PolARTS: A New Format for Artist-Scientist Collaborations

By Kathy Ruoran Li, Junior Project Manager, Art-Science

In Switzerland, universities and research institutions across the country have long been experimenting with interdisciplinary programs, such as artist residencies at scientific institutions, to foster collaboration at the crossroad of art, science, and technology. Most of these programs are result-oriented: residencies that delivered a finished project are considered successful. But is there an alternative form of an artist-scientist collaboration program?

On December 5, 2021, Swissnex in China had the pleasure to invite three speakers from Switzerland with first-hand experience of creating a different type of artist-scientist collaboration. In 2020, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and the Swiss Polar Institute (SPI) launched the pilot program of PolARTS, a joint initiative to stimulate the exchange and foster the collaboration between art and science. The program supported four artist-scientist tandems to exchange on their research and other aspects in their professional lives over the course of one year. At our 7th Art x Science Dialogue, the three speakers shared their experiences and insights from the perspectives of artists, scientists, and organisers.

We first heard from Seraina Rohrer, head of the Innovation & Society Sector at Pro Helvetia. Pro Helvetia is closely connected with Swiss artists active around the globe, and many artists have expressed their desire to connect with people from the fields of science and technology. In response to these feedbacks, Pro Helvetia launched Art, Science and Technology four-year focus area (2021-2024), preceded by a pilot year (2020) with several new programs. The main goal is to facilitate networking and dialogue of artists and scientists and to stimulate new interdisciplinary collaborations. To achieve this goal, Pro Helvetia partnered up with different institutions that have a big network in the science world and already launched several programs: “Connect” and “Connect International”, with CERN; podcast “Arts meets…”; and PolARTS, with Swiss Polar Institute.

PolARTS is a research grant for tandems consisting of one artist and one scientist, giving them opportunities to meet, share, and discuss their research ideas, as well as an opportunity to jointly undertake a field excursion to a polar or a remote mountain region. In the pilot program, the four tandems have taken on very diverse focus areas, two tandems have successfully completed their field trips.

Following Seraina’s general introduction of PolARTS, Scientific Director Gabriela Schaepman-Strub introduced the Swiss Polar Institute’s part in the collaboration. The Swiss Polar Institute is the Swiss national research infrastructure to support the Swiss polar research community through facilitating access to the field, flagship projects across the research community in Switzerland, services and courses, and community building and outreach.

After the commencement of the pilot program, Gabriela collected feedback from the participating scientists and shared what worked and what was challenging for them. The main gain for them was the new perspectives that they obtained through these intensive exchanges because of their different background. However, these differences also brought about several challenges. The two groups have drastically different ways of working: scientists tend to plan everything ahead and stick to those plans, but for artists, uncertainty and questioning is part of the working process, and their wish to be flexible during the entire process can be difficult for their scientist counterparts. Similarly, the two may find it difficult to communicate efficiently due to a lack of common terminology.

A few recommendations had emerged. For example, at the beginning of the program, tandems should agree on the amount of time that would be spent on the exchange, as well as setting clear expectations for both the artists and scientists. It would also be helpful for future participants to already have some experience in interdisciplinary exchange to make the most out of this program.

Then, Barbara Schibli joined the conversation and gave us inputs from the artists’ perspective. Barbara is a writer, she and Gabriela were one of the four tandems in the PolARTS pilot program. Barbara has published a novel about twin sisters entitled “Flechten”, which is German for lichen - tiny symbiotic groups of plants that look like moss. She started to work on her new novel about a young researcher going into the field for the first time and is overwhelmed by the sound. Gabriela, when she works as a researcher, focus her work on vegetation change in the arctic, especially in the Siberian tundra, and how climate change comes into play.

