Field, dividual fragments, and Distant Echoes. Sandverse connects immersive experience with physical sand manipulation, translating virtual encounters into material expression. Together, these projects articulate a movement from threshold, through symbolic encounter, to material return. The presentation will discuss the theoretical context, research methodology, emerging observations, and the development of a future integrated prototype, while considering how adaptive immersive systems can support symbolic participation without reducing spiritual practice to technological effects.

20min

Chung Yi Wang

Chung-Yi Wang (TW) is an artist-researcher and PhD student in Art and Technology. His doctoral research, Technoetic Individuation, was initiated at National Tsing Hua University and continues at The University of Sydney. Through practice-based projects including AUM / Breath of Bardo, Spiritual AI, and Sandverse, he explores how virtual reality, artificial intelligence, biofeedback, and material […]

Birds of a Feather – Yuichiro Katsumoto: SIGGRAPH Asia

SIGGRAPH Asia is an annual conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques that has travelled across Asia and Oceania since its launch in 2008. Although smaller than its North American counterpart in duration and attendance, some of its programs—particularly its art-related tracks—have in recent years received more submissions than their North American equivalents, reflecting the region’s growing creative and research communities. Yuichiro Katsumoto has participated in SIGGRAPH Asia since its inaugural year, presenting artworks and research while gradually becoming involved in its organization. He served as Art Papers Chair in 2024 and Art Gallery Chair in 2026. Drawing on nearly two decades of personal experience, this talk offers an informal journey through the conference from the perspectives of an artist, researcher, reviewer, and chair.

15min

Yuichiro Katsumoto

Yuichiro Katsumoto (JP) is an artist and educator based in Saitama, Japan. His practice explores the relationship between letters and images through linear materials such as strings, ribbons, springs, chains, and needles. By releasing lines from the flat surface into physical space, he creates kinetic typography, motion graphics, and poetic systems of movement. Katsumoto earned […]

Doctoral Consortium Session 1 – Markus Passecker: The Past Is All Around You: Situated Visualization for Cultural Heritage On-Site

What if you could stand in a city square and watch the past reassemble itself around you? A tram from a century ago rolling past where you stand; a political rally from 1933 unfolding again at its original scale and angle. This talk presents a doctoral project that returns digitized cultural heritage — photographs, footage, archival documents — to the physical sites they depict, using mobile mixed reality and situated visualization. Sitting at the intersection of site-specific media art and computational visualization, it asks how entire archives, not single authored narratives, can re-enter place: as cut-out, collage-like figures that remain recognizably archival rather than seamless reconstructions. Three Austrian sites ground the work — the Vienna Prater, the Danube town of Ybbs, and locations of Austrofascist politics — where design decisions become ethical ones: which pasts to make present, and which to deliberately leave unbuilt.

20min

Markus Passecker

Markus Passecker (AT) is a creative technologist, XR developer, and media artist based in Vienna. As a PhD candidate in the Visual Heritage doctoral program (USTP – University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten / TU Wien), he researches situated visualization of digitized cultural heritage: using mobile AR and MR to bring archival photographs and contested […]

Birds of a Feather – Baoyang Chen: China’s rapidly evolving art and technology scene: 798 Art District, ADAE and Beyond

This presentation takes Beijing’s 798 Art District as a starting point for a wider look at art and technology in China. Its scope extends beyond any one venue. It follows how artists and researchers work with cultural institutions and technology communities in response to recent advances in artificial intelligence and robotics. Particular attention is given to embodied systems and artificial life. The central question is how art makes technological systems culturally intelligible. Machine agency becomes more than an abstract idea when audiences encounter it in a physical work or live performance. Such encounters allow people to interpret that agency and negotiate what it means. The presentation also considers how artistic practice and scientific research are drawing closer in China, particularly through public exhibitions. These projects are creating new points of contact with media art communities outside China. This is not intended as a comprehensive survey. A focused set of examples instead traces the field’s current direction and the conditions in which new work is taking shape.

15min

Baoyang Chen

Baoyang Chen (CN) is an artist and researcher who works with AI and robotics. His installations give computational systems a physical presence, making machine behaviour perceptible through movement and space. His work asks how agency forms between a programmed system and the people who encounter it. Chen is Associate Professor at the Central Academy of […]

Doctoral Consortium Session 1 – Daichen Wang: Root-Seeking · Xun Gen: A Practice-Based Inquiry into XR Environments for Diasporic Cultural Reconnection

This presentation introduces a practice-based PhD project investigating how XR environments can support cultural reconnection for people living within diasporic communities. Through the development of the Root-Seeking · Xun Gen project, the research explores how immersive spatial design, cultural heritage, memory, and interactive storytelling can create meaningful experiences of identity and belonging. The presentation outlines the project’s methodology, creative development, and audience research, including insights gathered through focus-group activities. It also discusses the practical and conceptual challenges of translating culturally significant places and narratives into immersive experiences while maintaining space for personal interpretation and emotional engagement.

