Twenty-two works, performances, symposia and formats. The X-Reality-Lab is the heart of it, but the programme fills the building around it, and spills onto the meadow outside.
Three days,
three nights
The running order below is a working draft. It has not been reconciled with the 1 September programme, so treat the times as provisional and the placements as indicative.
Welcome
OpeningMusic for Smartphones
ParticipatoryCreation and Collaboration
SymposiumJourney
ImmersiveAncestors
Performance–19:30
Hackathon Showings
ShowingOpening Night
Live A/V–01:30
Opening Night
DJ setWelcome
OpeningMusic for Smartphones
ParticipatoryFuture Technologies
SymposiumAncestors
PerformanceThe Model Nation
Interactive XRMeet the Artist
Forum–19:00
Journey
Immersive10:00
The Model Nation
Interactive XRAncestors
PerformanceClosing
FinaleIn the
X‑Reality‑Lab
Nothing here needs a headset. The room itself is the medium: 3D projection across five of six walls and the floor, with spatial sound.
The Model Nation coming soon
Mundomagicx · International
An interactive journey through an abandoned Chilean miniature theme park, rebuilt as a virtual nation. Groups of two to four navigate and re-curate the park together, physically rearranging 3D-printed miniatures on the floor while the projected world rewrites itself around them.
Merging Visions coming soon
Merve Sahin · Austria
An examination of the relationship between Salzburg, the Mönchsberg and the festival buildings that dig into the rock: the city and the mountain read as one layered, living twin rather than a static digital copy.
Journey coming soon
Nohlab · Turkey
Fascinating image worlds: four minutes inside the birth of a photon, from the moment light approaches the eye until the brain reconstructs it into something perceivable. Winner of the Grand Prix at the Immersive Art Festival, Paris.
Choosing News
Institut für Experimentelle Angelegenheiten — IXA · Germany · Ars Electronica Futurelab · Austria
An interactive experience developed between science and art, tested in the X-Reality-Lab for the first time: systems theory you can put your hands on.
Opening Night
Elementarstrategien & DJ T.K. · Germany
The opening concert, played inside the lab with 270-degree visuals, with the projection surfaces as the light rig. Electronics from the Berlin formation Elementarstrategien, then a DJ set into the early hours.
KI Entschlüsseln Decoding AI
Polycular · Austria
Polycular explores what is possible in communicating technology when the subject is artificial intelligence.
Visual Music — Ordnung und Chaos
Alex Bauer / Marco Döttlinger · Austria
Visualised sound in the lab. Description to follow.
Hackathon Showings
Various artists · with Schmiede Hallein
The hackathon, held in cooperation with Schmiede Hallein, presents its results in the lab, built on mozXR, the open-source Unreal Engine framework the room runs on.
Outside the
X‑Reality‑Lab
An international programme fills the rest of the building: VR and AR works, smartphone performances, new instruments, a cinema, two symposia, a knowledge bar and a radio station.
Instructions for Use
Chris Salter and team — ZHdK Zurich · Switzerland
A performative mixed-reality installation for four visitors at a time in headsets. Inspired by Fluxus scores and Bruce Nauman’s repetitive endurance videos, in which language instructs physical action. AI agents analyse what the headset cameras see and generate spoken instructions that provoke surprising actions between the visitors — a performance executed by humans but imagined by machines.
Audio Passthrough
Chris Salter and team — ZHdK Zurich · Switzerland
A soundwalk for one visitor at a time: audio’s answer to the visual passthrough of a mixed-reality headset. Earmuffs suppress the real environment while microphones capture it, and a small computer decides continuously how much of the world you hear, what virtual soundscape replaces it, and how the real signal is transformed. Your access to your own surroundings becomes a compositional parameter.
A long Goodbye
Kate Voet & Victor Maes · Belgium
A VR work. Description to follow.
Less than 5Gr of Saffron
Négar Motevalymeidanshah · Iran / France
Golnaz, a 23-year-old Iranian immigrant, is trying to cope with her new life in Germany. She finds a pack of saffron that reminds her of home and cooks rice to add it to, but the moment pulls her back into the most traumatic events of her life. An animated VR experience made in Quill, told almost entirely through Golnaz’s own eyes.