After several exchanges over emails, phone calls, and in-person, Barbara and Gabriela’s decided to center their collaboration around the sound of the tundra - as well as the lack thereof. This aspect is new to Gabriela and her team, but eventually, it opened new perspectives. Emotionally, they began to be more aware of the sound in the field, and register how sound, like all environmental conditions, impact their work in the field. For example, the noise from mosquitos would irritate researchers and make them rush through their work, resulting in poorer data. As sound has a strong physical component, it also appears that the sound effects in the tundra are unique from other places in the world. Unfortunately, due to the restrictions brought about by the pandemic, Barbara was not able to go into the field with Gabriela, but the tandem has already collected several sound samples with the help of a fellow researcher.

During the Q&A session, Seraina elaborated on how PolARTS differ from the more traditional model of artists residencies at scientific institutions: the program’s goal is not an art piece as an outcome, but the encounter on the dialogue and exchange between two different people from two different worlds. This new format requires a lot of work in the design and implementation of the program and would be a trial and error process in the beginning years. The pilot project is designed just for that so that the organizers can tweak the program based on feedback and first-hand experience. Gabriela added that the framework of PolARTS is also valuable by itself. It is not uncommon for scientists to request bringing an artist on their expedition, and with an established framework, the process and responsibility would be clear and more manageable. The selection process is also important to ensure the maximum success of the tandems. At the most recent Matchmaking Event in November, 10 scientists and 50 artists signed up, and selection was necessary to balance the participant numbers. The speakers also touched on the possibility of scaling up the project. As Gabriela pointed out, currently the most important next step would be to bring PolARTS into the second established phase and see the experience of this new artist-scientist collaboration format.

Recently, PolARTS launched a new call for project. Submission of application will be open until January 31st, 2022, and the selection of tandems will be announced in April 2022. 

We would like to thank everyone for their participation, your engagement during the Q&A session has made the conversation vibrant and the event all the more valuable. If you have further questions for our speakers regarding their work, please email us at artscience.china@swissnex.org. We will try our best to forward them to our speakers.

Click here to watch the recording of the event.

From Cultural Heritage Preservation to Digital Innovation

By Kathy Ruoran Li, Junior Project Manager, Art-Science

On October 8, 2021, Swissnex in China invited two professors from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in the digital humanities field to share their work in preserving the cultural heritage of the Montreux Jazz Festival and beyond, in celebration of the festival’s first edition in China. Prof. Sarah Kenderdine is the Lead of Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) at EPFL, as well as Director & lead curator of EPFL Pavilions. Dr. Alain Dufaux is the Operations & Development Director of EPFL – Cultural Heritage & Innovation Center (CHC), his work is directly linked with the Montreux Jazz Archives and several associated research and innovation projects.

Computational Museology: Interfaces to Cultural Big Data

Prof. Kenderdine has been designing interactive frameworks for public engagement with cultural heritage for 20 years and is one of the leading figures in the field. She was named a “Digital Shaper” by Bilanz, a project that celebrates the 100 people advancing Switzerland on its journey to become a leading global digital hub of innovations, in 2020 and 2021.

Prof. Kenderdine has long been a pioneer in experimenting new ways for audience to interact in museums

In her talk, Prof. Kenderdine introduced three paradigms addressing different aspects of digital museology and its interfaces to cultural knowledge.

Computational Archives: Shifting from Stewardship to Co-production

According to Prof. Kenderdine, at most museums only a fraction of the collections is on display and the majority of the treasures are hidden from view. At Smithsonian it is 2%; at the British Museum, only 0.4%. At least, such is the case in an “orthodox” model of stewardship in which curators decide what the visitors see. With new archival access modalities, the paradigm can now shifts to co-production through a process of recollection, regeneration and reworking.

Jazz Luminaries is based on the constellations of jazz greats from the Montreux Jazz Archive digitization project. The installation cuts, remixes and replays 5400 artists and 13,000 videos from the total archive of 11,000 hours of video, resulting in a “neural net” based on the social network of the artists. The clustering is based on the numbers of time artists played with other artists.