20min

Daichen Wang

Daichen Wang (CN/AU) is a PhD candidate at Queensland University of Technology. His practice-based research explores how extended reality (XR), immersive environments, and digital storytelling can support cultural reconnection within diasporic communities. His current project, Root-Seeking · Xun Gen, investigates the reinterpretation of Chinese cultural heritage through XR experiences, combining creative practice with audience research […]

Birds of a Feather – James She: Expanding the Visual Canvas: VINCI’s Journey Across Tech, Media Art and Culture

What unfolds when a long‑standing visualization‑focused conference expands into AI creation, cultural computing and gallery‑based art practice? This talk traces VINCI’s evolution within global media‑art research. While preserving its core roots in visualization technologies and visual art, VINCI has embraced AI‑generated media art and digital creation, launching dedicated Art Papers, Art Gallery and Media Gallery tracks for worldwide creators. VINCI pursues rotating host cities across Eastern and Western regions to connect diverse communities and embed local cultural perspectives. Drawing on VINCI 2025 (Linz) and VINCI 2026 (Hangzhou), it explores intersections between visualization scholarship and artistic practice. For this Birds‑of‑a‑Feather session, it identifies synergies with SIGGRAPH, ISEA, the Digital Arts Community and the Expanded Conference, to foster future cross‑community exchange.

15min

James She

Dr. James She (CN) is a tenured Associate Professor of Computational Media and Art at HKUST(GZ), with a joint appointment at HKUST. He is an active media artist whose creative works have been internationally exhibited across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Merging AI, multimedia computing, and immersive technologies, his artistic and research practice transforms […]

Academic Session: Art Track #5 More-than-Human

Art Paper Session Track #5 More-than-Human features 5 presentations. Session Chair: Oliver Gingrich (UK)

1h 30min

Oliver Gingrich

Dr. Oliver Gingrich (UK/AT) is the programme lead for the BA (Hons) Animation at the School of Design, University of Greenwich, a media arts practitioner and researcher. With an Engineering Doctorate in Digital Media, and 15 years of professional practice in the Creative Industries as Creative Director and Art Director, Olive’s practice centres around holographic […]

Doctoral Consortium Session 2

Session 2 of the Doctoral Consortium features 5 presentations. Session Chairs: Simone Kriglstein (AT/CZ), Günter Wallner (AT), Marcel Zaes Sagesser (CH/AT)

1h 30min

Ars Electronica Project Space

Marcel Zaes Sagesser

Marcel Zaes Sagesser (he/him) is an artist and researcher investigating how humans are increasingly intertwined with their technologies. Focusing on the material qualities of sonic media, his work reimagines environments that let us listen to human-technological relations. Mixed practice-based and academic methods enrich this critical practice. The ongoing series, High & Low Tech Sonic Materialities, […]

Simone Kriglstein

Simone Kriglstein (AT) is associate professor at Masaryk University and senior scientist at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology. She specializes in designing and evaluating user interfaces and interaction methods in different fields, including games, VR/MR/XR, and training/learning methods for schools, universities, and companies. Simone has been deeply committed to exploring the intersection of technology, […]

Günter Wallner

Günter Wallner (AT) is Professor for Game Computing at the Johannes Kepler University Linz and holds positions at the Eindhoven University of Technology and Ontario Tech University. His research interests lie at the intersection of games user research, data analytics, and information visualization. His work particularly centers on understanding player behavior in games and on […]

Doctoral Consortium Session 2 – Simon Hochleitner: Sarastro’s Lion in 3D — The Digitization of a Costume from the Salzburg Festival as an Artistic Process

This presentation takes a single object as its example, the costume Sarastro’s Lion from Achim Freyer’s 1997 staging of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte at the Salzburg Festival. The costume is one of 77 items from the Festival’s collection that the project has captured photogrammetrically and published on Kompakkt, an open platform for 3D research data. Following this object from stage to 3D record, the talk asks whether artistic approaches add value to collection digitization, and whether the resulting records can themselves be understood as artistic works. In response, the talk proposes a set of ARTE principles (Artistic Research, Realization, Transformation by Technology, Experimental Approach) as a productive counterpart to the regulative FAIR and CARE principles. In doing so, it positions the act of digitizing as itself an object of artistic research.

