The Immersive Arts Space (IAS) at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) is a cross-departmental, interdisciplinary lab for research, teaching and production in the emerging area of “immersive arts.” Immersive Arts is a catchall description for a genre of contemporary arts practices which utilize technological apparatuses and setups in order to “immerse” visitors and thus, merge the physical and digital worlds. Consisting of a permanently employed team of research associates – recent MA graduates from the ZHdK in interaction design, game design, computer science, computer music, film production and engineering – the IAS aims to conduct a technologically-supported artistic examination of digital immersion, XR or extended reality (VR/AR) and the convergence of media-based and performative practices while socially-critically reflecting on these practices.

From its inception, the IAS was imagined and designed to be a crossdepartmental “art-tech lab,” an idea initially implemented under the name “InnovationLab” in 2018 as a pilot project within a multi-year research model/financial commitment from the department of performing arts and film (where IAS is based) research infrastructure. Unlike many art-tech labs’ embedding in visual arts or digital media, the IAS’s position in performing arts and film context suggests a key conceptual thread that travels through the lab’s varied activities: exploring the “interrelationships between media technologies, environment and body” (Angerer 2010). From an innovation studies perspective, the original InnovationLab is appropriate, considering the broader set of forces that the lab is set within, including the city and Kanton of Zurich as well as the Swiss art university landscape. Unlike the majority of art university art-tech “labs” which are predominantly focused inwards through various teaching activities, the IAS aims to be part of larger art-design-technology ecologies outside of the ZHdK (as in the present Pro Helvetia Synergies program).

Since 2019, the lab has been part of the Digitalization Initiative of the Zurich Higher Education Institutions (DIZH) research cluster. The DIZH is a multiyear research and funding model supporting interuniversity collaborations around larger issues of digital transformation in society, with the explicit goal “to not fall behind in this rapid development, both nationally and interna tionally, and to be able to hold its own in competition and take a leading role” [5]. The DIZH includes four Zurich regional funded universities: the University of Zurich, the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), the ZHdK and the Zurich University of Teacher Education (PHZH). Positioned within the DIZH, the IAS was thus imagined to be linked into larger research and
knowledge networks.

At the same time, the IAS is seen as a conduit to larger initiatives in the Zurich city/region, particularly as the city (with a large tech startup ecosystem) brands itself in a typical creative economies fashion as an international hub for art, design, technology and digital culture. In this sense, from a sociology of innovation perspective, the IAS can be located within a broader set of interdisciplinary initiatives that focus on the “potential of the arts to help transform our society to become more inclusive and sustainable in the context of a digitalized future” as well as anchored in historical genealogies which argue how societal transformation using the arts can also be “inextricably related to advances in media and technology” (Alacovska 2020).