Similar to tuning a radio, visitors can use a spherical interface to browse through the massive audiovisual archives and listen to snippets of the recording. If they hear something they like, they can then “zoom in” to hear the full song and explore more work by the artist.

In a more traditional museum setting, such interactive installations can also be used for opening up the museum storehouse and enabling visitors to interact with its collection. At Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, Prof. Kenderdine created a massive Data Browser for the museum’s over 100,000 objects to be interactively examined at 1:1 scale on a 360-degree display. The Data Browser pulls data from its Content Management System (CMS) and generates a selection within 15 minutes for visitors to examine. Because it operates as a “real-time curating machine”, each selection is unique, presenting visitors with the unexpected.

Deep Mapping and Deep Fakes

The project “Atlas of Maritime Buddhism” is based on the compelling story of the spread of Buddhism from India through the seaports of Southeast Asia and South China Sea. Research team conducted fieldwork in hundreds of sites spread across 12 countries and recorded thousands of locations in ultra-high resolution 3D panoramic and spherical imaging, including ambisonics and sound field recordings.

The work is now presented to the public with an exhibition that has toured Taiwan and Hong Kong and will travel to Chengdu in November. In the two precious stops, the exhibitions included artifacts collected by local museums to go with the digital presentations. Visitors were able to interact with the digital collection through devices such as the projection dome and the rotating human-scale viewing platform.

“Deep Fakes: Art & Its Double” was another exhibition that recently opened at EPFL Pavilions with 21 installations, re-presenting seminal objects of art, architecture, heritage sites of worldwide cultures. It takes up the challenge to pose crucial questions about the potency of digital replicas and opposes the use of “deepfakes” for manipulation and misinformation, and touches on cross-cutting themes of mirror worlds, digital twins, crypto currency, machine intelligence, and so on.

Dr. Dufaux followed the footsteps of Claude Nobs, who founded the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1967. He began recording the concerts in the highest quality in a time that such technologies were not that common, with a vision to archive and broadcast the festival programs to audience across the world.

The digitalization project was initiated in 2007, now Most of the concert have been digitalized and archived at EPFL. Claude Nobs Foundation was founded to manage the archive and preserve them for the next generation. In 2013, the Montreux Jazz Festival Legacy was inscribed on the international register.

 The archive includes 14,000 master tapes in 18 different audio and video tape formats. It covers the festivals from 1967 to 2017, which translates to 11,000 hours video recordings and 6,000 hours of audio recordings. Some concerts were recorded using more than one technology, so that the team can experiment the latest technology risk-free. It is worth noting that the video recording were made in HD since 1991, and it would take another 15 to 20 years before the general public can even view HD content on TV.

Uncompressed archive requires tremendous storage space

The objectives of Montreux Jazz Digital Project were two-fold; it not only digitizes and preserves the recordings for the next generations, but also innovates and researches with the digital archive as a reference database.

 The actual digitization work were mainly done by specialists. Dr. Dufaux’s team at EPFL played the management role and is responsible for quality control, documentation and storage, and more importantly, valorization, innovation, and education work that involve researchers in academia.

 The team was able to achieve live recording of the concert streams and store them on server. Later that evening, the team transcoded the recording in sub formats that were more suitable for public platform. The morning after, an indexing team would segment all the songs. In the afternoon that followed, author’s rights were checked. So in the next evening after the concert, the videos are accessible for audience on public platforms.

Innovative Projects utilizing the Montreux Jazz Archive

With Sound Dots, visitors can listen to different content without headphones and without interfering with one another.

Casino Kursaal was burnt down in 1971 during a concert. Deep Purple had a song, Smoke on the Water, written about this tragic incident. This project reconstructed the venue with sound.

Public can also play with the archive and try remixing the recording by tuning the volume of different instruments, as if a DJ playing with the content.

In a live event, an artist is singing live to selected tracks from a certain recording.

