Artist Perspective – Wendi Yan, Alona Rodeh, Alessandro Bavari & Adrian Haim (Total Refusal)

In the “Artist Perspective” panel, the artist collective Total Refusal (AT), Alessandro Bavari (IT), Alona Rodeh (IL/DE), and Wendi Yan (CN/US) present their work. Current films by these artists are also shown in the Deep Space 8K, including in-person screenings for Total Refusal and Alessandro Bavari. In her talk, Alona Rodeh will share a bit of the processes behind the CITY DUMMIES series. This includes works shown in this year's Ars Electronica Festival:  CORE DUMP (2024/2025), Fogging (2025), and Runway Freefall (2024). The works respond and reflect on - directly and indirectly - the current state of affairs: automation of transportation, AI warfare, geopolitics, censorship, romance, and the apocalypse. 'Part archive, part speculative fiction, Dream of Walnut Palaces is a 10-minute CGI film reimagining knowledge exchange between China and Europe in the 18th century. Exploring the psyche of a fictional Daoist in a Paris lab, it examines the East-West clash of epistemic visuality and envisions an alternative to techno-Orientalism: a harmonious union of knowledge integrating Daoist metaphysics. Wendi Yan will share her thinking and the making process behind Dream of Walnut Palaces. From secret scientific experiments in Qing China to magic lantern shows in Antoine Lavoisier’s Arsenal, her years-long research led to a creative, cinematic exploration of the psyche of a fictional individual she wished existed. What if, during the Age of Revolution, a Daoist master brought his wisdom to the Enlightenment scientists who were establishing the rules and orders for the emerging modern science? The artist will show how she turned archival images into the various worldbuilding elements in the film, re-enacted historical illustrations with newly designed character models, and redesigned critical instruments from the time period. Using a real-time engine, 3D modeling and AI, Yan transmuted historical images and lost ideas, giving voice to “ghosts” and “orphans” of the Enlightenment. The film becomes a speculative historical study of epistemic visuality between China and Europe. Adrian Haim will talk about the potential of cinema interventions in sports video games. Moderation: Alexander Wilhelm (AT) & Filippo Gregoretti (IT)

2h

Wendi Yan

Wendi Yan (b. 1999, Beijing, CN/US) constructs speculative epistemologies through research-based worldbuilding, using CGI, game engines, and documentary practices to interrogate the boundaries of scientific imagination. Her work—spanning films, interactive media, and fictional archival installations—examines the embodied challenges of facing alien epistemic systems across time. Wendi collaborates frequently with scientists and engineers, from synthetic biology […]

Alona Rodeh

Alona Rodeh (b. 1979, IL/DE) is a Berlin-based visual artist, scenographer, and urban practitioner whose work merges CGI animation, game-engine production, and immersive light-and-sound environments. Her born-digital films and installations address feelings of safety, spectacle, and the infrastructures of the built environment. At the Prix Ars Electronica, she presents recent short animation films from her […]

Alessandro Bavari

Alessandro Bavari (IT/FR), an Italian-French artist educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, has been fascinated with photography, painting, and music since childhood. Over the years, he experimented with various techniques, combining disciplines and using photography as a central expressive medium. Recognized as a pioneer of digital art and a leading figure in […]

Adrian Jonas Haim

Adrian Jonas Haim (AT, *1991 in Vienna) works in film and politics in Vienna and beyond. He studied Political Science and Experimental Game Cultures at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He has participated in various writing, music, and art projects.

Paper Session #3 – Creative AI & Speculative Futures

Paper Session #3 consists of six presentations. Moderation: Margarita Köhl (AT)

1h 30min

Margarita Köhl

Margarita Köhl (AT) is a transdisciplinary researcher and artist working at the intersection of arts, eco-social as well as science and technology studies, recently focusing on the role of affect in more-than-human relationships. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies and an MA in Arts & Cultural Management, East Asian Studies, and Art History. She […]

Elham KargarTazargh: Tell Me a Story: Playful Storytelling Approach for Supporting Grandparent-Grandchild Relationships

Video calls have become an important tool for families separated by distance, especially during the pandemic when it was for many the only way to see their families. However, video calls don't fully replicate the experience of in-person meetings. One significant challenge is keeping children engaged during these calls. In this paper, we examine how playful communication technology can strengthen bonds between grandparents and grandchildren. Our study analyzed long-distance relationships and the activities they share. We found that painting and storytelling are promising activities. "Tell Me a Story" is a playful mobile prototype that combines video calls with a shared painting canvas and call recording features. The results showed that while the prototype successfully encouraged shared activities and strengthened bonds, there are areas for improvement, particularly in video call quality and overall user experience for painting.

