And the fellowship 2025 goes to …

The AURORA XR Fellowship 2024/25 goes to Lisa Kaschubat, Tasha Hess-Neustadt and Jane Arnison with their concept for PHYGITAL INTIMACY!

PHYGITAL INTIMACY (AT) is a speculative vision of the future that combines live performance, mixed reality (MR), gaming and AI with contemporary dance, performance and generative music production.

Performers and the participating audience enter a multiplayer MR environment where they interact with both AI-driven digital content and a generative sound layer. Inspired esp. by Sophie K. Rosa’s concept of radical intimacy – care and community are emphasized as political fields of resistance – the aim is to create connection and intimacy between the users, but also between humans and machines.

A big thank you goes to our expert jury – Pablo Dornhege, Sebastian Keppler and Peggy Schoenegge – and to the many artists and cultural professionals for their submissions to our annual XR Open Call!

Our project at Transferale festival

On 27 September, we are part of the awesome festival Transferale in Berlin to present and discuss »from hostile to hospitable«, the interactive WebAR application for inclusive urban spaces that we developed in close collaboration with the artist Martin Binder! The experience explores discriminatory design in urban public spaces and visualizes (mostly) utopian alternatives.

Transferale is the first transfer and science festival with a focus on climate and health, organised by our HTW Berlin in cooperation with four other universities of applied sciences in Berlin. In over 70 events with more than 150 scientists from different disciplines, you can experience the diversity of applied research.

Link to the event: https://zukunftstadt.berlin/transferale (last access: 25.09.2024).

New project grant in the framework of EFRE/INP-III project HERA!

Good news: Our application on a new project grand was approved!

»HERA – Handlungs- und Lernräume für Extended Reality Angebote mit der freien Kulturszene« is funded from 2023 to 2025 by the ERDF in the program »Stärkung des Innovationspotenzials in der Kultur III« (INP-III) gefördert und führt die beliebte AURORA School for Artists weiter – jetzt neu als AURORA School for XR Artists, mit Kursen zu allen XR-Technologien, auch für Fortgeschrittene, Open Calls und XR Art & Networking Events.

AURORA ARchive

Also worth mentioning: The AURORA ARchive, released in March 2022, now presents 118 international AR art and culture projects – and of course, it includes all projects from the AURORA Production Lab.

Open source and free, now available at the URL: aurora-archive.com.

Workshop on Comics & Augmented Reality

After being invited—together with AURORA alumna Christina Sarli and her AR comic Señor Pulpo—to the Insta-Video podcast Kreative Pause of the Berlin comic store Grober Unfug on 06.02.22, there was a nice AURORA workshop on “Comics & Augmented Reality” with 13 participating artists on 10.03.22 – due to corona still via ZOOM.

Topics:
• Creative input and comparison of sample comics and related media
• Input on digital media production
• Technological basics around AR
• AURORA alumna Christina Sarli answers questions about workflow and storytelling in Señor Pulpo
Platform to discuss your own ideas and their technical feasibility with each other and with AR specialists.

Thanks a lot to Christina Sarli and the great artists for their highly motivated participation! 🙂