20min

Simon Hochleitner

Simon Hochleitner (AT) is a university assistant at the Department of Media Design and Digital Literacy at the Institute of Art and Education, University of Art and Design Linz. His doctoral research examines the artistic value of three-dimensional digitisations and of the digitisation processes themselves. Its central question is what emerges creatively in translating objects […]

Art Track #5 More-than-Human – Caroline Vogel & Juice Cui: Falling Silent: Relational Listening, Mourning, and Multispecies Attunement To Coral Reefs Through Speculative Instrument Co-Making

This presentation shares a participatory workshop on listening to and re-mapping coral reef soundscapes through co-creative, speculative instrument-making, developed in collaboration with the Horniman Museum and Gardens, London. Drawing on marine bioacoustic research showing that coral larvae and juvenile fish orient toward the complex sounds of healthy reefs to locate places to settle, the workshop invites participants to dwell with the gradual loss of these acoustic environments. The session explores listening as a relational practice in the face of ecological loss, and negotiates acts of collective instrument-making as a form of situated, tacit knowledge production that foregrounds embodied, relational modes of engagement with more-than-human worlds.

15min

Caroline Vogel & Juice Cui

Caroline (DE/AT) is a practice-based researcher working across design theory, ecofeminism, and more-than-human perspectives. She investigates design as an epistemic practice, using participatory storytelling, performance, and speculative methods to think through the relations between human and more-than-human worlds. Based at the University of Art and Design Linz, her current focus is on local AI systems […]

Art Track #5 More-than-Human – Peijing Mou: Trout Telephone: A Telematic System for More-than-Human Communication Across Fragmented Habitats

Human infrastructure profoundly reshapes nonhuman lives. This talk introduces Trout Telephone, a telematic art installation that presents a communication system for trout across habitats that have been fragmented by dam constructions. For millennia, trout have inhabited the Arroyo Seco watershed in the Los Angeles basin, migrating between a river surrounded by forest and the sea—an ancestral route now interrupted by human interventions and concrete infrastructures. Responding to this ecological injustice to a nonhuman species, the work places two actuated trout-tail sculptures at the divided sites—one upstream in the forest, one in a coastal lagoon. The project links them through a real-time network, creating a call-and-response system across the distant extremes of trout populations. Developed as an on-site installation, experimental documentation, and an indoor gallery version, this project contributes a more-than-human model of ecological care and communication, where technological connections are reoriented towards nonhuman perception.

15min

Peijing Mou

Peijing Mou (CN/US) is a media artist and researcher working with ecology, computation, and experimental narrative. Her work examines threatened ecologies through the lenses of social conflict, technical infrastructures, and the ways language reproduces ideological assumptions. Drawing on critical ecology and alternative computation, she builds systems that entangle natural processes with digital media—using field research, […]

Doctoral Consortium Session 2 – Christian Feichtinger: Subtle Cues: Adaptive Real-Time Guidance for Stabilizing Spatial Orientation in Virtual 3D Environments

Virtual 3D environments are widely used in VR training, simulations, interactive learning, and games, where spatial orientation is essential. Current support mechanisms often rely on explicit aids such as waypoints, mini-maps, compass overlays, or HUD markers. Although effective, these may redirect attention or feel intrusive. Subtle, diegetic cues—including lighting, contrast, geometric variation, and landmarks—can instead provide orientation information within the environment, but their effectiveness depends on context and has mostly been studied in static, isolated configurations. Building on a visual-cue framework and a controlled CHI 2026 landmark study, this PhD project investigates how subtle guidance cues can be classified, evaluated, and integrated into an adaptive real-time system. It combines taxonomy development, controlled experiments, intensity studies, Wizard-of-Oz prototyping, and an Unreal Engine implementation. Using behavioral telemetry, the system estimates users’ orientation state and adjusts cue type, intensity, and timing to balance orientation performance, intrusiveness, and immersion across diverse interactive application contexts.

