Diolch yn fawr iawn am wylio'r fideo. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning and welcome to Expanded 2026. This is Ars Electronica first day 10 o'clock. I think it's the first program of Ars Electronica. We already kicked off yesterday with the pre-opening and the celebration of Ars Electronica Center, 30 years of Ars Electronica Center, the Ars Electronica Festival. And now we are starting Ars Electronica Center, the Ars Electronica Festival. And now we are starting Ars Electronica 2026 with a very intense program. And this is one amazing program within Ars Electronica Media Art Festival, the expanded conference. So welcome here at the Ars Electronica Center. As you already know, this building is 30 years old already. But with the extension, it is kind of newish. Not everything is 30 years old. We are here at the Skyloft. It's a beautiful weather and everything is setting up. The Klangwolke that will take place on Saturday is already doing rehearsals. So it will be a very fantastic five days journey for us. And now we are kicking off the expanded conference that is, I would say, the academic conference at Ars Electronica. We started the journey 14 years ago, so this is the 14th edition, with, yeah, starting as a small one-day symposium, and now it's already a big, big conference with, I don't know exactly the number, And now it's already a big big conference with I Don't know exactly the number but so many presentations. I think we counted more than 80 speakers here at the conference and This is a bigger number than the other conferences at us electronic or some don't tell them because Anyway, I'm so happy to kick off the conference together with Victoria Szabo. We are both the general chairs this year. We have switched the symposium to a conference. It's ACM in cooperation. Victoria will tell you a little bit more about the proceedings later. And we already have a steering committee with a lot of chairs, so it's becoming professional, I would say. So welcome again, and I will pass over to Victoria, and you will give a little insight into the program. I think you have a mic. Hi, everyone. Yes? Yes. It's such a pleasure to be here, and I want to thank Juergen and everyone for all of your support. I got involved in Xpandit just a few years years ago and it's been amazing to see it grow and develop even in that time. So you'll see we have a very exciting and dense program. There are a variety of different types of activities. We're going to kick off today with the Expanded Play Gallery short presentations, but also bear in mind that this is also an exhibition that will be available to visit for several days. And then we have two different types of academic sessions. You'll see art tracks and research tracks, and these are both two different types of art papers. The art tracks tend to be more about projects and the research more about theory, history, criticism, but of course we all know that there is a lot of ambiguity and overlap between those modalities. So you'll see a number of those throughout the day. One thing that I've found especially exciting about our program is that it really encompasses history and critique and art and culture and technology all wrapped up together. We're also going to have a few other exciting sessions. The Birds of the Fe the feather connecting media arts research will bring together leaders from a variety of organizations that are around related topics and then Friday of course we have expanding expanded into a network of other associations art and industry artist perspectives from the pre-arts electronica and of course our keynote with the wonderful Catherine Ibister. So we have a lot happening. We hope that we'll see you for all of it. And also a reminder that we will have proceedings at the ACM after the conference is over, where you can read the papers and get more information about what you have seen. Thank you. So this is one venue where we have all the presentations, but we have already kicked off another venue, the Atelier Haus Salzamt, yesterday, the pre-opening walk, where we have a show of 13 projects that have been submitted to the Expanded Play Gallery track. So we will actually start with the first session where all these researchers and artists give you a brief introduction in that and if you haven't seen it yesterday, you are cordially invited to go to the expanded play gallery afterwards. It's open from today until Saturday, 6 o'clock. So here you see the map, the Danube, and there, of course, if you go on the Ars Electronica website, there are a lot of different venues. Another one that I would like to recommend is the Met Campus, where you will get information about the screening program. What we also want to do, of course, is to say thank you to a lot of people. We will share the information about the chairs. Besides the general chairs, there are a lot of track chairs. They did a lot of work in the last six months, selecting the reviewers and being responsible for picking the program. I just realized I neglected to shout out the doctoral consortium, which is a really critical program that is the future of what we're doing here. So I wanted to acknowledge that. And also to say that something like this really does have casts of hundreds behind it. The reviewers, the contributors, the tech staff, the everyone. So we really appreciate that. Yeah, this is great that you mentioned it. So it's an ongoing journey. So we don't know what new tracks will maybe come up next year. So it's really an evolving field, looking at the intersection of this pillar of us electronic technology, art, society, but also research. So that's the main focus, actually, at Expanded, to think about all these different forms in the context of media art and research What we also want to highlight is that we have a great website and a big archive already so every presentation since the beginning of expanded animation symposium in 2013 is documented, recorded, and there was a live stream. So it's a big resource for researchers, artists, curators, practitioners to go into the archive and listen to the talks. There is a streaming, and we already got a lot of requests. Where is the streaming? So it's a YouTube streaming, and you can also participate via the stream. So there is a chat, and we will look into the chat and pass the questions to the speakers here as well. So here's the QR code and we also want to of course highlight our sponsors and collaborations. The expanded journey began with a collaboration between the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and Ars Electronica. So these are the main funding institutions, so to speak, but with a lot of partners, local institutions and international institutions and a lot of collaborations. We are also very interested in connecting to SIGGRAPH and ICIA and other media art conferences and conferences with the media art focus. And a big, big, big, big thank you again and again. I think Expanded has the greatest production team, so a lot of students from the university are involved. You already saw the trailer created by John Lim. And a lot of people are working months before the conference to prepare everything. Also doing the archive, the documentation. The documentation is, so to speak, the key for the archive. And now I would like to hand over to Daniela Duker. We are both the curators of the Ars Electronica animation art screening. So as you all know Ars Electronica has a big, come to me, has a big international competition and one category is since the beginning since 1986 focusing on time based media entitled at the beginning computer animation and now the category is entitled new animation art so expanding all forms of time based media in the context of media art. And we have a brilliant screening program that Danila will introduce. Thank you. Yes, so let's see. It doesn't show up yet. Yes, so let's see. It doesn't show up yet. So as Jürgen said, this program consists of a lot of animations that we selected from the submissions in the new animation art category. Some projects are award-winning projects, and other, because Jürgen and I, yeah, we're part of the pre-selection process. We have usually around 1,000 submissions. And then the jury awards 15 prizes. That's why we find it really fair to extend the selection and show beyond the winning projects other animations that drew our attention. So we have this whole screening program