15 min

Elham KargarTazargh

Elham KargarTazargh (CZ) is a UX Designer specializing in AI-driven experiences and data-informed decision-making. She is passionate about leveraging emerging technologies to enhance human-computer interaction, streamline design workflows, and personalize user experiences through agentic behavior and AI-powered tools. Beyond the professional realm, Elham has found deeper purpose in designing technology that strengthens the bonds between […]

Philipp Thölke: Oneiris: An AI-augmented Brain-Computer Interface for Exploring Personal and Collective Dreamscapes

Oneiris is an interactive, AI-augmented brain-computer interface installation that explores personal and collective dreamscapes through generative artificial intelligence, real-time electroencephalography (EEG) neurofeedback, and Indigenous symbolic systems. Participants wear a wireless EEG headset and contribute dream narratives and hand-drawn sketches on a digital tablet. These inputs are embedded using Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) and matched to ten Lakota dream symbols, displayed as a floating constellation within a 360° projection space. A diffusion-based AI pipeline simultaneously augments participants’ sketches and texts into continuously evolving “dreamscapes”, whose texture and color palette are modulated in real time by neural markers of hypnagogia and brain complexity. A Medicine Wheel–inspired interface—an Indigenous symbol embodying the cyclical nature of life—provides viewers with intuitive feedback about their cognitive state as they watch the visuals unfold. In parallel, an online companion platform archives dream contributions as nodes in a collective semantic map, enabling thematic clustering and public exploration. By striving to ethically integrate Indigenous epistemologies—particularly Lakota dream symbolism—into a neuroscientific and generative AI framework, Oneiris provides an innovative model for culturally sensitive, participatory art-science collaboration. The installation offers concrete methodologies for engaging with personal dreams as culturally embedded cognitive phenomena, creating spaces for introspection, collective storytelling, and cross-cultural dialogue.

15 min

Philipp Thölke

Philipp Thölke (DE) is a computational neuroscientist and artist working at the intersection of brain science, creative technology, and artificial intelligence. With a background in AI and neuroscience, he builds real-time systems that translate brain activity into visual, auditory, and interactive media—bridging analysis with creative exploration. His work centers on EEG, biosignals, and neurofeedback, with […]

Kevin Blackistone: Blending Identities and Breathing Life Into Radiology Through ML-Merged Volumetric Chimeras

We human organisms regard each other’s bodies through their visual surface components. The interior, when considered at all, is typically only due to medical concern for one’s-self – rarely envisioning that of others. Within the digital realm we find the expected representations of the body as surface manifold, extending even to those limited levels to which interior organs are made visible. Radiological tools have dramatically improved our capacity for non-invasive representation, but their use is (for a variety of reasons including exposure both to potentially damaging radiation and of private medical information) often confined to the domains of personal health. Yet, through their abstracted volumetric output we can as well uncover the possibilities to represent our bodily forms in a greater totality, simultaneously eschewing surface boundaries to which we are accustomed – the same which lead to numerous biases and conflicts. Here, I present techniques used to re-appropriate artificial intelligence based frame-blending tools as a novel workflow to produce synthetic radiology made not from a generative algorithm, but as combined volumes of chimeric human forms. These are then used to explore the metaphor of imperceptible identities through expanded techniques to animate these visual datasets – traditionally diagnostically static excepting the manner of camera orientation or layer visibility.