20min

Christian Feichtinger

Christian Feichtinger (AT) is a PhD student specializing in human-computer interaction and interactive 3D applications. His research focuses on spatial orientation in digital games and examines how subtle environmental cues can support players’ orientation. His work includes a taxonomy of environmental cues and design pointers for maintaining spatial orientation in 3D games, published at FDG […]

Art Track #5 More-than-Human – Ella Raidel: No Path: Immersive Ecologies and the Worlding of a Vanishing Forest

This paper examines No Path, a 360° virtual reality installation engaging with the vanishing secondary forest of Dover Forest West in Singapore as both site and subject of artistic research. Integrating point cloud environments, spatial sound, cinematic VR, ecological data, oral histories, and speculative narration, the work creates an embodied mode of sensing rather than observing the forest. Situated within post-cinema, immersive media, and environmental humanities, the paper argues that VR can foster ecological attention rather than mere simulation. LiDAR scanning and 3D Gaussian Splatting reconfigure the forest as a “living dataset,” while exposing tensions between technological extraction and preservation. Borrowed from video-game logic, the title denotes inaccessible terrain where navigation fails, becoming a metaphor for the limits of human knowledge and control. Through sensory reorientation and ecological encounter, No Path proposes that immersive media can contribute to sustainability discourse through affective, embodied engagement, recalibrating human perception in the Anthropocene.

15min

Ella Raidel

Ella Raidel (AT/SG) is an artist, filmmaker, and Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University Singapore’s School of Art, Design and Media. Her practice-led research explores the intersections of cinema, immersive media, urban transformation, and ecological imaginaries. Working across film, video, performance, installation, and cinematic VR, she investigates how emerging technologies can enable new forms of […]

Doctoral Consortium Session 2 – Yuhanxiao Ma: Forensic Worldbuilding and Evidentiary Interfaces: Assessment, Diagnosis, and Pseudo-Medical Measurement

This presentation explores how speculative interfaces can reveal how systems of assessment, diagnosis, and measurement produce knowledge. Through the concept of forensic worldbuilding, I examine how artistic reconstructions of institutional procedures can question the authority of evidence. The talk begins with Modest Witnesses, a project that examines pharmaceutical documentation, specimen collection, and scientific formats through fabricated archives and material experiments. It then discusses The Guinea Pig Eligibility Test, a biometric assessment system that transforms participants into hybrid guinea pig-human subjects, and Instruments of Care, a series of speculative diagnostic devices based on medical measurement practices. These works do not attempt to expose hidden truths, but instead examine how reports, images, tests, and interfaces shape what becomes accepted as evidence. By building functional fictional systems, my practice investigates how institutions classify, measure, and define knowledge.

15min

Yuhanxiao Ma

Yuhanxiao (Maggie) Ma (CN/US) is a US-based multimedia artist and PhD researcher at the University of Washington’s Department of Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS). Through installation, sculpture, interactive media, and performance, she examines how scientific, medical, and technical systems shape bodies, labour, and lived experience. Her work often takes the form of speculative worlds […]

Art Track #5 More-than-Human – Clarissa Ribeiro: Carbon, Code, Mourning, and Care: Performative Technoetics as a Way of Inhabiting a Burning World

This presentation introduces Ecovotive Chimeras, an interactive expanded animation installation that combines generative AI, augmented reality (AR), and digital fabrication to explore ecological grief and multispecies loss. The accompanying paper examines the conceptual and methodological development of the installation, integrating online image searches, satellite-based wildfire visualizations, environmental datasets, and AI-assisted morphogenesis into a reproducible artistic workflow. Beginning with a search phrase extracted from a 2024 New York Times article on the Pantanal fires, the project developed a standardized methodology for locating images of carbonized wildlife from wildfire-affected ecosystems worldwide. Selected images served as prompts in Krea AI to generate morphogenetic animations of unstable interspecies transformations. Frames extracted from these animations informed the production of fifteen 3D-printed chimeric sculptures reanimated through AR, creating a recursive dialogue between moving image, physical artifact, and embodied interaction. The paper argues that expanded animation can translate ecological trauma across biological, digital, and material realities, fostering new forms of ecological perception, mourning, and care.

15min

Clarissa Ribeiro

Dr. Clarissa Ribeiro (b. 1977, BR) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, and former Program Director of the Roy Ascott Studio’s Advanced Program in Technoetic Arts in Shanghai. A Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar at the UCLA Art|Sci Center (Los Angeles, 2013–2014) and recipient of […]

Doctoral Consortium Session 2 – Yesica Duarte: From Normalization to Repair: Disability Justice–Grounded Interaction Mechanisms for LLMs

My dissertation examines how interactions with Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically large language models (LLMs), shape social imaginaries of ability and access. LLMs encode the world through training data that privileges majority perspectives: able-bodied, white, and cis identities are statistically dominant, while those outside these norm are erased. In turn, LLM-mediated interaction may encourage users to reproduce same normative assumptions that reflect eugenic logics embedded in AI systems. Such dynamics may reinforce expectations of efficiency, productivity, and self-sufficiency, often producing ableism, i.e., discrimination against people with disabilities. By examining how LLMs may enact ableism, this research aims to develop guidance for designing interactions with such systems without reproducing normalcy. It will identify normalization mechanisms in current LLM-mediated interactions and explore how such interactions might be design otherwise. Oriented toward justice rather than fairness, these designs emphasize accountable practices. This research evaluates whether accountability-oriented interaction can disrupt normalization expectations.