that takes place in the third festival hub, which is Met Campus. The screening space is the so-called Met Space. It's the little brother of Deep Space. And we have five days of program. You can see here the calendar and the different selections. And beyond the curated programs like the Priars Elektronika Insight, Ghost Stories and Austrian Panorama, we also have a series of Meet the Artists events in which we show the film and then we have an in-depth discussion with the artists. And we also have a partner guest program with the Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art where we show a selection of best student animations. As Ars Electronica teaches us, and I guess any festival this size, a lot is happening at the same time. So yeah, unfortunately our screening program runs at least these first three days in parallel with the conference. So we will have to make some choices. But the good news is that we also have a lot on Saturday and Sunday. So if some of you are staying longer, then you can join us, especially because some of the guests will present here, part of the CIFA panel, the Artist Perspective panel, will also be invited for the Meet the Artist events. And we also have on Saturday these two programs, which is the Two Girls, One Comp Showcase, with a lecture performance showing how the artist duo is modding video games, and this one is also a performance on Saturday evening, also in Met Campus, by Riot Jetsby, who's also a guest on Friday here at the Expanded. So I hope to see some of you there and I wish you a great conference and great festival. Thank you. Thank you Daniela. Yeah I also want to mention that there is a festival on tour program after Ars Electronica. So if you are a curator or responsible for an institution that is interested in the screening program, just get in contact with us and we can talk about options for screening and showing Ars Electronica in different locations. screening and showing as electronic or in different locations. We are right on time to kick off the first session and I would like to invite Jeremiah on stage to start with the expanded Play Gallery spotlight session. Thank you. Good morning. There we go. We're just going to switch over to the presentation. I had the pleasure of basically organizing the Explanted Play Gallery this year. This is the third year in a row that we've done this type of exhibition, but this was the first year that it was really integrated into the entire conference. submissions for projects and we reviewed all of these both in terms of their sort of autistic statement but also in terms of feasibility for the space that we have and we selected 13 interactive works to exhibit and last night we had our grand opening and everything was running and everything's fine and we're very honored to start off the conference today at the same time the timing is a bit challenging because the exhibition has to actually start running in a few minutes and so some of us had to sort of hurry on over here after we got all the installations running. We're going to do this really quickly, it's a very quick format and so what I have are these 13 projects. I'm going to ask the people to come up and briefly present the projects but they only have five minutes and what we're going to do then at the end, we're going to do the people to come up and briefly present their projects, but they only have five minutes. And what we're going to do then at the end, we're going to do a question and answer session. And the good news is I've made a really quick slide where you can see the names of the projects so that you can ask the artists a question, you know specifically which project that they're referring to. So we're going to go ahead and get off to our first project. And I would like to ask the artists from the Clausemble machine to come up on stage, which is our next project and I would like to ask the artist from the Closembly machine to come up on stage, which is our next project. Thank you very much. So again, you have five minutes. I will stop you and move on afterwards, okay? Do I actually need to do the slides myself? So hi, I will have the honor to present the core assembly line to you, which is a student project of ours. It's actually quite small and tiny, but I think we also have a slide for that. Yep, that's the claw assembly line. It's the small mock-up. So basically our project is a mixture of a character creator and an arcade claw machine. Basically the users get three claws, which they use to pick up these small orbs on a conveyor belt and build their own little character. And our idea behind that or what we wanted to achieve is that players just leave a mark so whenever a character is finished it just moves on into the background. You see a small crowd over there of lots of different, differently looking characters. So whenever someone finishes one of the creations, it moves into the background and together over the whole exhibition, a crowd is formed of many different looking characters. For this we created over a hundred different assets, consisting of different hairstyles, eyes, ears and so on. And with this we also wanted to make the whole thing very approachable. So that's why we chose the whole arcadey looking joystick and button setting. And this also makes it a lot more playful and approachable. And on top of that, a little tidbit from the design perspective of the whole thing, is it was actually a bit tricky of, as you know, claw machines are often not that accurate. And also this character creator is also not that accurate. But that is actually intended, since you can't really choose what you look like. You do get a bit of control, but in our representation, it really doesn't matter because in the end, you always get a good looking small character. And after all, you can also just do it again. Another thing you also might see the little QR code over there. You can always then scan your creation and share it with friends or download it. And that is pretty much it. Feel free to come by to the SALTSAM and give it a try and also feel free to give feedback. Thank you. Thank you very much. We're gonna move right along with our next project which is called Vimmer. Okay, hi. So let's talk about Wimmel real quick. I wrote a bachelor thesis about it, so it's kind of hard to do in five minutes, but let's go. First of all, do you know this painting on the right? That's Pieter Brueghel's The Flemish Proverbs, and it's one of the greatest paintings ever made in my opinion. And basically it's a Wimmer-Build. Wimmer-Build in English for the lack of a better term is a hidden object picture. But you know a hidden object picture has the component of there is a goal, there is an incentive for the viewer. And in the Wimmer-Build it's more about the exploration of the whole piece. Now there are two really cool things about this piece. First of all, it's the day-to-day life of the Dutch people, which is very unconventional for Renaissance paintings. And then second of all, secondably, the whole picture incorporates about 100 or so Dutch proverbs. So, what we wanted to do with Viml is take this picture, make it animated, make it interactive, and translate it into the Austrian zeitgeist. So, we made about 20 characters or so, animated all of them, and then we collected like 50 or so Austrian proverbs and the Austrian language is a very beautiful one so there are a lot of lot of sayings and proverbs like for example It's neither a disadvantage nor a mistake if the schnitzel is bigger than the plate so then we basically planned all this out and this is what you see on the left and don't be afraid it's just looks confusing. It also kind of is but I get it. So we planned all of these out and we settled on 18 characters with about 25 or so different sayings that are portrayed in like a pictorial way. So in a really literal sense, not in the sense that the, not in the meaning of the actual proverb. And then we made it interactive. So the whole system works via this laser tracking system on the floor, where you can move about in the Wimmelbild, and you're represented by these small hands. Now, this is where the playful nature of the hidden object picture comes in again. So you can actually move around in the picture, and then hover over trigger points you can find in the picture. And then a character spawns and does their whole animation and their whole routine. And the goal