15 min

Kevin Blackistone

Kevin Blackistone (US/AT) is a media artist and researcher using immersive, tangible, participatory and performative elements as tools for exploratory engagements. His current focus investigates the networks of cross-interactions between our human organism(s), its habitats & inhabitants, and their technological interrelations from cultural, medical and ecological perspectives. These works are produced using a combinatory approach […]

Philippe Pasquier: Autolume: A GAN-based No-Coding Small Data and Model Crafting Visual Synthesizer for Artistic Creation

We present a series of artworks created using Autolume, a no-coding, generative AI tool that leverages the artistic potential of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Designed to empower artists without technical backgrounds, Autolume enables small-data model training, real-time latent space exploration, and interactive applications such as audio-reactive visuals. By preserving the fluidity and navigability of GAN latent spaces, Autolume offers unique possibilities for the creation of moving images and dynamic visual experiences. Through diverse case studies, including audiovisual performances, interactive installations, and small-dataset model crafting, we demonstrate how Autolume expands creative agency and supports new modes of artistic expression with generative AI.

15 min

Philippe Pasquier

Philippe Pasquier (FR/CA) is a scientific researcher, media artist, educator, and a community builder. He is the director of the Metacreation Lab for Creative AI, and a Professor at Simon Fraser University’s School for Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), in Vancouver (Canada). There, he is pursuing a multidisciplinary research-creation program focused on generative systems and […]

Beste Ileri & Toprak Firat: SENTIMAP: Spatiotemporal Mapping of Emotions in Historical Newspapers Using LLMs

SENTIMAP is a spatiotemporal mapping system that visualizes the emotional contours of Istanbul from 1970 to 2023 by analyzing a large corpus of historical newspaper articles using zero-shot emotion classification with large language models (LLMs). The project geolocates emotional expressions across districts and periods, constructing a dynamic affective cartography of the city. While sentiment analysis has proven effective in domains where emotional valence is explicit—such as social media or consumer reviews—its application to archival news presents unique challenges. Emotions in newspapers are rarely direct; they are embedded in narrative framing, lexical nuance, and emphasis. These subtleties are especially difficult to parse in morphologically rich languages like Turkish, where agglutination, flexible word order, and a lack of labeled emotional datasets hinder traditional NLP approaches. SENTIMAP addresses these complexities through LLMs capable of capturing context, handling morphological variation, and identifying multiple co-occurring emotions without the need for extensive training data. This enables a granular, temporally sustained analysis of how collective emotions respond to crises, reforms, elections, and ideological shifts over time. In Türkiye’s context—marked by media censorship and narrative control—public emotion becomes not only an expression but also a target and a byproduct of political control. The project responds to these conditions by repurposing the very tools often associated with mass influence and transforming them into instruments of counter-analysis. The project is presented as a two-channel video installation: one screen animates the month-by-month emotional evolution of Istanbul over 54 years, while the other displays spatial and periodic infographics of emotional intensities. Blending computational analysis with conceptual inquiry, SENTIMAP reveals emotion as both a historical trace and a political signal, inviting viewers to navigate the city's affective history through non-linear, exploratory encounters.

15 min

Beste Ileri & Toprak Firat

Toprak Fırat (TR) is an emerging digital artist, researcher, and computer engineer based in Istanbul, Türkiye. Toprak examines the fractures and contradictions inherent in contemporary human connections by analyzing the social metastructures that shape societal networks. With a multidisciplinary approach, their work bridges the fields of digital art, computational research, and social critique, offering unique […]

Rewa Wright, June Kim & Simon Howden: Beyond Instrumentalism: Posthuman Assemblages and AI in Contemporary Animation

This article offers a critical reinterpretation of recent literature on Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), from the fields of computer science, animation, and digital filmmaking, applying a broadly posthumanist theoretical lens with the aim of threading together disparate discourses, engaging both technical and artistic perspectives. We focus on current issues of relevance for digital artists and animators in the interactive arts and filmmaking space, by examining concerns (labour relations, ethics, authorship), as well as commendations (co-creativity, efficiency, expansion).