With VR and 3D audio recordings, the public can view a concert as if they were actually there. In the future, with special remixing and programming techniques, audience can move about “on stage” both visually and acoustically.

A closer look at the Jazz Galaxie project.

As one can see from the above examples, the Motreux Jazz Archive is far more than simple documentation of the past. Dr. Dufaux’s team continue to work with collaborators to experiment new ways to utilize the documentation and keep it fresh. At the end of the lecture, Dr. Dufaux also touched on some interesting ongoing projects, such as experimenting with long-term storage on synthetic DNA.

Forward Thinking

The ongoing global pandemic has accelerated the depth and reach of utilizing digital tools to create new interfaces to cultural data that are more immersive and interactive. Switzerland is one of the pioneers in digital humanities field and has nurtured numerous projects that have garnered inspiring results. Researchers and practitioners such as Sarah Kenderdine and Alain Dufaux are constantly experiment new ways to create new interfaces to cultural data. Behind all the boundary-pushing and inspiring projects and experiments are countless hours of staff work, years of digital curation and archiving, as well as forward-thinking visions.

Click here to watch the recording of the event.

Wildlife Through the Lens: Utilizing Camera Traps in Modern Wildlife Conservation

By Kathy Ruoran Li, Junior Project Manager, Art-Science

On September 16, 2021, Swissnex in China was delighted to present the 29th Café des Sciences: Wildlife Through the Lens, featuring Dilsad Dagtekin and Dr. Bicheng Li. This special edition stems from a relationship that can be traced back to September 2020, when Swissnex in China facilitated the collaboration between the University of Zurich’s “Triggered by Motion” project and the Shanghai Natural History Museum, which now hosts one of the project’s camera trap sites.

Dilsad Dagtekin, our first speaker, is a PhD Student in the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at University of Zurich. “Triggered by Motion” project has set camera traps in 14 countries and has established an international network of researchers and citizen scientists, and Dagtekin’s research utilizes one of those cameras set in Northwestern Turkey. She translates the on-camera sightings into data sets and incorporates three different modeling approaches with increasing complexity based on the data resolution, to study how seasonal fluctuations affect different populations of several predator-prey animal pairs.

One of the goals of Dagtekin’s research is to help develop evidence-based conservation based on concerned species’ demography, habitat preferences, distribution, and behavioral decisions such as movement. All of which can be affected by resources such as water and food availability, shelter and cover needs, as well as disturbances such as external factors and inter-species interactions. Species try to adapt to these strong external factors with different demographic strategies. It has been long recognized in the population ecology field that seasonal cycles can cause variations in overall animal population dynamic, but since most data were collected at annual steps, making environmental perimeters look constant within each year. Eventually, these flaws in traditional data collecting would lead to misguided conservation efforts.  

To understand how seasonality affect species co-occurrence patterns, Dagtekin and her team used camera-trapping to track seasonal changes throughout the year. Then, they apply occupancy models, in both static and dynamic approaches, to analyze the data of 7 predator and prey pairs in the region.   

One of the important results that come from Dagtekin’s research is that different prey species give different responses with the same predator. This is expected because all the prey species have different coping mechanisms. However, from the seasonality perspective, it emphasizes inter-species seasonal variations, which is easily overlooked by similar types of studies when there are only one or two focus species in the region when there are much more species.

“Triggered by Motion” is an ongoing project that continues to generate data that allow more future studies. Dagtekin’s research hinted that human population density also affected predators’ occurrence either directly or indirectly through the prey, which can be investigated more in the future with incoming data. 

Next, Dr. Bicheng Li introduced he and his team’s participation in the “Triggered by Motion” project. Dr. Li is a researcher at the Shanghai Natural History Museum, he is engaged in animal population ecology and conservation biology research, with a focus on the impact of urbanization on animal community structure and tiny animal populations. Dr. Li’s team installed camera traps at Tianmashan Forest Park in rural Shanghai and keep them running for one year. As a result, they’ve collected more than 8,500 videos totaling 36 hours in length. All videos are stored on a cloud storage services and can be easily accessed.