basically is to explore the whole Vimble build, fill it up, so it really Vimbles, it really sprawls, right? And that is very fun. You can also explode the whole canvas and reset everything. But that was really fun and really complicated to do. But I think it's worth it, and I hope you check it out. Thank you very much. We're going to move on to the next project. I hope the person... Yeah, there he is. We were just setting up this morning, and he wasn't quite here yet. Pascaro is going to present on to the next project. I hope the person's here. There he is. We were just setting up this morning, and he wasn't quite here yet. Pascaro is going to present Matchmaker Madness. Hi. We made Matchmaker Madness in part of our Game Spaces course in the Masters. And this game is about making love or making pairs. Obviously happy pairs. The background story is that you're a little cupid in training and you're not allowed to use your bow yet. That's why your controller is a big slingshot which you have to pull and match people. The goal is to match happy people despite gender ethical or cultural background and yeah your goal is to make as many happy people and Paris as possible. And there are possible outcomes that you make couples that are not happy or toxic, which is displayed in UI with unhappy persons, and we don't want them, and that's your goal as a good qubit to make the happy couples. And for our controller, as I mentioned already, we have a big slingshot, which is like this size. You can try it out at Salzamt, and I'm happy if you try it out, give some feedback on the controls, and we implemented this in Unreal Engine 5 and some custom scripts for detection of shooting and aiming. Thank you. Thank you. detection of shooting and aiming. Thank you. OK, we'll move right on. So we have plenty of time for the question and answer session. And our next project is the guinea pig eligibility test. Hello, I'm.-Han Xiaoma. I created this project with my collaborator, Anna Ren, who unfortunately cannot be here today. The Guinea Pig Eligibility Test is an interactive installation that explores clinical trials, screening, biometric data, and the systems that determine who become eligible for experimentation. Clinical trials are very essential to medical progress. Our intention is to examine the intertwined relationship between scientific progress and medical exportation. The project focuses on how clinical trial eligibility criteria and incentives shape participation, particularly when financial and social vulnerability affect a person's choices. It then invites audiences to experience the system from within through direct participation. The title comes from the double meaning of guinea pig. It refers literally to an animal historically associated with medical experimentation, it is also a metaphor for a human test subject, someone whose body and identity can be reduced to experimental material. Our installation makes this metaphor literal by transforming a recognizable human face, particularly the participant's face, onto a human guinea pig hybrid. The result appears playful and humorous, but it is also unsettling. It blurs the boundary between human, animal, biometric data and experimental subject. And now let's walk through the process with this video. Is projection mapping not? So participants begin by walking to the kiosk and signing a clinical-style consent form, and then complete a screening questionnaire about their socioeconomic status. During the first attempt there's no guidance those who are ineligible are given additional attempts and during the second or third attempts they may choose to strategically adjust their answers and eligibility score a scale now appears moving between ineligible and eligible as they select different options many begin answering the same questions differently to reach eligibility and at any point reaching the eligibility threshold immediately triggers the transformation the system captures the participants phase and then transforms it into the hybrid. And then they're asked whether they want to enter the farm. With their consent, their hybrid would join this farm with previous participants in a growing, seemingly banal digital farm. But then people can think about the darkness behind all this. And the core of the work is the reversal of reward, becoming a guinea pig, which is usually bad, now is framed as success, and vulnerability becomes eligibility. So as the participants discover this logic, the questionnaire becomes almost like a game, and self-reporting becomes a strategy. Research on experienced participants in paid clinical trials has found that some conceal health information where previous trial participation to remain eligible. So in our fictional interaction, participants conceal signs of privilege and present themselves as vulnerable to qualified guinea pigs. And yeah, and this comparison shows how eligibility systems can influence self-representation and encourages ethical reflection through direct experience. Please experience the work for yourselves. We are always looking for a few more qualified guinea pigs at South Amt. Thank you. Thank you. are always looking for a few more qualified guinea pigs at South Amt. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. We're going to move on to the Urban Data Orchestra. Okay. Hi. Hi, everyone. My name is Elina Ikonomaki, and I'm one of the two artists behind this project. I want to thank my colleague, Lucas, who is in the audience, and without him, this project wouldn't have been possible. So I also want to thank Data Through Design and Beta New York City because this project was originally created during the New York City Open Data Week and we are using the public open data sets which are the tree data sets and sounds from the public repository. So our project initially was created to turn visitors into kind of DJs and try to think through how we can take an alternative approach on city soundscapes. The original data set was collected to just monitor noise pollution, and we really wanted to think through how we can turn this into like a gamified experience and think through how sound, play, and visual can really go together. Okay, yeah. So the installation is split into really three parts, three components. This is the on-screen visualization that kind of exposes the selections through the physical interface, which I'm going to walk you through in a bit. The visualization consists of the city map with different city blocks and the visualization of different sound types that you can find over a period of a month. So this is kind of like the sound distribution based on what you're selecting and the kind of the trees that are available around the city areas. This is like a schematic of the actual physical interface. The visitors, it's kind of split between A and B, similar to how a DJ would work. And you can select different sounds, like the colored acrylic blocks to the left and right. And you can start creating compositions by placing these blocks on the physical interface. This is a detail of the actual embedded digital interface which is part of the physical interface. It's a visualization that allows users to insert inputs and select what city blocks are interested to compare and listen to, which months they're interested to listen to. So, for example, you can actually select the same city block and listen how it's, what kind of sounds it has in January versus in June. So, you can kind of like start understanding how the different activities and how city is transformed through sound on our everyday life over time. There's also the playback components so you can really curate through your compositions what you're actually listening to. So yeah, this is our project and we are very excited to be here. Thank you for all of your support. And yeah, please visit us. Thank you. Perfect. Moving right along. We're still on schedule. We're moving on to Infinity AR. Hiroko Kawano Reviewer Reviewer's Name Hello everyone, I'm Ayuko Noe. Today I will talk about Infinity, a visual novel game with AR elements. So there are a lot of emotion-based games in this world, but most of them are focusing on categorizing or leveling them. So our question is, how can art-based AR interactions support young people in exploring, expressing, and reflecting on emotions through play. The story starts when Dani wakes up in a small, mysterious room. She finds that she is