15 min

Rewa Wright, June Kim & Simon Howden

Rewa Wright is a computational arts, real time animation, and emerging technologies researcher, whose career is driven by a commitment to exploring the intersection of bleeding edge technologies, creative practice, and critical thinking. June Kim is a media artist and academic who currently is Lecturer at the UNSW Art & Design. She is affiliated with […]

Paper Session #4 – Extended Reality

Paper Session #4 consists of six presentations. Moderation: Katja Zibrek (SI/FR)

1h 30min

Chueh-Fu Yu & Bo-Yu Tseng: Mahōo: An Emotive Narrative Tool for Weather-Related Emotion Reframing through XR Interaction and Tangible Experience

Mahōo explores the potential of XR technologies as narrative tools to reframe emotional experiences associated with rainy weather. By transforming rain, commonly associated with negative emotions, into an interactive, multisensory landscape, Mahōo invites participants to participate in embodied reinterpretations of climatic affect. Centered around a tangible umbrella interface that evolves into a blooming flower, the project integrates narrative-driven interaction, hybrid physical-virtual choreography, and real-time sensory feedback. Participants collaboratively gather clouds, summon rain, and dance alongside the spirit character, reshaping the emotional meaning of rain through embodied movement and immersive interaction. Presented at an international VR festival with 129 interactive sessions, Mahōo demonstrated significant emotional impact, transforming perceptions of rain from gloom to vitality. This work highlights how participatory XR environments and tangible interfaces can intervene in culturally embedded affective schema, offering new strategies for emotional regulation and everyday sensory reimagination.

15 min

Chueh-Fu Yu & Bo-Yu Tseng

Chueh-Fu YU (TW), a Taiwanese-Japanese artist from Taitung, is a graduate student at the Institute of Technology and Art, National Tsing Hua University. During his undergraduate years, his primary focus was on techno-art and a secondary specialization in anthropology. Dedicated to integrating technology art with interdisciplinary knowledge, he specializes in visual design, interactive installations, virtual […]

Selina Behrens, Simone Feldbacher & Sebastian Grundherr: Divine Machinery: Making the Transhuman Experience Tangible

Divine Machinery critically approaches the relationship between humans and generative technologies. Drawing on the concepts of Mysterium Tremendum and Fascinosum from theology, which describe awe and fear toward the divine, we apply these ideas to technology. Visitors enter a dark room, facing a physical sculpture - the Angel - embodying modern machinery. The experience during the installation is shaped by the user answering questions by touching its hands. By retaining past interactions and adjusting its conversations accordingly, each dialogue with the Divine Machinery is unique. A blend of ever changing sound, projection, lights and visuals serves to deeply immerse the participants in the experience.

15 min

Selina Behrens, Simone Feldbacher & Sebastian Grundherr

Selina Behrens: Originally from Germany Selina started studing Media Technology and Design at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and then joined the Digital Arts Bachelor programm when it started. She finished her bachelor and is currently studying in the Digital Arts Masters program., Simone Feldbacher: Graduated from HTL Salzburg and is currently finishing […]

Yuyang: Little Hands, Big Exhibitions: Children’s Virtual Curation with Generative MR Toolbox

Curation has evolved into a multifaceted artistic practice that extends beyond the mere display of artworks to encompass thematic development, dissemination of knowledge, and participation of the audience. Although traditionally seen as a specialist field, children's innate curiosity and storytelling abilities suggest their potential as active participants in the curatorial process. To address the challenge of adapting complex curatorial concepts for young learners, this study introduces "Little Curator", a generative mixed reality (MR) tool specifically designed to simplify and enrich the children's curation experience. By integrating creative workflows with interactive virtual environments, "Little curator" empowers children to conceptualize themes, organize content, and present immersive visual narratives. Through this exploration, children not only acquire more art knowledge but also develop a heightened sense of self-efficacy in the complex exhibition planning. Furthermore, these "creative performances" serve as a source of inspiration for professional curators, bridging the gap between emerging and established practices in the art world.

15 min

Yuyang Jiang

Yuyang (CN) is a digital artist, art therapist, and researcher. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the China Academy of Art and a research-oriented master’s degree in computational media and arts from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Guangzhou (HKUSTGZ), pursuing a doctoral degree in the field of cognitive science. His […]

Rose Bond: Democratizing VR: A Collaborative Experiment in Expanded Animation, Spatialized Sound, Improvised Vocals, and Emily Dickinson