 Far from many people’s perception, Shanghai is not just a metropolitan inhabited by human. As Dr. Li’s research has shown, our daily life is not that distant from wild animals as one might think. More than 10 species were recorded, including Racoon dog, pallas’s squirrel, Chinese bulbul, spotted dove, oriental turtle dove, and many others.

After giving a brief introduction to Shanghai’s geological history, Dr. Li introduced various species that can be spotted in the region, including waterbirds, frogs, and Macaque (Macaca mulatta) – a monkey species that lives only in Dajinshan island in Jinshan District of Shanghai. Dr. Li and his team wanted to know how many macaques live in the region, so they set up 30 camera traps and took about 250,000 pictures. With such volume of recorded images, the team was able to recognize the different monkeys by using of the face characteristic, body size, and others.

a gridded chart of Dajinshan Island

In addition to camera traps, Dr. Li and his colleagues have conducted numerous field surveys throughout the city over the past six years. Their work includes using geolocator to monitor population change of barn swallows in Qingpu District, Shanghai, monitoring local badger by investigating badger caves and setting up camera traps in Fengxian District, Shanghai.

During the Q&A session, audience showed interest in the camera trap technique and its role in biodiversity study, as well as public engagement in wildlife protection and management. If you have further questions for our speakers regarding their work, please email us at artscience.china@swissnex.org. We will try our best to forward them to our speakers.

Click here to watch the recording of the event.

Fostering Art-Science Collaborations in “Spaces of Possibilities”

By Kathy Ruoran Li, Junior Project Manager, Art-Science

The 6th Art x Science Dialogue, Art-Science, Quo Vadis (“Where are you marching?” in Latin), featured two practitioners in the field of art, science, and technology, a.k.a. AST. Iris Long is a writer, curator, and researcher at Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), and the recipient of 2018 Hyundai Blue Prize for curators. Irène Hediger is head of the artists-in-labs program (AIL), a project part of the Department of Cultural Analysis at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

Irène Hediger began her talk with an introduction to the program. Since 2003, artists-in-labs has been facilitating artistic research by way of long-term residencies for artists in scientific laboratories. It brings artists and scientists together in their national and international residencies, and encourages collaborators to challenge their comfort zones to explore questions of our contemporary world, and creates opportunities for cultural and intellectual exchanges.

Hediger describes the environment they create as an “in-between space”, or “space of possiblities”. Artists and scientists alike enter the space of not-knowing, of uncertainty, and ambiguity. Coming together from entirely different professional territories, disciplinaries, and expertise, what links them is their reciprocal interests in new experiences and their willingness to accept the difficulties inherent in the confrontation with the unknown.

During this process, the central role of Hediger and her team is to create a best possible enviroment for collaboration, with a significant amount of preparation work taking place a long time before the residencies start. This includes negotiating and managing expectations, and introducing the science group to the diversity of the contemporary artistic practices nowadays. Such process helps the collaborators see things through each other’s eyes and critically engage with each other, which is a key factor to success.

Hediger then gave two examples of residencies that grew into a long-term and impactful collaborations.

In 2011, Christina Della Giustina spent 9 months at the Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape (WSL). A trained musician, Giustina channeled her interest in sap flow in trees and converted the scientific data into a musical piece, as well as a book where she reflected on our relationship with the nature. Hediger pointed out that scientists tend to focus on a very small piece of a discipline and forget the big picture. During Giustina’s residency, she challenged the scientists on that and brought them together in a different way. One participating scientist commented that when an artist comes in and asks questions, it “stimulated efforts to gain an overall view on the understanding of the functioning of forest ecosystems and to identify important gaps in knowledge.”