trapped there because she suppressed her emotions. To escape from this room, she must face these six emotions. Anger, happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, and sadness. We are using this three-layer model of emotion. layer model of emotion. This model is based on my own journaling and self-reflection experience, and also it resonates with emotion-focused therapy by Rosalie Greenberg. So it's like an iceberg, and at the deepest layer, there is the true feeling, what we truly feel. But we're sometimes afraid of being disliked or judged by other people, so hide it underneath with fear. Then we suppress our feelings and act as if nothing is wrong. So through playing this game, the player will face Danny's suppressed emotions together and learn how to confront their own. In this game, there are two AR modes. We call them taking in and letting out. First, taking in. With preset markers, you can talk with six portraits. They will give us various perspectives on how to treat your emotions and it will widen your view and loosen your fear to feel your own feeling. And then letting out. It is sometimes very difficult for us to express honest feeling with words. So instead, you can use colors and shapes. The drawing is registered as an AR marker in real time. And then when you scan it, the ice will appear, and you swipe to melt it, and the seed will appear. And then you tap it, and the bud will pop up. So through playing this cycle, players learn to face and express their emotions in a very fun way. So if you want to play our game, please come to our booth. Thank you. Thank you very much. We're moving right along to In Data We Trust. Hello. My name is Magdalena Kistova and I want to present to you our project which is In Data We Trust. So first I would like to make you think of how many decisions or if you made some decision based past this week or month based on some chart and then to think about if you were actually taught how to critically read charts and so this is what our project is about because data visualizations are basically everywhere right now in social media and really some decisions are made based on these charts and people are not really thought how to critically think about them or how to critically read them, see if they are not just like fooling the idea that is not really backed by the data. And so you will be the participant in the boardroom where you will get ten proposals. All of the proposals are baked by some chart. And your task will be to see if the chart is misleading or if it's truthful and based on this chart, accept or reject this proposal. And so this is one part of the installation. And you will not know if the charts were truthful or misleading until the end, where you will then see all of the charts and you can see how you went. The second part of the installation is above this tablet. It's a live scatter plot on a big television above and it is showing each participants on the two axis based on how well they caught the traps and how well they trusted the truthful visualizations. And so at the end of this exhibition I hope we will see some collective idea of the audience how well they can catch the traps and how well they can trust the correct visualizations. So please come and add your dots to our live scatterplot. And our next installation, Chro Dunham. Hello, everyone. My name is Jenna Caravello, and I'm an artist from Los Angeles and assistant professor of design media arts at UCLA. My project is Codonum, and I'm very, very pleased to be part of this lineup. In the logic of my game, which is a two-player game meant to be installed in gallery spaces, you can type out a word under five letters and gift an object to the other player, which they receive in their world, which looks a lot like yours, but you cannot interact with them in space and time. When you align your two objects in space, they solidify as part of the environment, and they are no longer editable, as you can see here. You know, it's very personal to me as well because this art practice comes from research that involves looking at mechanic as allegory and emergent play in games as new performative languages or ludalechs. My research is personal. So during the pandemic, I developed a friendship through networked game VR chat, if anyone is familiar. And this was a very unlikely friendship. And as he convalesced with a buckshot wound on a couch in Arkansas, we became almost like family. And across this void, I never really learned his real name. For installations, I always make custom sculptural controllers. sculptural controllers, it's important to me to limit the number of buttons so that it's quite organic for someone to sit down and to play the game without too much instruction or too much leading. This game takes place more between the two people who are sitting in the gallery together. Any two friends or strangers in the gallery begin to negotiate or to make up rules. And this kind of emergent play really mimics the kind of relationship that you can have in a friendship across a networked game. For example, two boys spent an entire game session sending hearts to each other back and forth because a third boy came along and instructed them to type love to each other over and over and over again. Because this kind of play is performative and generous but mysterious, there are no rules and there are no fail states. So I really hope that you'll come to the gallery and spend some time with chronodonum with your friends or maybe with a stranger. Thank you very much. Thank you. with your friends or maybe with a stranger. Thank you very much. Okay, and our next project, Deus in Machina. Hello, everyone. Hello everyone, I'm Philipp Haselbauer and I brought with me from Switzerland an installation that lets you talk to Jesus Christ. I've also brought with me my two collaborators, Markus Schmid, who's not here yet, but will arrive later today, and Aljosha Smolich, who is sitting in the second row over there. Yeah, so, yeah, it's quite simple to understand. We have an installation which lets you freely talk to Jesus Christ, but we often get the question how this actually came to be. But we often get the question how this actually came to be. So in the beginning, the Catholic Church in Luzern came to us and they wanted to do a project with art and religion. So one of the ideas was to create an avatar with a religious connection and they wanted it to be Jesus Christ. So we did that. We did it with conversational AI, so like everything you're also using today, and real-time generative video. And you may see a resemblance between me and this AI avatar, which is not coincidental. We installed the whole thing into the confessional booth of the Catholic chapel in Luzern. So, yeah, it's marked there. It's kind of hard to see. And the reaction we got was quite overwhelming. We did not expect that. Maybe we should have. We probably should have. We got a lot of very strong feedback. Some positive, some negative. Like if you read online comments, they made me quite nervous actually because they can be very strong. We got all kinds of media reactions like YouTube theologians. We turned up in some quiz shows. We've been asked to be in documentaries. And there was even a reference to us on an American talk show which was a crazy reaction. And then we also of course got reactions from the local churchgoers, which were mostly positive actually. And people, even in the personal conversations that we have, sometimes thought this is… like they really had a conversation with Jesus Christ. So this surprised us a lot. You can read more about this in our previous publication or ask us. So in the original exhibit, the whole conversation worked like this. You would close the door of the confessional booth. Then Jesus' face would appear and the conversation would begin. Jesus' face would appear and the conversation would begin. The visitor would speak the first words for Jesus to know the language he's supposed to respond in. And then in the end the conversation would end with a kind of ritual with a blessing or prayer. And this had a really big effect on people I think. We've changed the shape to be able to bring it here and like to other places so we put the whole thing in a box inspired by the confessional booth it was originally in and now it activates not through a door sensor but through human presence. So feel free to try it out and feel free to