20min

Yesica Duarte

Yesica Duarte (AR/AT) is an artist and HCI researcher whose work spans immersive technologies, experimental DIY body-based interfaces, and conversational AI. She has been working with and for disabled artists and researchers, developing speculative technologies for artistic expression. Through co-creation within an inter-abled collective, her practice examines access frictions as critical sites for reimagining technology. […]

Art Track #5 More-than-Human – Nozomu Kubota: Production of Absence: Reading Stable Diffusion’s NSFW Filter through Code and Typology

This paper introduces production of absence as a critical concept for analyzing AI image generation systems. Through a study of Stable Diffusion's NSFW filter, I show that the filter can systematically remove hand sketches containing anatomical variations—polydactyly, oligodactyly, and atypical finger arrangements—rather than the sexual or violent content it ostensibly targets. The paper makes three contributions: a methodology that treats the source code of generation pipelines as a critical primary source; empirical analysis of approximately 10,000 NSFW-flagged images including manual observation of a 316-image subset, suggesting that this exclusion is not incidental but structurally patterned; and a reading of the installation The Invisible Hand of AI as a forensic reconstruction of what the filter has produced as absent. NSFW filters, I argue, are not safety devices but apparatuses that invisibly govern the composition of the visual field.

15min

Nozomu Kubota

Nozomu Kubota is an artist, filmmaker, AI engineer, and inventor whose practice examines how artificial intelligence and classification systems define the boundaries of normality. His work explores bodies, voices, and lives that are excluded, misread, or rendered invisible by technological systems in the name of progress, safety, and accuracy. Drawing on his background as the […]

Doctoral Consortium Session 2 – Sifan Pan: LOS! LOS! LOS! – Participatory Visual Narrative Analysis of Cross-Cultural Time Perception among Chinese Women in German-Speaking Europe

This research examines how Chinese women living in Germany and Austria experience, narrate, and visualize cross-cultural time perception through participatory co-creation with AI Text-to-Image tools. It focuses on women’s time as it is shaped by social clocks, institutional time, migration, and algorithmic visual defaults. Drawing on Participatory Action Research the project investigates how women’s temporal experiences are translated across oral narratives, prompt writing, AI-generated images, and participant reflections. The study is based on 11 participatory AI visual co-creation workshops with 50 Chinese women in six cities in Germany and Austria. The current corpus includes 117 AI-generated images, approximately 10 short videos, audio recordings, open-ended questionnaires, and iterative prompt revisions related to the images. Rather than treating AI-generated misalignment as technical failure, this project analyzes moments when AI “draws time wrong” as data. These moments reveal how cross-cultural time perception becomes visible, contested, and negotiable. The Doctoral Consortium submission presents a methodological framework that combines Participatory Art Mediation Design with Visual–Textual Co-Analysis.

15min

Sifan Pan

Sifan Pan (CN) is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Art at the University of Arts Linz. She previously earned her Master’s degree in Art in Context from the Berlin University of the Arts, where her thesis was awarded the DAAD Graduate Creative Scholarship. She completed her undergraduate studies at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts […]

Art & Industry featured by Sparte Information & Consulting der WKOÖ

Three presentations providing unique insights into the theme Art & Industry. Session Chair: Alexander Wilhelm (AT)

1h 30min

Alexander Wilhelm

Alexander Wilhelm (AT) studied Industrial and Interaction Design at the UFG Linz and the ZHDK, Zurich. With his company “The Visioneers,” he worked for clients like Audi and BMW for more than a decade in the field of interaction design and visualisation. 2011 he became a professor for design and animation at the University of […]

Art & Industry – Mario von Rickenbach: 16 Years of Interactive Animation

In this talk, Mario will give insights into different aspects of his work, including his collaborations at Playables and his latest game Pocket Boss. For 16 years, he has been exploring the field of video games through the lens of interactive animation. He will share insights about the design and development process and the unpredictable reality of releasing his projects on commercial video game distribution channels.