After the initial residency, artists-in-labs continues to bring the processes and result of an individual exchange into the public realm, which leads to first an installation at the botanical garden, then an interdisciplinary project at a primary school, and later at the Montreux Jazz Festival 2015. Earlier this year, Giustina finished a PhD out of these projects.

A second example is of an international residency. Marie Griesmar, a Swiss artist, went to the KAUST Red Sea Research Center’s Reef Genomics Lab, and then went on to another residency at Swissnex in San Francisco. Having done these projects together with scientists on reef ecology and reef restoration, Griesmar founded RRReefs in 2020 with ocean scientist Dr. Ulrike Pfreundt. The organization strives to rebuild coral reefs sustainably and scientifically with an artistic vision and has received two SEIF Tech for Impact Awards.

In these residencies, collaborators do not cast aside their identities or their artistic or scientific disciplines. They create possibilities in the field of tension that arise from the confrontation between the respective disciplinary knowledge, as well as their social and cultural contexts. It is, as Hediger put it, always an endeavor, with unpredictable outcomes.

In 2019, artists-in-labs launched the pilot of its master series, giving master students in Zurich universities opportunities to explore their field of study with a transdisciplinary approach, and link theory with practices of artistic research. Some of these experiments already made an impact on the study concept at ZHdK: for those who want to pursue academic careers, artists-in-labs provides first encounters with research practices and is exploring transdisciplinary approaches towards PhD programs.

At the end of her talk, Hediger reflected that artists-in-labs aims to promote a new way to understand the challenges of today, to bring together different perspectives, and stressed the importance of really opening up and being prepared for conversations and challenges.

Iris Long began her talk by pointing out the current tendency to take metaphors from the science and tech world despite the perceived difference between the two’s practices and tracing it to as early as the historically renowned “9 Evenings” in 1966. We established “labs”, “incubators”, and “R&D” platforms, and equipped the artists with “advanced technology.”

“9 Evenings” was an event that gathered 10 artists and 30 engineers, which attracted 10,000 audiences, and consumed 8,500 “working hours” from Bell Labs – a term still relevant today when measuring the cost of time and energy.

Long then introduced one of her recent projects, Blue Cables in Venetian Watercourse, hosted by Power Station of Art (PSA) in Shanghai as part of their Emerging Curators Project 2O2Online. The project started with a 6-month research, followed by a week of showcases in the forms of online webinars, one-day WIP (work-in-progress) exhibition, off-site reading room events and podcast shows. Its key concern was around an emerging, yet ambiguous tendency of “how art flows interdisciplinarily”.

A diagram on Blue Cables in Venetian Watercourse’s website visualized the research conducted by the team.

During the research phase, Long conducted a study of the AST landscape through case studies of 11 Chinese artists’ AST programs worldwide, either through residencies, incubations, or commercial commissions. 17 groups of practitioners-in-residency came together to articulate their versions of inter-/cross-/trans-/anti-disciplinary exchanges. Long interviewed and discussed with them the different roles artists played in the projects, the support and guidance they received, and the limitations and bind they encountered.

While it appears that artists are in a quite promising situation right now with numerous opportunities regarding residencies, R&D resources, and exhibitions, challenges presume. While some artists were quite positive and benefited from the inspiring “chaotic” environment at incubators, some voiced their concerns, such as the disconnection between the artist’s proposal and its funders, the feeling that the scientists’ role was often marginalized in these collaborations, or sometimes the artists’ role being downgraded as merely doing the visual communication for science knowledges.

Blue Cables’ online residency was a research-driven online community that encouraged exchanges of ideas. 17 groups of artists with a diverse area of focus participated in the 2-month residency that include events such as roundtables, workshops, and lectures with researchers, curators and artists working at the intersection of AST.

