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Short abstract

This talk presents ArtScience methods — creative experiments with extended reality, installations, and interactive storytelling — from artist residencies in science and technology research. They foster critical literacies by closing the gap between human senses and data through play and agency.

Long abstract

As knowledge production in emerging tech-intensive futures becomes increasingly mediated by AI and large-scale data infrastructures, both researchers and publics experience growing experimental distance — a gap between technological systems, their data, and our senses that limits engagement, agency, and critical reflection.

This presentation examines artistic methods as interventions that can help close this gap and foster critical literacies about emerging technological futures. Through ArtScience collaborations embedded within research environments, artists and scientists co-create experiential settings — including extended reality (XR) artworks, immersive installations, and interactive storytelling — that translate abstract phenomena and technologies into sensory encounters. These experiments enable participants to explore complex systems through play, spatial reasoning, and embodied engagement.

Drawing on case studies from residencies integrated through the ARTlab Nottingham and projects including the Cosmic Titans exhibition and the generative-AI initiative Beyond Resonance, I present interventions in which artists work within physics and technology contexts to make otherwise intangible phenomena tangible — such as the vast scales of the universe, the first seconds after the Big Bang, or emerging quantum and AI technologies. In immersive environments experienced by around 100,000 people, participants can adopt more-than-human perspectives to explore and navigate complex data and technological systems.

Evidence suggests immersive engagement enhances understanding, pattern recognition, agency, and sense-making. It can stretch perspectives, reveal limitations, and improve system design. The talk reflects on benefits, challenges, and limitations of immersive ArtScience collaborations as methods for cultivating critical literacies about emerging tech-intensive futures. XR environments will be demonstrated if the format allows.