European Research Initiative SHARESPACE Launches Open Call

In the near future, more and more communication will occur in digital spaces. This leads to a further blurring of the border between humans and technology, and an increase of their close intertwining in everyday life. Therefore, steering this hybrid future towards the creation of new opportunities for human-centric, safe, rewarding, and inclusive social interaction is vital. SHARESPACE is a three-year Horizon Europe research and innovation project that aims to create future Social Hybrid Spaces (SHS). These are spaces that are shared by humans and avatars where both are engaged in embodied collaborative tasks. SHARESPACE technology will be applied in three real-world scenarios: sport, health, and art. For this latter scenario, SHARESPACE is now looking for a (group of) media artist(s) to collaborate with through the means of an Open Call.

Art performance in Deep Space 8K

In this call, established media artists are addressed to realize their own artistic concepts using the Deep Space 8K, located at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, and the first prototype of SHARESPACE technology released in 2024. Artists are invited to create a multi-user, hybrid, interactive art performance that leverages embodied interaction between people and different types of Virtual Humans. The Ars Electronica Futurelab is responsible for the coordination of the Open Call and will have an assisting role in the overall process of the artwork realization. For the production of the artwork the artists will receive 15.000 EUR, and the final presentation shall be in Deep Space 8K during the Ars Electronica Festival 2024 (4-8 September 2024). The application period closes on November 19th, 2023. All information about the Open Call can be found on: https://sharespace.eu/open-call-for-artists/ .

Europe-wide research network

SHARESPACE is a large European research and innovation project driven by 14 renowned partner institutions: German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DE), Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (FR), Ars Electronica Futurelab (AT), CRdC Nuove Tecnologie per le Attività Produttive Scarl (IT), Cyens Center of Excellence (CY), De Montfort University (UK), Golaem S.A. (FR), Hospital Vall d’Hebron (ES), Institut national de recherce en sciences et technologies du numérique (FR), Lightspace Technologies SIA (LV), Ricoh Europe (JP), Universitat Jaume I De Castellon (ES), University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (DE) and University of Montpellier (FR).

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 10192889