In May and June of 2021, ESPRONCEDA, Institute of Art & Culture, organized a new edition of the international residences IMMENSIVA. This year we collaborated with institutions in 12 cities worldwide to produce a program of pre-residences and a final residence in Barcelona. The projects created by interdisciplinary groups were pitched to a professional jury who selected 3 projects to be in Barcelona Ars Electronica Garden. One of the projects will be exhibited and inter-connected within 4 European cities. Selected projects: Oxytocina Machina. International VR installation between Barcelona-Milan-Rotterdam-Linz. By Sammie de Vries, Mila Moleman, Zalán Szakács, Mathieu Preux, Lucia Redondo.
Theater of Inconveniences. Multimedia/ VR installation, by Anirudhan Iyengar, Nuño de la Serna Vicente, Dominic Schwab, Helvijs Savickis, Julia Obleitner, Mathieu Preux. Tesserice. Multimedia installation, by Clea T. Waite, Max Orozco, Jared Christopher Kelley. Additionally, we invited a former artist from IMMENSIVA residence 2020 to present his project: Perception of wine. Multimedia installations by Mohsen Hazrati.
HYBRIDTIMES–INTERDEPENDENCE_IMMENSIVAResidenceProjects_gallery_Perceptionofwine-c-MohsenHazrati
HYBRID TIMES – INTERDEPENDENCE, IMMENSIVA Residence Projects, Perception of Wine, Credit: Mohsen Hazrati
HYBRID TIMES – INTERDEPENDENCE, IMMENSIVA Residence Projects, Perception of Wine, Credit: Mohsen Hazrati
HYBRID TIMES – INTERDEPENDENCE, IMMENSIVA Residence Projects, Tesser Ice, Credit: Clea T. Waite, Jared Christopher Kelley, Max Orozco
HYBRID TIMES – INTERDEPENDENCE, IMMENSIVA Residence Projects, Theatre of inconveniences, Credit: Anirudhan Iyengar, Dominic Schwab, Helvijs Savickis, Julia Obleitner, Mathieu Preux, Nuño de la Serna Vicente
Lucía Redondo Rubio (Madrid, 1994): Lucía Redondo Rubio is an architect, dancer and performer based in Barcelona. She works with the relationships and confluences between body, space and atmospheres. Apart from contemporary and urban dance, she practices other embodied disciplines such as capoeira and physical theatre, with three plays released in Madrid and Berlin.
Mathieu Preux: Mathieu Preux is a French sound designer focused on creating interactive sound with new technologies. Referring to natural patterns, his works take the form of art installations involving living human and non-human subjects. A graduate of IRCAM’s Master in Sound Design, he has a technical background in Film and Marine Biology, both of which heavily influence his work.
Mila Moleman: Mila Moleman is a 25 year old VR/AI artist, currently based in Amsterdam. In 2014, she started studying Artificial Intelligence at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where she became increasingly interested in how a digital image can change our perception of reality througha computer-generated environment. These interests were not only focused on science and technology, but also in the artistic field, so as to fully engage with her passion to develop totally immersive alternate realities.
Sammie de Vries: Sammie de Vries is a virtual reality artist based in Amsterdam, who has been working at the forefront of the VR industry for the past 8 years. With a background in social psychology, script writing and acting, Sammie’s main interest is creating engaging multiplayer narratives in VR, where the players are connected through story, action and emotion. Together with Mila Moleman, Sammie founded Studio VRij, an Amsterdam-based immersive content studio established in the belief that immersive technologies should bring people together.
Zalán Szakács: Zalán Szakács is a post-digital artist/researcher based in Rotterdam. His practice explores the links between historic and contemporary media phenomena, with a focus on media archaeological research translated into the medium of light and atmospheres. He sees his role as that of a mediator between technology and society, creating perceptual experiences that offer alternative technological narratives. His concepts are executed in various (hybrid) media, from site-specific installations, animations and performances to AR and VR experiences.