Commonly, VR is seen as a single user experience with sound focused on the ‘sweet spot’. This paper focuses on Earths to Come, an XR installation which premiered at the 2024 Venice Biennale Cinema Immersive as a collaborative and democratizing work. We begin with the story of its development over a week-long residency with animator Rose Bond, composer inti figgis-vizueta and vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth. Originally, designed for a tri-screen live projection performance, improvisation was key to the process. Our intention was always to share the lead between sound and visuals. The paper then explores several formal structures that undergird Earths to Come, focusing on moments of synchresis and how the deliberate gaps between image and sound and serve to unseat expectations and untether the metaphoric power of the poetic. Finally, we frame the piece as political, distinguishing how Earths to Come breaks away from the aurally constructed illusion of the “sweet spot” and re-centers the collective body of listeners within a dynamic field, where acoustic perception unfolds in relation to movement, position, and the presence of others. In Earths to Come spatialized sound, designed and distributed in 15.1 dome mounted speakers, democratizes listening - making all seats good seats and creating a surprisingly personal yet shared experience.

15 min

Rose Bond

Rose Bond (CA/US) creates XR work at the intersection of expanded cinema, experimental animation and spatialized sound. Her past large-scale animated installations have navigated allegories of place, illuminating urban spaces with fragments and overlooked realities of the historically underrepresented. Her current nonlinear VR projects are interdisciplinary collaborations with composers and musicians. Earths to Come, created […]

Wei Huang: Chongqing Forest: Situated Cinema and Mediated Subjectivity

This presentation introduces the 2024 projection mapping work Chongqing Forest, which reimagines the Chongqing’s mediascape as a ‘data forest,’ exploring the dense ecology where urban history, platform aesthetics, and digital subjectivity converge. Borrowing four lines from Wong Karwai’s cinema Chungking Express (1994)—a film well known in Sinosphere for its subtle expression on the emotional alienation in modern metropolises—the 2024 work structuralizes four respective chapters according to the rearranged lines, in order to discuss the experience that is even more contemporary than what is expressed by the 1994 film, and that is theorized by this presentation as the magical synchronicity in post-1978 China—the synchronicity of modernity and postmodernity, of industrialization and post-industrialization, and of urbanization and the rise of network society. This presentation argues that the magical synchronicity could be articulated, firstly, by the textual entanglement with Chungking Express; and secondly, in the form of expanded cinema, a mixture of film and computational media.

15 min

Wei Huang

Huang Wei (CN) is a Shanghai-based media artist, lecturer, and researcher whose practice explores the intersection of expanded cinema and experimental games. He holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a BA from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Currently, Huang serves as a lecturer and researcher at Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts, […]

Danlin Huang: Body Oracle: Exploring Somatic Hieroglyphs for Collective Bodily Awareness

In our modern information age, we face a deficit in bodily awareness during digital communication, despite Mehrabian's 7-38-55 rule suggesting that body language conveys 55% of meaning. Our current vocabulary struggles to describe complex bodily phenomena such as proprioception and social proprioception—the awareness of one's own and others' spatial body positioning. Body Oracle is a computational linguistic speculative design project, introducing an alterative language system of AI-generated hieroglyphic characters representing corporeal and intercorporeal poses inspired by ancient Chinese Oracle-Bone Inscriptions. These intuitive, cross-linguistic, cross-cultural signs—akin to emojis—aim to expand our capacity to conceptualize, understand, and communicate bodily and inter-bodily experiences. Drawing on linguistic relativity—the idea that language shapes worldview—we propose that these new hieroglyphic signs will function as a sociolinguistic mediator, influencing collective semantic cognition of bodily awareness. By envisioning an alternative present, Body Oracle challenges us to reconsider how embodied communication can transform our shared understanding.

15 min

Danlin Huang

Danlin Huang (CN) is an undergraduate student in China Academy of Art. As an artist, designer, and XR developer, her academic papers and demos have been published in top conferences such as SIGGRAPH Asia, CHI, CHI PLAY. Her works have been featured in the Ars Electronica 2024 in Linz, IJCAI, TEI, IEEE VR and the […]

Art & Industry – Volker Helzle & Andreas Dahn, Philipp Seifried & Regina Reisinger, Dinko Draganovic & Christian Steininger

