Wednesday, September 20, 2023
Opening Programme
The National Library of Latvia (Mūkusalas iela 3), 11th floor (roof ridge) / Zoom
PROGRAMME
17:00 Opening keynote Chris Salter
Chris SALTER (CA/CH) / Anna RIDLER (UK/US)
Chris SALTER. Probing XR’s Futures
This talk explores conceptual, historical and practice-based approaches to the emerging domain of XR or extended reality – an umbrella term arising in the mid 2000s describing computer generated environments accessed and experienced through worn headsets and body interfaces. While the histories of VR (only one element in the XR mix) have traditionally been focused on the human experience of mediated space, this talk aims to situate XR in the histories of wearable and ubiquitous computing in which the “interplay between embodied perception and action” is critical and becomes the “focal point of design” (Flach and Holden 1998). Examining a range of historical examples as well as current artistic and research work on XR’s futures emerging from the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts, the talk aims to critically explore the emergence of new paradigms of sensing and acting in worlds that hybridize the computational and the real.
Chris Salter is Professor for Immersive Arts and Director of the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). He is also Professor Emeritus, Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal and former Co-Director of the Hexagram network for research-creation in arts, cultures and technology and Co-Founder of the Milieux Institute at Concordia. He studied philosophy and economics and completed his PhD in theatre studies with research in computer music at Stanford University. His artistic work has been seen all over the world at such venues as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Barbican Centre, Berliner Festspiele, Wiener Festwochen, ZKM, Kunstfest Weimar, Musée d’art Contemporain, Muffathalle, MUTEK, EXIT Festival and Place des Arts-Montreal, among many others. He is the author of Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance ( 2010), Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (2015) and Sensing Machines (2022), all from MIT Press.