Ars Electronica and Shanghai Tech University co-curated a series of artist-led student workshops together with four different research labs of the university. These workshops aim to introduce ArtScience as a research and production practice that nurtures innovation by bridging the worlds of art, science, and technology.

Type: Workshops
Duration: May 6 – May 10 and May 20 – 24, 2025
City, Country: Shanghai, China
Venue: Shanghai Tech, No. 393 Middle Huaxia Road, Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China
Collaborating Artists: Jan Zuiderveld, Anna Schaeffner, Peter Freudling (Ars Electronica Futurelab) and Tiziano Derme
Hosting labs: Artificial Intelligence and Digital Art Lab (AIDA), Center for Adaptive System Engineering (CASE), Design Interaction Visual Lab (DIV), Hybrid Ecologies Lab (HY) at ShanghaiTech University

Over the course of a week, students were invited to explore ArtScience as a research and production practice. Each workshop introduced a distinct approach: In Embodied LLMs, artist Jan Zuiderveld guided students from the AIDA Lab to give large language models a physical form—resulting in interactive machines with personalities and presence. Embracing Collision led by artist and researcher Anna Schaeffner at the CASE Lab, encouraged participants to rethink the design of objects and devices by embracing collision rather than avoiding it. At the DIV Lab, Peter Freudling, researcher at Ars Electronica Futurelab introduced students to art thinking methodology. In Linking Life(s), architect and researcher Tiziano Derme worked with students from the HY Lab to prototype hybrid ecosystems involving humans, fungi, and AI—asking what more-than-human futures might look like.

The workshop series aimed to foster cross-disciplinary curiosity, offer new tools for thinking and making, and encourage students to step outside disciplinary boundaries.

Workshops

Jan Zuiderveld x AIDA Lab

EMBODIED LLMs

Coffee machines that question your life choices, photocopiers that complete your drawings, cameras that narrate rooms like nature documentaries—artist-researcher Jan Zuiderveld gives algorithms a physical presence. In this hands-on workshop, students will work in small teams to give Large Language Models (LLMs) a tangible form. They will design and build interactive installations with personalities—machines that can sense, act, and engage in conversations with visitors and each other.

The Artificial Intelligence and Digital Art Lab (AIDA) focuses on the cutting-edge fields of artificial intelligence, encompassing multi-modal learning, content generation, reinforcement learning, and intelligent gaming. We are dedicated to developing innovative algorithms and models to explore how intelligent systems learn and make decisions in diverse inputs and complex environments, advancing the development of intelligent applications, particularly in gaming and interactive experiences.

Biography

Jan Zuiderveld is an artist and researcher with a background in physics, electrical engineering, neuropsychology and artificial intelligence. His work explores the interface between technology and life, prompting reflections on the essence of being and our rapidly evolving relationships with machines. Zuiderveld’s work is currently exhibited at the Nieuwe Instituut. His research has been featured at NeurIPS, and he served as artist in residence at De School from 2021 until 2024.

Anna Schaeffner x CASE Lab

EMBRACING COLLISION

This workshop explores the creative potential of collision—between disciplines, technologies, and bodies. It opens with a one-day speculative exercise called “Magic Machines.” Participating students will be invited to envision a new type of device that merges their field of research with unexpected phenomena. The goal is to challenge their own discipline by blending it with inspiration drawn from another field. The rest of the workshop will be built around the core concept of “embracing collision rather than avoiding it.” It will revolve around the question: what needs to change or adapt in the design and engineering of objects and devices to encourage human interaction through bodily confrontation—rather than through screens, buttons, or voice commands. The idea is to shift our perspective on problem-solving: instead of always avoiding collision, how might we face it and transform it into a tool for creative inspiration?

Center for Adaptive System Engineering (CASE) focuses on high-end equipment fields such as aviation, aerospace, and new energy, tackling key technologies in data-driven additive manufacturing, numerical simulation, intelligent decision-making and control. Artificial intelligence, digitalization and robotics technologies are applied to promote closed-loop manufacturing of materials, design, manufacturing, and testing. While balancing scientific research, talent, and teaching, we also serve the high-tech industry, emphasizing the industrialization and marketization of technology.