In the “Art & Industry” panel, Volker Helzle (DE), Dinko Dragonovic & Christian Steininger (AT), Philipp Seifried & Regina Reisinger (AT) present innovative projects in the fields of film, games, and applied research. Creativity despite constraints - how to develop fast without losing your vision "In July 2024, Vienna based indie studio Microbird released their first game, Dungeons of Hinterberg, to critical acclaim from both press and players. Dungeons of Hinterberg is a mix of Action RPG and Social Sim, set in the Austrian Alps - and it is a big project, considering it was done by a small team of 10 people at maximum. A year after release, co-founders Philipp and Regina reflect back on the project, their learnings, and how it was possible to make such a game with a small, local team. The talk will shed light on how the project came to be, both from a creative and visionary point of view, as well as more practical aspects like funding and production planning. It will deal with developing a unique, expressive, yet fast to produce art style, and talk about the challenges of efficient productions, and how to facilitate them by leveraging technology, reusing assets, and concentrating on what matters most to the project and the creative vision. Regina and Philipp will talk about the project's approach to animation, concept art, modelling and shading, and how to build an efficient pipeline around them. In the face of current challenges, both time and money constraints are an integral reality of game development, and it looks like they are here to stay. This talk tries to examine how we can live and develop with these constraints, and how they might even help us push our creativity and create more focused, unique products." Moderation: Jeremiah Diephuis (US/AT)

2h

Volker Helzle & Andreas Dahn

Volker Helzle (DE) is in charge of Research and Development at Animationsinstitut of Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. After graduating from HDM Stuttgart Media University (Dipl. Ing. AV-Medien) in 2000 he moved to California and worked for three years at Eyematic Interfaces (later acquired by Google). Volker quickly advanced to team-lead in charge of the Los Angeles based […]

Philipp Seifried & Regina Reisinger

Over the past 15 years, Philipp Seifried (AT) has worked in many areas of game development, including game design, programming, tech art and narrative design. Between 2012 and 2014, he spent two years as a solo developer on mobile game “Ace Ferrara and the Dino Menace”, where his work also included 2D/3D art and music/sfx. […]

Dinko Draganovic & Christian Steininger

Dinko (BA/AT) is a freelance film director and writer, born in former Yugoslavia. His studies at the University of Arts in Linz sparked a passion for filmmaking, leading to numerous award-winning commercials and films, including the notorious viral hits for the city of Linz. Dinko is currently working on his first feature film, besides that, […]

Paper Session #5 – Animation & Performance

Paper Session #5 consists of five presentations and a recap and outlook session. Moderation: Philipp Wintersberger (AT)

1h 30min

Philipp Wintersberger

Philipp Wintersberger (AT) is a Professor of Intelligent User Interfaces at IT:U. He leads an interdisciplinary team of scientists working on research projects funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), and industry partners. His work focuses on human-machine cooperation in safety-critical environments, including automated vehicles, robotic and industrial systems, […]

Celine Pham & Jolanda Abasolo: Animating an Archive: AI and the Limits of Cultural Heritage Interpretation

This paper explores the potential and limitations of artificial intelligence in animating and interpreting cultural heritage, focusing on the project Brosch AI – Distorted Dreams, an AI-animated short film based on the works of Austrian artist Klemens Brosch. The project utilizes AI technologies such as diffusion models and generative adversarial networks to transform archival drawings into animated visuals, balancing authentic reinterpretations with intentional artistic distortions. Through detailed analysis and practical experimentation, the paper highlights significant challenges in realistically animating figures and maintaining stylistic fidelity. Embracing these animation errors as artistic interventions, the project aligns with Brosch’s psychological themes and biographical context. The discussion critically addresses broader implications regarding authorship, originality, and technology’s role in cultural heritage preservation and creative interpretation, advocating for a nuanced understanding of digital heritage practices.

15 min

Celine Pham & Jolanda Abasolo

Celine Pham (AT) is an interdisciplinary artist and Master’s student in Digital Arts based in Upper Austria. She works at the intersection of analog and digital art, blending mixed media, artificial intelligence, and experimental storytelling. Exploring themes of identity, belonging, and transformation, she continuously redefines the possibilities of artistic expression across different media. Jolanda Abasolo […]

Mona Hedayati: From Signal to Sensation: A Critical Practice of Affective Mediation