talk to us. We are always happy to discuss what this all means. Thank you very much. presentation is Plato's AI allegory of the cave. We need to, I think, refresh it, though. There's a change to it. We'll give it a try, but we're going to go ahead and start the video, and maybe you guys can come in the meantime. Hello. I'll just get started and say that I'm Sam, this is Kathy, we have Ruipeng in the audience as well as two or three other team members who couldn't make it, Leonie, Sky and Alex. And so I'll talk a little bit about the high level of this project. We're looking at this, if you're familiar with the thought experiment of Plato's cave, it's this idea about perception and how your reality is kind of shaped by what you're able to perceive. And so in this thought experiment by Plato, he imagined these people who were chained to the your reality is kind of shaped by what you're able to perceive. And so in this thought experiment by Plato, he imagined these people who were chained to the wall of a cave. And there's a fire behind them. So all they saw were the shadows in front of them. And so if you could not move your head and you're chained to a wall, your reality would become the shadows. And so even of even though they are humans and are three-dimensional, their reality becomes a two-dimensional thing. And so we looked at this in terms of LLMs as this kind of shadow, this person who's attached to the wall looking at shadows. So we literally have a webcam pointed at this projection and then we have this 3D stage in front of it. The 3D stage you can put like your fist on it, you can put blocks on it, and you can also turn on and off the switch. So we have this like little shadow guy who you can see over there, and his goal is to turn off the switch. And then your goal is to kind of put things in his way and or block him. You can literally do that with the block by putting it in front of the switch, which then casts a shadow and kind of prevents him from pushing the switch or flicking the switch. But then we have electromagnets embedded underneath and so when you put the block down he can actually kick it away. But he'll also do that if you put your fist down because he doesn't really understand what's causing the projection. And so the kind of the artistic statement behind this or like the concept behind this is that LLMs consume all of this language data, but they have no idea about seeing. There are visual models, but those are trained on images. But LLMs are still able to talk super cogently and even control stuff like robot hands, and there's this whole idea of physical AI, right? And so even though they don't have any sensory abilities necessarily and they can't perceive, they're still able to kind of act in the physical world in a really compelling way, seemingly. But they don't really have any understanding of what's causing the shadows and or what the original 3D thing that is causing the projections to be. And so we think that this shadow installation is kind of a metaphor for how LLMs interact with the world. I'll kind of leave it to Cathy to talk a little bit more about the technical implementation. Thanks. Yeah, I think as Sam mentioned, we have to figure out a way for LLMs to see what we see. So to bring you sort of behind the scene a little bit. So there's a webcam that looks at the real shadow, and then the shadow person is actually drawn on the screen. But as Sam mentioned, we're not allowing the LLMs to taking actual images, so we have to convert the real world or the shadow into the language that it understands, which is symbols. So in the middle where the model view actually shows what the language model actually receives, so it has a description, its goals, and then the symbols like ASCII maps, hashes, and letters to represent the shadow world that it sees. And then, oh, sorry. And then here you can actually see how it plans the trajectory of where it should go and then upon which seeing the collision, it actually decides whether it should climb or kick or take other actions. And we have no control over that. So I hope you actually come visit us and actually explore or discover what LLMs actually would do when encountering obstacles. And yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. And moving right along to embodied animation. Hello everyone, my name is Jiajian, this is Annam, and it's our great pleasure to be here attending the Ars Electronica Expanded Play Gallery. And firstly, I want to express our special thanks to Jeremiah and all the organization team. Without their efforts, we cannot make this happen. And so today we're introducing our interactive artwork called Embodied Animation. And this one was developed at MIT Media Lab for MIT Media Lab Human Augmentation Summit. And there's an interesting thing is that this one was also invited to be exhibited at the ECCV Art Gallery in Sweden right now. We have to say sorry to them because we want to be here for our events and showcase a video for theirs. The interactive one is here, so welcome to experience it in the gallery. I will give you more idea about this. So drawing on the traditions such as hand, shadow, puppetry, performance, and sand painting, so you want to express how you could use your body not only as an apparatus but as a medium and as an agency and how to express yourself to the world. So that's how we integrated hand-based generative AI and made this project. So for now, I have four questions. The first one I have already talked about. So how do you understand hand not only as an apparatus, not only as a device, but as your body, like as an agency? And also, how do you understand animation? Like from the very ancient time, like as we mentioned, like Plato's cave, like animation is something happening in real time and very fluid. But then in the like industrial pipeline, like people make animation frame by frame or like render them in this 3D space. But how do you improvise and make the animation in real time and interact with that? And also the perception. So we all know like modern and contemporary technologies has been shaping our perceptions and understanding of the world. So for now like we understand the world as really like precise and slick and photorealistic but how these like blurry like artistic art style and languages could echo with our like human beings like humanities. So there's also one thing to think about. And also AI, right? So AI is not only a tool, not only raising the efficiency, but how it's shaping the new language and the new ways of understanding and looking at the world. So we have these four questions together, and we make this. And this is our technology pipeline. So we are integrating the pipeline of a hand-tracking camera and this prompting, text prompting and live prompting adjustment with the parameters from live OSC. And we also trained a model of Lara with Chinese calligraphy. So this is how we get the aesthetic style of 2D images rather than the 3D pre-rendered thing. We wanted to look at like Chinese calligraphy, like Chinese landscapes with like walk and ink drawings. So as you will see later in this. And yeah, so you could interact with different ways. It's like by your hand interaction, like waving in the air, or it's like left prompting and weight adjustment through left OIC, but you have different interfaces. And you would realize that your hand itself is the interface because it really matters through this process. We have a video, is it playing? And one thing I want to say that AI is really giving us a new way of looking at it. So like when we look at this like blurry, like diffusing and morphing things, we realize it's something like embedded in the AI algorithm, but we are making use of it and it's really talking to the Chinese calligraphy art still. So that's how we are enjoying this part. Yeah, so again, we want to say, like, we want to embody ourselves into all this, like, technology and the technological world and all this nowadays media, and want to expand our humanities, our human beings into the world, not only the real world, not only the semantical world and the digital world and all this work together. And also it's an immersive experience. So if you go to the gallery and play with our installation, it's really immersive not only because the skill like you could look at the improvised animation by yourself, but also it's soundscape at the same time and you feel you are