Embodied Spaces ↔︎ Digital Formats

A combined practical seminar

This seminar invites participants to explore how bodies, images, and material spatiality interact to reshape our perception of presence, movement, and site. In the group and individually, the work focusses on embodied artistic experimentation combining physical gesture, visual transformation, and architecture, using the Department of Site-Specific Art’s new Kit for Interactive Performance (KIP).

This practice-based seminar focusses on the artistic relations between body, image, and space. Co-led by interactive performance artist-researcher Marie-Claude Poulin and video artist and filmmaker Flora Watzal, it encourages students to investigate how movement and perception transform space, and how digital formats influence the experience of embodiment. The seminar builds on a lightweight modular setup combining cameras, projections, and simple software tools as a means to support performative experiments. Rather than foregrounding technology, the KIP (Kit for Interactive Performance) is used as an intuitive partner in practical research, responsive to movement impulses and improvised interactions with the site. Participants work with light, shadow, projection, and gesture in direct dialogue with the environment. Architectural elements, walls, textures, and pathways act as dramaturgical partners that shape presence and attention. Real-time feedback processes are used to expand and explore the creative potential of movement and interaction.

The aim is a transdisciplinary search for hybrid spaces in which material and immaterial layers intersect, and body, media, and place act, reflect, and mutually redefine each other.

Over the course of the seminar, performance-installation prototypes will be developed and presented on July 2, 2026, during Paulusplatz Day, as part of the Site-Specific Art Department’s contributions to the Angewandte Festival 2026.

- Attendance, active physical participation, and punctuality in a minimum of 80% of the seminar sessions (70%)

- Development of performance-installation prototypes and their public presentation during Paulusplatz Day (Angewandte Festival 2026) (30%)

Important:

The courses Embodied Spaces and Digital Formats 2 form a combined seminar. Participation in the seminar requires separate registration for both courses.

Mandatory co-registration for Flora Watzal’s course Digital Formats 2 is available here:
https://base.uni-ak.ac.at/courses/2026S/S03436/

Places are limited, and sustained in-person work throughout the seminar is required.

- The seminar is given in English

- Practical and project-oriented course

- Number of participants limited

- Open to all university students

Please bring:

- Your laptop computer

- Comfortable clothes for movement