The presentation will discuss the multi-phase artistic research project Resonant Atmospheres which interrogates the logics of biometric technologies by critically reconfiguring their apparatus through participatory site-responsive performance. Drawing from feminist technoscience, critical data studies, and participatory paradigms in artistic research, the project challenges the epistemic assumptions underpinning emotion recognition systems, foregrounding the socio-political and cultural situatedness of biometric data. Rather than decoding bodily signals into emotional categories, Resonant Atmospheres transduces biological signals into ambient audiovisual environments, cultivating collective affective conditions that exceed the semantic leap common in computation deduction. Framed as a methodology in itself, the project embraces affect as relational, contingent, and distributed—positioning biosensors not as instruments of truth-making, but as relational interfaces for co-construction of experience. Through public activations and dialogical engagement, the work reorients biometric sensing away from extraction and toward relational resonance, generating atmospheres in which the affective dimensions of complex experiences such as migration can be sensed without being represented on a narrative level. The contribution offers both a critique of dominant data regimes and a proposition for how affective technologies can be subverted toward aesthetic and collective reimagining.

15 min

Mona Hedayati

Mona Hedayati (IR/CA) is an Iranian-Canadian artist with a dual doctorate in artistic research and interdisciplinary humanities from Belgium and Canada, soon to start her postdoctoral research at Cambridge University. Her work draws on performance, computation art, sound design, and sensory studies. She studied digital media and social-political art and design for her MA and […]

Hannes Sturm & Vincent Maurer: Implementing AI-Driven Frame Interpolation for a Hand-Crafted Animated Watercolor Film

The animated short film Sensual explores a novel workflow for hand-painted watercolor animation, blending traditional artistic methods with AI-based frame interpolation techniques. This paper highlights the advantages and disadvantages of different methods for interpolating 2D animation and proposes a new workflow developed during the production of the film. By combining traditional compositing tools with image interpolation using the Real-Time Intermediate Flow Estimation (RIFE) network, the approach significantly reduced production time while maintaining the unique hand-painted aesthetic. The presented work does not conflict with moral or ethical issues of AI technology and serves as a blueprint for enabling artists to fulfill their vision more effectively.

15 min

Hannes Sturm & Vincent Maurer

Hannes Sturm is a Technical Director, Indie Game Developer, and Freelancer focussing on interactive media, bringing innovative technical solutions to creative projects. He recently completed his diploma at the Animationsinstitut of the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg GmbH, following his studies of media computer science at the University of Tübingen. Throughout his career Hannes has contributed to multiple […]

Nairy Eivazy: Memotions: Designing a participatory animated film with cherished objects

This paper presents a work-in-progress project detailing a participatory animated film titled Memotions, that integrates participatory animation with interactive film features. Addressing the destruction of cultural heritage in the disputed territory of Artsakh, the project invites participants to rethink the stories encapsulated in their own personal objects and create animations with them. Through the development and evaluation of Memotions, we learned that familiar objects facilitated overcoming the unfamiliarity of the participatory animated film, imperfections mediated participation, and animation making with cherished objects can evoke memories embodied in objects. Future work will involve refining the prototype, conducting further observational studies to explore the impact of Memotions on cultural reflection through objects, and producing the film.

15 min

Nairy Eivazy

Nairy Eivazy (IR/BE) is an Armenian-Iranian animation artist, designer and researcher specializing in animation film with a participatory approach. Holding a master’s degree in Animation directing from the Tehran University of Arts, she is currently pursuing a PhD at LUCA School of Arts/KU Leuven. Her short films and animation installations have been showcased at international […]

Charlotte Triebus: Precious Camouflage: Artistic Research for the Creation of a Dance Piece with Humans and AI

This presentation presents the layout of and research behind the dance performance Precious Camouflage, which explores the interplay between human movement and artificial intelligence (AI) within a museal space. The work stages four AI systems that interact live with a contemporary dance ensemble and the audience, critically examining themes of agency, surveillance, interpretation, and body politics. By intertwining choreographic principles with real-time AI responses, the performance challenges traditional notions of authorship and reflects on the societal and ethical implications of digital technologies. In addition to presenting the communicative setup, the work is accompanied by extensive research on ethical questions, with a focus on the representation of bodies in datasets. This presentation reflects on the artistic research methodologies applied in Precious Camouflage, highlighting their relevance for both performative arts and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) contexts. Background materials and the recorded performance are available at http://www.precious.dance.