leading the world, you are driving the world, and you are negotiating with the algorithm because the algorithm identifies something but you don't know how it's understanding it so you try to negotiate with it and you see like what is identifying and how you could create something together with it. And so we're artists and researchers based in Boston, US. And currently, Anna, so we have our own studio called MY Studio. And Anna is right now pursuing a PhD at UC Santa Barbara Media Arts and Technology, and also research affiliate at MIT. And I'm also working with Harvard before. And so that's our linking. And also Instagram. We really want to get connected to the community and also working with Harvard before. And so that's our linking. And also Instagram. We really want to get connected to the audience, researchers, and this big family of Ars Electronica. Thank you so much. Okay. We just have two presentations to go, but they're from the same institution, they're going to be presented by the same person, so I'm going to ask Kristin Geiger to come up here and tell us a bit about the two projects. Okay, yeah, thank you for inviting us. I'm Chris from MIREVI, New Media Artistic Research and Development Lab in Düsseldorf in Germany. And here we have our project on Aeronautica. It took me quite a while to learn to pronounce it correctly. And it is on dreams. So Aeronautics is the conscious exploration of one's dreamscape. So you can control your dreams. And this is the idea of this project. This is an ongoing collaboration with a theater in Mülheim and we see the theater also as a place for dreams and dreaming and we use VR experience. We can put an HMD on and we use VR as a dream machine. And yeah, in this project, we dealt with this, and we created a number of dreams. So it is a series of experiences. Originally, we started with, more technically, with a workflow, we scanned the theater, did some avatar designs, motion capturing, and then had a framework where we can create a number of different experiences, a number of different dreams based on the topics of the theater season. So in this collaboration, there are the theater pieces, and in the foyer, there is this installation. Here we present on our Nautica 5. I would not want to go too much into detail. I would like you to try it out, but there are two inspirations of this work. We were inspired by Dostoevsky's Dream of a Ridiculous Man where the protagonist infects paradise simply by being there. So the community becomes aggressive. There is hated speech in this experience. And also it gets then healed. It was inspired by Charlie Chaplin's final speech from The Great Dictator. The experience itself is an eight-minute experience. So you have to take some time to experience it. And I only want to show you a bit of this experience and also the aesthetics showing you currently a video we created for that. Come in. Take your place. You want quality. You want to know what you're getting. You want quality. You want something that lasts. Your worries, your failures. Here, you don't have to. More performance, more reliability, more attitudes, more difficult things. You came. We breathe because we have been given. No place has products like this every three years. Nova is built to last five. And we gather because we were never meant to walk alone. And you want a fair price. For this moment, it is enough to simply be here. More performance. More reliability. More value to the sounds outside. And suddenly I understood with such clarity that there is nothing more beautiful, nothing more profound than love, that within it lie the dignity and the strength of being human. If we truly loved one another, we could awaken to another life, a life without lies, without hostility, for all the evil between us begins when we separate ourselves from one another and believe that we can endure it, but no one lives alone. Okay, thank you. And we're quite happy also to show another work from our lab. It's called Das Trampeltier, L'Angers du Fouillé. Not quite sure how many of you know this painting. It is a very famous painting from surrealist Max Ernst, L'Angers de Fouillé. It was painted in 1937. It was associated with the Spanish War when the Spanish War ended and the fascists won. And yeah, I would say this creature represents the fascismism and Max Ernst itself cited it it's a bit ironic and also an ambivalent character but he cited in this way this is of course an ironic title for a kind of clumsy beast that destroys and annihilates everything that gets in his way and that was my impression at that time, the Spanish War, 1937, and what follows then, and was likely going on to happen in the world, and I was right about it. And we thought, so can we bring this creature now, today, into 2026, and created a number of different experiences, and one we will show here. You can experience it, as you can see here also. It is a mixed reality, augmented reality experience. You have to pull on an Apple Vision. And then the creature jumps out of the painting. We use a copy of this painting in the installation at Salzamt. And you can interact with the creature. And he tells a story. Basically, the idea is to create it using AI. Sure, it's a sincere authority. And so he is utterly convinced of his perspective. He is also a bit friendly. He is never defensive and tries to defend his position because he thinks it's correct, it's right what he says. It is also a smart alternative truth teller, so he frames instead of clear lies, and also a kind of friendly manipulator. So it's empathic in form, but it's very manipulative in function. And this is the experience we want here to tell. And also he offers a kind of false participation. So you can choose in the story, but it always goes into his direction. And here the idea is so that we want to experience populist strategies so we can experience these things. And yeah, the idea as I said is to bring it to 2026, preserving the works, also ambigity and also commenting on these popular strategies. There are a lot of different experiences we are currently developing. We're only showing this interaction with the 3D character and also this fairy tale telling, the Kindhearted Beer. It's a participatory fairy tale about controlling your neighbors. I do not want to go too much into the technical details. There's also a paper and also we are with our team here and we can talk about all the technical stuff, but I want to close it with a short video of the experience so when the creature steps out of the painting So this is what you experience when you look through the glasses. So he interacts with the real world and then you can also talk with him. But that you can experience in the art gallery. Thank you. Yes, that was very, very fast-paced, I know, but we were able to get some insight into the 13 different installations, which are actually, they've been open for the last six minutes, and so they're already running. Please stay here, though, because there's a lot of interesting things going on. You can visit the gallery a bit later. What we're going to do now is a short question and answer session, and we're going to do it in a very interesting way. I would like to ask at least one person from every team to come up and stand here. We'll have the largest podium discussion ever done at the Expanded Conference. And so here's the deal. I've got some questions in my head, but this is actually an opportunity for you guys. Expanded Play is about involving the participant and the audience in some capacity. So if you have questions, then make it a little bit easier. Can we switch to the slide? I've put the names of the projects. I did this really hurriedly, and 13 is a terrible number to try to put on a slide. But the names of the projects up there, maybe you guys could step away from the canvas just a little bit, right here, form a line. And if you have a question, simply raise your hand, someone will come around with a microphone. And again, if you need the project's name, it's listed on there somewhere. Hopefully you can see roughly how the projects are called. So think about a question. I'm gonna start off with a question, and I'm gonna start off with a question. And I'm going to start off with Plato's A.I. Allegory of the Cave. We do a lot of game development. And just a second, we probably need a microphone for you guys as well. Might need to see if that's turned on. Hello? Does it