Biography

Anna Schaeffner (FR) is an interaction designer exploring the field of human-computer interaction through a practice-based PhD at École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity« in Berlin. Her research centers on new form of interaction through Soft Collision and the Design of Deformable Objects. Through her practice, she investigates tangible interaction as a vehicle for movement programming, dynamic material adaptation, and expressiveness.

Ars Electronica Futurelab x DIV Lab

ARS ELECTRONICA ART THINKING

The Ars Electronica Futurelab is an artistic R&D laboratory and atelier within Ars Electronica. The workshop week will kick off with a deep dive into Ars Electronica Futurelab’s methods and goals. The presentation will provide an inside look on Futurelab’s works, key research topics and education programs amongst others. The following days will focus mainly on the Ars Electronica Art Thinking method, which serves as a starting point for numerous projects. “Think as an artist” – The basic premise is that viewing any topic through the lens of art (and its strategies, strengths and concerns) can help explore the questions around it and open the creative process, long before other disciplines such as design approach the finding of solutions. Students are invited to apply that method on their ongoing projects or choose fictional challenges. In between the sessions, various other short inspiration showers & discussions around topics like “AI & Creativity” or “Alternate Realities” can be applied.

The DIV Lab covers interdisciplinary research and practice areas, including intelligent design, human-computer interaction, systems design, applications of VR/AR/XR, and social innovation design in related fields. It is dedicated to advancing research in technology and art innovations in intelligent living environments, social services, and aesthetics.

Biography

Peter Freudling was one of the first members to join the Ars Electronica Futurelab. As a researcher in the Virtual Environments group, he created several projects in the field, among other the CAVE in the Ars Electronica Center. Peter has passed on his knowledge by teaching the course Virtual Reality for Industrial Design at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz. As an Industrial Designer his focus shifted slowly from the virtual to the physical world joining the Media Art and Architecture research team which he currently leads as its key researcher. Recent works mainly focus on artistic interventions in the semi-public space as well as design-related work on many projects.

Tiziano Derme x HY Lab

Linking Life(s)

In recent years, sustainability discourse has expanded to embrace a more-than human perspective, challenging anthropocentric frameworks through interdisciplinary research and practice. This workshop interrogates how collaborative networks of human, artificial, and organic agents might respond to contemporary ecological crises. By integrating collective mapping and making, it aims to reimagine symbiotic relationships between humans, fungi, and artificial intelligence (AI), transcending traditional hierarchies to address urgent planetary challenges. Participants will co-create hybrid sensory installations that explore entangled human-AI-fungal interactions, employing physical, digital, and biological systems as mediums for inquiry. Through iterative cycles of mapping and prototyping, we will visualize emergent eco-cultural-techno relationships, fostering dialogue between Eastern and Western epistemologies to generate pluralistic visions of more-than-human futures.

The Hybrid Ecologies Lab explores scientific research, design, and art through the innovation, development, deployment, and evaluation of novel physical devices and interactive systems that advance our computing culture, encourage broad participation by non-experts within science and engineering, improve human health and well-being, and provoke critical debate and inquiry concerning our existing and emerging technological society.

Biography

Tiziano Derme is an architect interested in the relationship between architectural design, emergent materials, and biotechnologies within digital and robotic fabrication. His research focuses on Microbially mediated fabrication processes applied to the built environment. He is a Ph.D. researcher at the Chair for Digital Building Technologies (dbt), Institute of Technology in Architecture (ITA) at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. Tiziano is also the co-founder and director of MAEID Büro für Architektur und transmediale Kunst, a transdisciplinary design practice based in Vienna.

Partner

Shanghai Tech

Jointly founded by Shanghai Municipal People’s Government and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2013, ShanghaiTech University is a high-standard, international university oriented towards research and innovation, for nurturing the next generation of innovative scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. ShanghaiTech is committed to tackling the challenges that China and the world are facing in the fields covering artificial intelligence, biology, biomedical engineering, data science, electrical engineering, energy, environment, human health, materials, and others. As a small-scale university, ShanghaiTech currently has 1,979 undergraduate students, 2,891 master students, and 1,698 doctoral students on campus. Our students benefit from the student-centered educational approach and are encouraged to conduct cross-disciplinary research in an international environment.

https://www.shanghaitech.edu.cn/eng/

ShanghaiTech University