30min

Mario von Rickenbach

Mario von Rickenbach is a swiss game designer and developer. Being more interested in dynamics than statics, he canceled his architecture studies to study game design instead. He collaborates with other designers, artists and filmmakers to create interactive works, like the award winning projects KIDS and Plug & Play. His local multiplayer hit Rakete travels […]

Art & Industry – Simon Christen: Pixar Alchemy – Animating Authentic Characters

In this talk, I'll share my journey and experiences at Pixar, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the creativity and culture that shape the studio, along with a glimpse into life on the Pixar campus. I'll also walk through my process of bringing scenes to life as a character animator, from first ideas to final performance. I will share stories from productions like Ratatouille, Coco, and Elio, along with lessons learned from balancing craft, technology, and storytelling. A candid look at what it's really like to animate at Pixar.

30min

Simon Christen

For 18 years, I’ve worked at Pixar as a character animator on films like Ratatouille, Toy Story 3, Coco, Onward, Luca, and most recently Elio. I love bringing characters to life, balancing emotion, and humor; from subtle acting to cartoon action. Along the way, I’ve also worked on character setups and animation tools, and most […]

Expanded Play – Exhibition of Playful Media

Exhibition from 11:00 to 19:30 in the Atelier Salzamt. Now in its third edition, the Expanded Play Gallery features a curated selection of interactive works that address a wide range of topics through the medium of play. From dynamic shadow worlds inspired by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, to the sonification of urban data or conversations with an artificial messiah, the exhibition spans a diverse range of artistic positions and technological approaches. Together, the works invite participants to engage directly with the evolving relationships between humans and machines, challenging conventional understandings of interaction, perception and digital culture.

8h 30min

Atelierhaus Salzamt, Linz

Art & Industry – Sputniko!: Scaling Design Inquiry into Social Implementation: From the Menstruation Machine to Cradle – Japan’s Largest Workplace Women’s Health Platform

This talk traces a designer's journey from design as inquiry to design as social implementation. My practice has long asked why bodies that menstruate remain invisible in the systems we build. Menstruation Machine (2010), a wearable device rendering menstrual pain experienceable by anyone, brought that hidden experience into public conversation - and a decade later inspired corporate empathy training programs across Japan. Menstrualverse (2022) posed the same question to virtual worlds, testing whether the metaverse would render menstrual blood — and was censored. Inquiry, I learned, can genuinely shift culture. Watching companies respond, I grew curious: could a speculative designer build, not just provoke, that change? In 2020 I founded Cradle, a corporate platform addressing the very taboos my works exposed — menstruation, menopause, fertility — now adopted by over 90 of Japan's largest corporations, including Honda, Nissan, Japan Post Bank and NEC, reaching nearly one million employees nationwide.

30min

Sputniko!

Sputniko! (JP/UK) is a British–Japanese artist whose work playfully yet provocatively explores the intersection of technology, identity, and society. Through films, robotics, music, and interactive installations, she challenges social norms and imagines the ethical and cultural implications of emerging technologies. Her work has been exhibited internationally at leading institutions, including MoMA (New York), Centre Pompidou-Metz […]

Artist Perspectives – Prix Ars Electronica

Three distinct artistic perspectives from the Prix Ars Electronica 2026. Session Chair: Philippe Pasquier (FR/CA)

1h 30min

Philippe Pasquier

Philippe Pasquier (FR/CA) is a Professor in Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology, where he directs the Metacreation Lab for Creative AI. His work lies at the intersection of generative AI, computational creativity, human-AI co-creation, and participatory creative systems. The Metacreation Lab develops human-centred approaches to AI design that emphasize co-creation, direct […]

Artist Perspectives – Ryat Yezbick: God was my first encounter with surveillance technologies

Artist and researcher Ryat Yezbick will discuss their interdisciplinary practice that moves between experimental documentary, performance, archival methods, and emerging technologies. Trained in cultural anthropology and studio art, Yezbick treats moving images, embodied performance, and computational media as ways of knowing—methods for tracing how technologies shape perception, memory, and social life. Their work asks how power takes shape through visual culture and how technologies transform the ways we see ourselves, remember one another, and imagine the social world. Key to their practice is the study of surveillance not simply as a grouping of technological infrastructures, but as a set of belief systems that mediate collective memory and the politics of witnessing. Using specific artworks as reference points, Yezbick will reflect on images as sites of evidence, uncertainty, and resistance inviting audiences to question what they see, how they come to know what is true, and what escapes visibility altogether.