Music for Smartphones
The Smartphone Orchestra · Netherlands
A room full of people, all absorbed by their own screen, flipped on its head. Everyone joins from their mobile browser, no app; different phones play different parts, spread across the room, so the sound moves through the audience rather than arriving from a stage. What starts as individual signals grows into a shared composition.
Ancestors
The Smartphone Orchestra · Netherlands
An intergenerational performance in which the audience’s own phones carry almost all of the sound. Working with face merging and collective storytelling, it moves between memory and legacy, future thinking, AI and climate change. It asks for concentration and silence rather than spectacle.
Science Fiction Labor Science Fiction Lab
Gold Extra · Austria
A do-it-yourself augmented-reality installation by the Salzburg artist group Gold Extra: an AR work visitors build themselves rather than only look at.
Festival Cinema
Three feature documentaries
Views of our world on a screen, in the festival cinema:
- All Creatures Welcome — Sandra Trostel, 97 min
- Eternal You — Vom Ende der Endlichkeit — Hans Block & Moritz Riesewieck, 87 min
- Wer wir waren — Marc Bauder, 114 min
PI14537
Kürstner & Vogel & Sievers · Germany
Compositions for electronic prepared piano: new instruments and the compositional possibilities they open, from Thomas Kürstner and Kai Sievers.
Liquid Knowledge
Thomas Ballhausen and guests
The festival’s knowledge bar: a place where not only drinks are mixed, but music and knowledge too. It runs alongside the programme.
Future Technologies
Christopher Lindinger, Tina Lorenz, Chris Salter and others
A symposium on where immersive technology is going, and who decides.
Creation and Collaboration
Konrad Hempel, Claudia Lehmann and guests
A symposium on making work together, across disciplines, institutions and machines.
Meet the Artist
Artists of the festival
A discussion forum with the artists whose work is in the building. This is the part of the programme where you can ask.
Radio Agnes
Karen Werner · a project of the PhD in the Arts
A mobile radio station, broadcasting live for the first time. Contributions go out from the festival centre and from the meadow outside, for anyone who would rather be washed over by thoughts than walk through them.
The names
Eight countries, from Chile to Turkey. Where a biography is missing, we are still waiting on the artist.
The residency work premiering in the lab. Credited in the programme as Mundomagicx, Chile; the supplied press material names the collective STUDIO NOCLIP.
Works on expanded immersive twins of urban environments, taking Salzburg, the Mönchsberg and the festival buildings as her test site. Biography to follow.
An Istanbul studio producing interdisciplinary experiences around art, design and technology. Shown at Milan Design Week, ISEA, Sónar and Ars Electronica; collaborations with Chanel, Audi and Atelier des Lumières.
Develops Choosing News with the Ars Electronica Futurelab: an interactive experience between science and art.
The Berlin formation opening the festival with a concert and 270-degree visuals inside the lab.
Carries the Opening Night into the early hours.
An Austrian studio working on what is possible in communicating technology, here artificial intelligence.
Details to follow.
From the Immersive Arts Space at the ZHdK Zurich, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Their AI-driven XR installation was shown at Zurich Art Weekend in June 2026.
Belgian artists bringing A long Goodbye to the festival.
Iranian filmmaker, animator and conceptual artist. Left Iran for Belgium in 2021; works in animation, games and, more recently, VR animation in Quill.
Amsterdam collective turning an audience’s own phones into a shared instrument. Two experiences from the Netherlands.
A Salzburg artist group, here with a do-it-yourself AR installation.
New instruments for electronic prepared piano, and the compositions they make possible.
Hosts the knowledge bar, where drinks, music and knowledge are mixed.
Runs the mobile radio station, a project of the PhD in the Arts, broadcasting live from the festival.
Co-leads of the X-Reality-Lab; Claudia Lehmann teaches at the Institut für Open Arts. They open the festival and host the symposium strands.
Speak in the Future Technologies and Creation and Collaboration symposia.
Walk in
Everything in the X-Reality-Lab runs on the room itself, with no headset and no booking: the residency works, Choosing News, Visual Music, the hackathon showings and the Opening Night. So do the symposia, the festival cinema, Liquid Knowledge and Radio Agnes.
How to get inPlan around these
- The Model Nation — 2–4 people, about 20 minutes
- Instructions for Use — 4 people per 20-minute slot
- Audio Passthrough — one person, about 10 minutes
- The VR works — seated, in headsets
Whether these are queued on site or booked in advance is still being decided.