work? So we often do game development and and you have a physics engine, and you can configure that and such. You have real-world physics that you're simulating. How did you go about doing that? Because it actually looks pretty good. It kicks the box up into the air. So we're primarily doing it just via the visual webcam stuff. So we actually did try a physics engine in a game engine originally to try to stimulate the guy and gravity, but we found that we could get by with just running it in web. And so most of the physics that is happening is actually just it tracking visually. And because we have such a high contrast situation, it's not too bad to track and be accurate. I don't know if that answers your question. It does ask my question, but you have like, you have a paper object that you can't really, like you can, the magnets and all this stuff below, I sort of understand that. Although I have to admit, when I first viewed the video for your project, it was voodoo for me. It was just like, okay, this is cool. And it's lovely that you showed us basically how it works, but the direction the box is kicked and all these things, I mean, paper is light, there's no question about it, but the real world is still a little bit difficult to influence and it's pretty impressive. I can talk a little bit. So it actually was, I was telling some other people, it's a bit lucky and a bit of trial and error. So we use commercial electromagnets. And so we actually have to have the field be misaligned with the... So we have a magnet inside the paper cube. And we have to have it be misaligned so it actually does this flipping motion. If it's actually the opposite way, it just kind of, like, gets sucked in. And so there's, like, the orientation of the magnet itself, but then there's also the lightness of the paper. So for the final installation, we were like, oh, let's like the orientation of the magnet itself, but then there's also the lightness of the paper. So for the final installation, we were like, oh, let's improve the paper. And so we bought like high quality paper and laser cut it and it was too heavy. And so had we like started off with like heavier paper to begin with, we might've just been like, oh, this interaction just doesn't work. And so just based on the size of the cube and the strength of the magnetic field that we had, that's kind of the luck part. But we did kind of really fine on the size of the cube and the strength of the magnetic field that we had, that's kind of the luck part. But we did kind of really fine-tune the physics of it to make sure that it kind of cleared the switch most of the time. Thank you so much. Do we have questions? The audience, you can raise your hand. I've given you time. I was talking to Jenna, one of our artists recently, about the concept of surprise, and I was very inspired by our chat. And so I have sort of a mechanism, if you don't have any questions, we have questions for you. Please don't make me throw stuff into the audience. So if, I will ask a couple more maybe, but if you don't have any questions, we have questions for you based on the presentation. It's gonna be a live quiz, and I don't know how well these airplanes will work, and I hope they don't actually hurt. So I see a hand over there, do I not? Excellent! That wasn't a threat, it really wasn't a threat. A question for the, what was it again, the Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Sorry. Yeah, I'm just really curious, like how did you transform the physical world into, like, a literal, like, a text representation? Like, what kind of? So it's kind of what Kathy was saying. We almost do, like, pixels, and then we use ASCII. So I don't know if you've ever seen ASCII art before, but it's almost like using letters and numbers as a shader. And so similarly, we kind of chose representations, like we represented a little bit less like a shader and more of like the ground is like SSSSSS and like the blocks are like hashtag, hashtag, hashtag. And so obstacles are represented in a particular way, but it's almost like a pixel grid. Thanks. Excellent. Great. Hi. This is a question for the mobile animation. Thank you. Excellent. Great. Hi. This is a question for the model animation. I'm curious about the training of your model. Clearly, you went for a particular aesthetic. And that probably helped you on the training of the model? Or how many images do you need to actually get the model to produce what you have? Yeah, that's an interesting question because first it's based on stream diffusion. It's a diffusion model and it's something you could put in Touchy Zen as a software. So it's actually a self-integrated black box. You could call it a black box. So you could insert different models and different trained lawyers into it. So that's where we trained. So we decided to use the artisan style of Chinese calligraphy, our Chinese landscape. So we collected different data sets from the open sources and from these online datas. And some landscape drawing and some flow and blur drawing. There are different Chinese drawing genres and some really Chinese calligraphy. And we made different data sets and different models from that. And we put them into this. And from this one is the best. Actually, I could disclose it's trained on Wang Cijie, Asian Chinese calligraphy. And we have a lot of these calligraphy writings because for one person, even if he writes one character a thousand times, a thousand times looks different. But they are from a similar art style. So that's kind of the baseline for the understanding. But actually for the real data set we use, it's around 100 pages of images, I think. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Great, we have another question over here. It's for the Machina. What's the... So I think everyone who grew up with Catholic belief in Upper Austria has a really traumatized by going into the Beichtstuhl to confess the sins and then get an answer. I'm just wondering, how do you feed God? I mean, what is his moral standard? And is he fed by the Bible or what is he telling us? We actually, in the final version, didn't do much. We just had a very simple instruction, you are Jesus Christ, and then some rules, what it's not supposed to talk about. Is it the ten rules? No, no, no, it's not supposed to talk about is it the 10 rules? no no no it's not the 10 rules no no no the 10 recommendations yeah no but recently I was actually curious I read about Leo Tolstoy being a anarchist like Christian anarchist so I read about Christian anarchist, like Christian anarchist. So I read about Christian anarchist. So I imagine like in a future version, it would be interesting to actually like have variations of this. Like interpretation of Jesus Christ. Okay. Thank you. More questions in the back. That's excellent. I don't think my airplanes would reach back that far anyway. So this is perfect. Just an additional question to AI Jesus. So am I just talking to the AI Jesus or is someone else listening? So is there some memory or is an external model called? Yeah, there's an external model called and we also have information in front that this goes out to non-European servers, American. So I should be careful about my confessors. Yeah, do not confess to anything. Thank you. Do not try to stay anonymous. Just the speech to text is actually on our own server, so that doesn't go out. But then the text produced from that does. OK, thank you. OK, another question back there. For the last speaker, I was interested in the Max Ernst painting coming to life and the concept of taking a painting about something that is horrific, in what Max Ernst stated, and then making it into an animation, whether the message of the painting or the conceptual framework for the painting is shifted irreversibly. I'm not quite sure if I understand it. Can you explain again? Sorry, I can't hear you. Sorry, I have not got the question. Can you explain it again, please? What was the question? I'm not very good at repeating questions because I have a very short-term memory and questions are hard. But it was fundamentally the conceptualisation. In other words, Max Ernst put his painting out into a context that was horrific and translating it into a beast that jumps out of the screen and so on, transfers the concept into some other realm. And it doesn't necessarily... I mean, so I wondered, I mean, when I was watching, I was wondering what Max