30min

Ryat Yezbick

Ryat Yezbick (US) is a visual artist investigating how technological infrastructures mediate collective memory, ethics, and public life through archival research and collaborative practice. Against the backdrop of AI, pervasive surveillance, and decentralized global conflict, Yezbick explores how systems of computation shape not only what we see, but how we remember, move, and bear witness. […]

Artist Perspectives – Veneta Androva: Speculative Evidence: Construction as Documentary Practice

In this artist talk, Veneta Androva reflects on an artistic practice that uses construction as a documentary method for investigating realities that resist direct observation. Rather than treating animation, game engines, or digital environments as ends in themselves, she approaches them as research tools for examining political, technological, and social infrastructures. Combining archival research, found materials, digital assets, interfaces, and speculative narration, her work constructs documentary experiences that engage with these infrastructures beyond the limits of direct observation. Across her practice, construction functions not simply as an aesthetic strategy but as an epistemological one: a way of producing speculative evidence for realities that are increasingly mediated, algorithmic, and difficult to access directly.

30min

Veneta Androva

Veneta Androva (BG) is a Bulgarian visual artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. Working across CGI animation, speculative documentary, moving image and installation, her practice explores how technological infrastructures, artificial intelligence and automated media shape perception, systems of knowledge and political imagination. Combining artistic research, documentary strategies and synthetic world-building, she develops hybrid cinematic forms […]

Artist Perspectives – Andrew Herzog: Human Nature

30min

Andrew Herzog

Andrew Herzog (US) is an interdisciplinary artist whose media-independent practice explores the constructed boundaries between humanity and nature. In doing so, he examines the perceived liminal space between human and nonhuman life across personal and species-specific temporalities. Fatherhood and caregiving have increasingly shaped his artistic practice and influenced his exploration of masculinity and its role […]

Austrian Animation Meetup 2026

1h 30min

Ars Electronica Project Space

Interactive Brosch – Red Dinosaurs

30min

Ars Electronica Deep Space 8K

Juergen Hagler, Nils Gallist, Sara Trawöger, Alexander Wilhelm, Lisa Gierlinger, Norbert Artner & Celine Pham

ASIFA Austria Forum – Current Perspectives

This session will feature the perspectives of 2girls1comp, Claudia Larcher and Hisko Hulsing. Session Chair: Reinhold Bidner (AT)

1h 30min

Reinhold Bidner

Reinhold Bidner (AT) was born in Salzburg/Austria. He studied at University of Applied Sciences Salzburg, at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Scotland, Dundee (Animation and Electronic Media) and he graduated in Berlin and Salzburg. Until 2006 he was a key researcher at the Ars Electronica Futurelab in Linz in the field of […]

ASIFA Austria Forum – 2girls1comp: The Game Was Rigged From the Start

In this lecture performance, 2girls1comp will share an insight into their practice. While navigating the world of "Grand Theft Auto V", one of the best selling video games in history, they will showcase how the hack, change and reclaim the software of popular AAA computer games.

30min

Alexandra Pfammatter & Marco De Mutiis

2girls1comp is a modding duo founded in 2023 by Marco De Mutiis (IT) and Alexandra Pfammatter (CH). Their work changes the logic of video games as an act of creative counter-play, revealing the social and economic fabric in which they are immersed: from reclaiming global digital infrastructures to commenting on free labor within the capitalist […]

ASIFA Austria Forum – Claudia Larcher: No applause, no life, no pain

In her talk at the Forum Expanded Animation, Claudia Larcher presents two of her films, both on view in her solo exhibition "No applause, no life, no pain." at the Francisco Carolinum Linz: "The End" and "Extinction Story." Both works connect narratives of ecological mourning with questions about the future of cinema and image production in the age of generative AI. "Extinction Story" departs from the inherited bird egg collection of the artist's grandfather, addressing species extinction, loss and the materiality of the photographic archive, and turning it into a reflection on disappearance and the conditions of future image-making. "The End" continues this inquiry and condenses it into a posthumanist vanitas, in which images, bodies and environments appear as fragile constellations.

30min

Claudia Larcher

Claudia Larcher (AT) is an artist, experimental filmmaker and AI researcher based in Vienna. She treats photography as a socially entangled, politically charged practice and extends the still image through algorithmic animation, video and immersive “phygital” installations. Her research explores the materiality of data, ecological futures and bias-aware artificial intelligence, engaging questions of digital humanism […]

ASIFA Austria Forum – Hisko Hulsing: Danse Macabre – a warning against fascism

Danse Macabre is a short animated film about the rise of fascism and the absurdity of war. The film is based on the terrifying Allegro from Shostakovich' 10th Symphony. Hisko Hulsing started working on the project in 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea, and Putin made clear that he wanted to make 'Russia great again'. In the meantime this concept has been repeated by politicians all over the world and a wave of dangerous populism has been sweeping the nations. Danse Macabre was made by 80 people in 5 studio's, divided over 4 European countries. Every shot in the film was based on an oilpainting made by Hisko Hulsing. Hisko Hulsing will talk about the content and the historical roots for his film and about the techniques used, that include paintings, 3D animation in Blender and Houdini, styletransfers for the 3D characters using Comfy UI, and 2D animation in TVPaint.