Clea T. Waite: Clea T. Waite is an intermedia artist, scholar, engineer, and experimental filmmaker whose artworks investigate the material poetics that emerge at the intersection of art, science, and technology. She has created immersive, cinematic works engaging embodied perception, dynamic composition, and sensual interfaces – as well as one inter-species collaboration with several hundred tropical spiders.
Jared Christopher Kelley: Jared Christopher Kelley is an artist drawing connections between digital simulations and their physical counterparts. As a child in a fundamentalist millenarian family, he was taught to believe he would live forever after the apocalypse. He has reacted to these beliefs in his work by exploring secular historic and contemporary transhumanist movements, using them as a means to sit with the unrealisable expectation of immortality.
Max Orozco: Max Orozco is a designer and creative technologist exploring human-centered applications of engineering. Using computer vision, AR/VR, deepfakes and IoT, his work focuses on human-computer interaction, healthcare, and creative problem-solving. Orozco’s background is in academic neuroscience, where for seven years he used MRI techniques to discover new insights into the developing brain. He’s had the privilege of working with brilliant minds in science, and he continues to apply the same academic rigour to applied research in emerging technologies.
Anirudhan Iyengar: Anirudhan Iyengar is an architect, visual artist, and researcher based in Austria. A graduate of The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, he is enthusiastic about experimenting with space and technology to advance possibilities. His interest lies in speculative architecture, human-machine collaboration & experiential interaction design. His project Neural Kubrick’ has been exhibited in London, Moscow & Beijing.
Dominic Schwab: Dominic Schwab is a speculative architect based in Vienna, Austria. He is working, teaching and researching in the dynamic field of architecture, visual culture and immersive media, by addressing the techno-philosophical questions of our future worlds. Driven by a strong interest in sonic & science-fiction, he started his studies at the Vienna University of Technology, where he earned a bachelor’s in Architecture . He holds a master’s degree in Art and Architecture from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Helvijs Savickis: Helvijs Savickis was born in Riga, Latvia right after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His work deals with uncomfortable scenarios that are transformed into digital and analog speculations. He is always on the lookout for geopolitical catastrophes that have been left outside of humanity’s collective memory. He has been twice featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale with the projects “Inner Freedom” (2012) and “Digital Disobedience” (2018), the latter in cooperation with Francois Roche. He has exhibited at Ars Electronica with the project ”Time Capsule” 2015, and had other exhibitions in Berlin, Vienna, and Riga.
Julia Obleitner: Julia Obleitner is an architect and artist operating between performativity, architecture, digital and real space. She is interested in territories, time, and contemporary political, ecological and urban issues. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and at Iceland University of the Arts in Reykjavík. In 2018, Julia received the Pfann Ohmann Prize for her Master’s Project “keimeno”, the Start Scholarship from the Federal Chancellery of Austria, and the MAK Schindler Scholarship, Los Angeles, 2019.
Nuño de la Serna Vicente: Nuño de la Serna Vicente is a Spanish Berlin-based media artist. Mixing multiple art disciplines with inventive ways of using technology, de la Serna creates artworks that are born from a fundamental, innocent curiosity and resonate with complex contemporary issues. His creative process acknowledges the importance of the fair use of resources and free access to information by supporting free software and open hardware, finding ecological alternatives to materials and building, and funding and using fair platforms for the community.
Mohsen Hazrati (Shiraz, 1987): Mohsen Hazrati graduated with a BA in Graphic Design from Shiraz Art Institute of Higher Education in 2012, minoring in New Media and Digital Art. His works focus on digital culture, new aesthetics and the integration of these two issues into the Shirazi culture and Iranian mystical literature. He has exhibited at Transfer and Babycastles Gallery, New York; Telematic Media Arts, San Francisco; V-Gallery, Tehran; ESPRONCEDA Institute of Art & Culture, Barcelona, among others.