Residency Mindmap

As an extension of the residency program, the offline show borrowed the idea of WIP (Work-In-Progress) to exhibit a draft-like assemblage of the residents’ progress. It showcased the materials generated during the residency that did not fully take form and gave voice to the practitioners. Long also raised new perspectives, such as whether artists could be involved in the publication of a science paper, or whether a keynote or workshop could be considered as the delivery of residency programs.

During the Q&A session, Hediger further explained the process of establishing artists-in-labs residencies. Due to time constraints, we could only take a limited number of questions. If you have further questions for our speakers regarding art-science collaborations, please email us at artscience.china@swissnex.org. We will try our best to forward them to the speakers.

Click here to watch the recording.

Step into the compelling VR world

By Aijing Cao, Junior Project Manager - Art-Science

In occasion of the stunning presence of the underwater experience "Paradise Lost" by Birdly at the 13th Shanghai Biennale from May 15 to June 1, Swissnex in China continued to delve deep into the topic of Virtual Reality (VR) with two VR insiders Bruno Herbelin, Scientist from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and Max Rheiner, CEO and Founder of SOMNIACS AG / Birdly to have the Art x Science Dialogues on the “Ultimate Dream of VR”.

Putting aside the fact of motion sickness and the current technological limitations, we’ve seen a growing market demand with applications in the business field, the increasing consumer base and the optimized quality of VR games. These have brought a hopeful signal to the industry as the next computing platform. However, before getting overwhelmed by the giant potential market and promising future, it is essential for us to understand the mechanism of bodily self-consciousness.

Scientist Bruno Herbelin elaborated the basis for comprehending VR in cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology with step-by-step explanation of various classic studies, such as the Rubber hand illusion, the Enforcement illusion, the Virtual mirror and the Virtual out-of-body experience. It was fascinating to know about the scientific fact that our body temperature would decrease and have an analgesia effect, after identification with an avatar in the VR headset. Immersion in VR is all the technologies that would replace the real world with the virtual world, namely, replacing your sensation by using your body as the interface to create displacement in your head. With abundant proofs from the empirical studies, it is found out that the first-person view with external multisensory experience can build up the illusion of embodiment and capturing your own body being present can modulate episodic memory. Following this principle, VR with avatar-sync can better allow participants to experience disembodiment or re-embodiment into other bodies. For instance, participants’ embodiment in a Black avatar can reduce implicit racial bias within just a few minutes. These remarkable findings have paved the way for further experiments and studies to improve the embodiment and disembodiment in the VR world.

A perfect example to elaborate Bruno’s presentation is Birdly, the VR flying simulator. The novel immersive experience of bodily embodiment as a sea turtle to swim deep in the oceans successfully puts us in the shoes of undersea creatures, to raise empathy for the ocean, witness the devastating pollution caused by humans, and the urgency of marine conservation. Max Rheiner, the man behind the Birdly, emphasized that experience is a close combination of hardware and software, and even the slightest incoordination would lead to the illusion break. Furthermore, design thinking enabled Max to mix total free-roaming experience with storytelling to bring down climate change in a smooth and linear story flow. What’s more, Max unraveled a few concept drawings of the latest gliding experience from the top of the Swiss mountain — “Skyfall — a Wingsuit Experience”.

In the Q&A session, Max expressed his openness to extend Birdly to full-body embodiment with a multisensory experience. However, at this stage, adding more sensors and activators would increase the setting up complexity dramatically. On the other side, the new “Skyfall — a Wingsuit Experience” would go about the social aspects through racing and gaming functions. In addition, Bruno stated that VR utilization in healthcare needs to be discussed and applied in a case-by-case approach. Besides that, VR has been considered a tool for medical professionals; it needs to be firmly pushed forward to patients to bring out potential psychological benefits. Moreover, VR has already been experimented to alleviate the breathlessness problem caused by COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses.

Due to the time constraint, we could only take a limited number of questions. If you have further questions for our speakers regarding VR, please email us at artscience@swissnexchina.org. We will try our best to forward them to the speakers.

Click here to watch the recording.