30min

Hisko Hulsing

Hisko Hulsing (1971, Amsterdam, NL) directed both seasons of Undone for Amazon Studios, which appeared in Top Ten lists of The New York Times and Time Magazine and won the Annecy Jury Award in 2020. Hulsing also directed the segment of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman called “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” for Netflix and […]

Keynote Session

Session Chair Michael Lankes (AT) introduces the keynote speaker Katherine Isbister (US).

1h 30min

Michael Lankes

Michael Lankes (AT) is Professor for Digital Media at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Campus Hagenberg, where he also serves as coordinator of the Master’s program in Digital Arts, and lecturer at the University of Regensburg. His research explores the intersections of game design, human–computer interaction, and digital arts, with a particular interest […]

Keynote – Katherine Isbister: Research through Design at the Intersection of HCI and Games

In this talk, Isbister will draw upon case studies from her research practice that illustrate the strengths of designerly approaches and values in the creation of innovative directions for the future of our everyday lives with technology. Examples include social wearables that leave us vulnerable, haptic robots to help children manage their emotions, and VR meeting spaces with fanciful tools that take more from the world of games than the world of business conference rooms. Isbister will note some key design practices and methods that have grown out of her interdisciplinary research practice, toward opening a conversation among the attendees of the ARS Expanded Conference about our commonalities and connections.

1h 30min

Katherine Isbister

Katherine Isbister (US) is Professor of Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz, where she directs the Social Emotional Technology Lab https://setlab.ucsc.edu/. Her team creates interactive experiences at the intersection of Human Computer Interaction and Games/Play to heighten social and emotional connections and wellbeing, with over 150 peer-reviewed publications. Isbister is a recipient of MIT Technology […]

Expanded Conference Awards & Closing

The chairs of this year's Expanded Conference will award the best paper awards and close the conference. Hosts: Veronika Liebl (AT), Stefan Wagner (AT), Juergen Hagler (AT), Veronica Szabo (US)

2h

Stefan Wagner

Stefan Wagner (AT) received his MSc in computer science in 2004 and his PhD in technical sciences in 2009, both from the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. From 2005 to 2009, he worked as an associate professor for software project engineering, and since 2009, as a full professor for complex software systems at the University […]

Veronika Liebl

Veronika Liebl (AT) is currently Director of European Cooperation at Ars Electronica and Managing Director of its department Festival/Prix/Exhibitions. She studied economic and business science at Johannes Kepler University in Linz (graduated in 2010) with study visits at Harvard University (US) and Université de Fribourg (CH) and has an interdisciplinary background in non-profit and innovation […]

Victoria Szabo

Victoria E. Szabo (US) is a Research Professor in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University, where she works at the intersection of digital humanities, visual culture, computational media, and immersive technologies. She is a founding director of Duke’s Computational Media, Arts & Cultures PhD program and has held several […]

Juergen Hagler

Juergen Hagler (AT) studied art education, experimental visual design, and cultural studies at the University for Art and Design in Linz, Austria. He currently works as a professor of Computer Animation and Animation Studies in the Digital Media department at the Hagenberg Campus of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. Since 2014 he a […]

Expanded Play – Exhibition of Playful Media

Exhibition from 11:00 to 19:30 in the Atelier Salzamt. Now in its third edition, the Expanded Play Gallery features a curated selection of interactive works that address a wide range of topics through the medium of play. From dynamic shadow worlds inspired by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, to the sonification of urban data or conversations with an artificial messiah, the exhibition spans a diverse range of artistic positions and technological approaches. Together, the works invite participants to engage directly with the evolving relationships between humans and machines, challenging conventional understandings of interaction, perception and digital culture.

8h 30min

Atelierhaus Salzamt, Linz

Expanded Play – Exhibition of Playful Media

Exhibition from 11:00 to 19:30 in the Atelier Salzamt. Now in its third edition, the Expanded Play Gallery features a curated selection of interactive works that address a wide range of topics through the medium of play. From dynamic shadow worlds inspired by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, to the sonification of urban data or conversations with an artificial messiah, the exhibition spans a diverse range of artistic positions and technological approaches. Together, the works invite participants to engage directly with the evolving relationships between humans and machines, challenging conventional understandings of interaction, perception and digital culture.

8h 30min

Atelierhaus Salzamt, Linz