15 min

Charlotte Triebus, Ivana Druzetic-Vogel & Christian Geiger

Charlotte Triebus (DE) works as a performance artist and choreographer. Together with her ensemble and her team of developers, she conducts research at the interface of dance, art and technology. Her artistic works and performances have been shown in numerous museums and festival halls as well as in international exhibitions. Charlotte Triebus combines artistic practice […]

Recap and Outlook: Expanded Conference 2025

Expanded Conference 2025 closes with a recap and outlook of the conference chairs.

15min

Birgitta Hosea

Birgitta Hosea (SE/UK) is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher in expanded animation. Exhibitions include Venice & Karachi Biennales; Oaxaca & Chengdu Museums of Contemporary Art; InspiralLondon; Hanmi Gallery, Seoul. She has a solo exhibition at ASIFAKeil, Vienna in April 2020. Included in the Tate Britain and Centre d’Arte Contemporain, Paris, archives, she has been awarded […]

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 […]

ASIFA Austria Forum – Dagmar Schürrer: Entangled Techno-Realities: Poetic Spaces of Augmented Minds

Schürrer introduces her multimedia installation “Where does the rest of the world begin?” that reflects on the deep entanglements of human consciousness, natural environment, and current technology. With a multimedia installation consisting of two digital animations, 3D prints and an interactive Mixed Reality experience, she creates a spatial narrative in which she poetically links the scientific concepts of symbiosis and neural synchrony and applies those to our existence in the postdigital. Both theoretical approaches highlight the interconnectivity of all organic and non-organic agents, challenging concepts of individuality, singular consciousness, and subjectivity.

30 min

Dagmar Schürrer

Dagmar Schürrer (AT/DE) is an Austrian digital artist based in Berlin. She holds a degree in Fine Art from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London, UK, and works in the field of animation and extended reality (XR) technologies. Her artistic practice is often inspired by scientific concepts from biology and neuroscience. […]

ASIFA Austria Forum – Tore Knabe: Reverse Turing Test Express: A postmortem

30 min

Tore Knabe

Tore Knabe (PL/DE) is a Berlin-based VR developer and digital pioneer who consistently explores the frontiers of emerging technologies. His journey began with the dawn of mobile computing, where his innovative games and educational apps, including the globally successful Bowmaster, reached top positions in App Stores worldwide. Since 2013, Knabe has been at the forefront […]

ASIFA Austria Forum – Tamiko Thiel & /p: Interactive Animation and the Conflict Between Free Will and Determinism

Tamiko Thiel and /p will talk about how they use animation in VR and AR to enhance users' engagement with the 3D virtual and real space around them. This involves playing with user expectations, giving users a sense of control and agency, that they then take away at key moments to create emotionally charged encounters with the virtual environment and its content.

30 min

Tamiko Thiel & /p

In 2024 Tamiko Thiel (US/DE) was awarded the SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award in Digital Arts and inducted into the inaugural cohort of AWE XR Hall of Fame for her politically and socially critical media artworks exploring place, space, the body and cultural identity. Earlier awards include the 2018 SAT Montreal Visionary Pioneer Award […]

Awards & Closing: Expanded Conference 2025

The Award Ceremony marks the official closing of the Expanded Conference on Animation and Interactive Art. During the event, the Best Paper Award as well as Honorary Mentions will be presented, recognizing outstanding scholarly contributions. The ceremony will be joined by the conference chairs as well as by Michael Rabl, President of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria,  and Christl Baur, Head of Ars Electronica Festival. Beyond celebrating individual achievements, the closing also provides an opportunity to collectively reflect on the experiences and insights of the three conference days.

1h

Michael Rabl

Michael Rabl (AT) is an Austrian engineer, academic, and research manager specializing in innovation, sensor technology, and product development. Since September 2024, he has served as President and Scientific Director of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria (FH OÖ). Previously, he was Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the FH […]

Christl Baur

Christl Baur (DE) is the director of the Ars Electronica Festival and an interdisciplinary researcher with a background in art history, cultural management, and natural sciences. She is particularly interested in the connection between aesthetic and social practices based on collaboration and experimentation that challenge social, political, and economic protocols. Her research spans topics such […]

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 […]