Ernst would have thought of this recreation of his, and whether you think the conceptual framework devalues the original intent. Yeah, well, this is a good question. And we also thought, yeah, can we do this? From our perspective, when we looked at the work from Max Ernst, we thought it is an interesting idea to transform this idea now to 2026. And the idea is also to have different scenarios. This fairy tale is only one. We also have another one. It is in work on the Spanish war where the creature comments. And well, what would he say? I don't know. But to use this, we had to also talk with the heirs of Max Ernst because of the copyright. And well, we got the license because they are interested in this experience. We also talked with art historians and also colleagues from the art department so to get some feedback. But yes, you're right, we have to discuss if this, what Max Ahrens would do, and yeah, if this is a good or interesting work. But let's discuss it. So feel free, come and experience it. Okay, thank you. Any other questions in the audience? You can raise your hand in the meantime. I'm going to ask one. You have a question? You're breaking the rules. I like that. Sorry. I have a question for the Urban Data Orchestra, please. Could you speak a little bit about the best context for this work? We see it in the gallery as it's in the white box. And can you just talk a little bit about context and where you see it? Yeah, sure. I mean, we haven't thought about, so we originally created for the, basically, people of New York City, and it was in the gallery there for three weeks, so it had a lot of exposure with a lot of kind of different people, as you can imagine from kids to all kinds of ages and it was really interesting to see people how curious they were about their own city and trying to how they can play with what is out there and and kind of we think about that and this is our second basically basically, exhibition in the gallery space, but I think it would be, I mean, I have a background originally in architecture, so I was thinking about it as also a different way of thinking about the city from the people who are actually making the policies and making the decisions and even designing and just a playful way of really rethinking how you see maps or you see and hear sounds beyond noise pollution. So, I mean, it's also kind of a stance in how we think about cities and noise pollution and all this kind of data that is everywhere. So maybe it could be out of a gallery and could be something else other than just an artwork. But yeah, for now, it is what it is. It's in the gallery. That's great. Thank you. Okay, we have a couple more minutes for questions before we move on. And since... Ah, they're perfect. Yes, I have a question for the creative guinea pig eligibility test. So I'm very curious about your design process. How did you, or rather, how did you translate this sometimes complex social issue into an experience that also feels a bit uncomfortable? Could you? Thank you. That's a wonderful question. So in the questionnaire itself, we actually borrowed a lot of questions from real clinical trial consent forms. And yes, I was saying people do lie about certain things in the real process if we don't verify them. Yeah, it's, I guess being playful is a way to get around it in a way because it's a difficult topic to touch on and having this serene beautiful farm environment is also part of trying to smooth it down a little bit. Yeah, I don't know if I answered your question. Yes, you did and just one follow-up around the aesthetics. Was there, beyond the scenic farm view, were there any considerations you made to make it feel also a bit disconcerting when people interacted with it? Oh, yeah. This project was actually presented at an expanded conference last year, and then after that we had, thank you so much for the support and everything. And in New York we had thank you so much for the support and everything and in New York we had an exhibition and in the front room there are a lot of huge inflatable guinea pigs they're two meters long and a lot of huge inflatable pills as well so people loved like a lot of kids and people are just taking photos and posting them on social media and that's really like making the whole process entertaining but then going back into the like back room and then actually participating in this whole process made a lot of people realize oh there's this dark side of it and I mean not everyone participating in this because it can feel a little strange having your face on the guinea pig. So that's, we made it optional, and I think that's part of trying to, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Perfect. Just a couple more minutes for questions. I'm going to ask a question from this side. I'd like to talk really briefly about the Claw-Simbly machine. And specifically, basically you can create your own avatar. And if you're not happy, you get three tries to do that, et cetera. It's a very fun sort of game to play. But how did you go about designing all of the different elements? Was there some type of taxonomy? You were like, OK, there's eyes, and there are like 20 different types of eyes. There's quite a diversity of facial animation, of clothes, etc. How did you go about designing that? So basically, at first, we also were facing this, how do we actually make it? And we decided on just making a base model at first, and then fitting or figuring out how we best fit facial features on there. So basically in a way that all the same and it's just textures that we swap around. And during the process we also had to think about what features actually work, what are too much, what if stuff intersects and covers each other. So it was pretty much just a trial and error. At first we had a phase of trying how to best make it work and then we were just producing lots of assets. Have you calculated how many different combinations there are? Like combinations I'm not quite sure but we have over a hundred different assets but they're like technically like four-ish slots like the hair, the eyes, the noses, the mouth, and the the clothings. I don't have an exact number. I have not managed to recreate the same character and I've been playing it for the last three days, so there's a lot of possibilities. Okay, maybe one more question from the audience or apparently from the podium itself, since we've introduced that possibility, if you have any questions for anyone else. If not, I will ask a last question and, hmm, should I go controversial or simple? Both, simple and controversial. Okay, then I'm going to have to ask Diaz and Machina. The visual representation of Jesus. Tricky, tricky topic. How did you guys go about that? How did you go about deciding how it's going to be designed? Or did you just say, AI, give me a picture of Jesus? Like originally, we wanted to go for a kind of stereotypical representation of the face. So actually what my original plan was to, like you have to feed an input video to this generative video service. And like two minutes of a person talking. And what I originally had planned is like, I do a face swap with a painting, a depiction of Jesus Christ, at like a Dutch painting actually that I found fitting. And the face swap worked, but per the user agreement with that service, you could only upload a video of a real person talking. And we also had actually an artist who wanted to be the face of it, or almost agree to it, but then he got doubts, and he wasn't there anyway, and then I thought, yeah, I'll do it. Yeah, that's how it came about you definitely have to try it you can't experience it in 2D you really have to sit in the room and see Jesus and speak to Jesus I'd like to thank you so much for all participating, coming this long way and helping with the setup and we've got a couple of days of exhibitions still ahead of us but all of you in the audience when you are finished attending the conference today, we're open until, I believe, 7.30 p.m. tonight and all the way until Sunday and 6 p.m. on Sunday, but every other day until 7.30 p.m. Please drop by and try out the exhibits. Tell your friends. And again, thanks so much for participating. I'm going to run over to the exhibition space. Some of you might be doing that as well. Lots of fun at the rest of the conference. We have a very exciting panel starting here in just about five minutes. Thank you very much. Thank you.