VIRTUAL WORLDS-INTERACTIVE ENVIRONMENTS: Art as an Immersive Experience

Mobile and extended reality technologies are opening new spaces and interaction possibilities for us. The immersion in virtual worlds by means of VR or the inclusion of the outside world in AR, in which the real world is overlaid with virtual images both open new perceptions, creating an alterity of our living world. Immersive image worlds are conquering the art world and these experiences are becoming a new field of action, as the exhibitions of the Japanese collective teamLab or the enterprise Superblue, a new branch of the New York based Pace Gallery, show. Sabine Himmelsbach will speak about these current developments and present examples from her own curatorial work at HEK (House of Electronic Arts), Works discussed range from interactive installations to AI, game environments or video installations which challenge, provoke, and explore how technology is representing, influencing, and changing our world.

Sabine Himmelsbach is director of HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel. Trained in art history, she was project manager for the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz and in 1999 became exhibition director at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. From 2005–2011 she was the artistic director of the Edith-Russ-House for Media Art in Oldenburg, Germany. In 2022 she curated Earthbound – In Dialoge with Nature for the European Capital of Culture Esch-sur-Alzette in Luxembourg. As a writer and lecturer, she is dedicated to topics related to media art and digital culture.