What Happens when Nothing Happens?

Art-science collaboration at TU Dresden investigates perceptual realness and the psychology of space.

Since 2020, the Immersive Experience Lab (IXLAB) at the Faculty of Computer Science has been researching the perceptual foundations, technologies, applications, and implications of immersive media - media in which virtual or remote people, objects, events, or worlds are experienced as real and present in some way. Within the framework of the project "Embodied, enactive and ecological perception, cognition and experience", junior professor Matthew McGinity and his team use virtual reality technologies to investigate the different causes, forms and consequences of perceived “realness” and spatial presence. The lab uses these findings to develop applications in psychotherapy, education, art and entertainment.

Together with the Icelandic artist Elín Hansdóttir, the exhibition What Happens when Nothing Happens? was created since 2022 and will open on April 19 at the Ernst Schering Foundation in Berlin. The artist's work revolves around confusion, the manipulation of the senses and the concomitant deception of perception. In her installations, for example, Hansdóttir creates strange environments by means of architectural fixtures and the altered, often reduced lighting conditions within them. The architectural system within which we usually move is manipulated and we ourselves are deprived of reliable constants. In What Happens when Nothing Happens? the artist subtly dislocates the spatial structure of the exhibition space of the Ernst Schering Foundation by means of dissolved contours, causing feelings of irritation, uncertainty and disorientation.

Matthew McGinity and Elín Hansdottír explore from a scientific and artistic perspective how the mind and sensory organs influence our perception, why we see our surroundings as real or unreal, and how this perception can be influenced in virtual spaces. In 2022, they began work on the joint VR project, which is now on view in the exhibition What happens when nothing happens? On April 25, both will talk about their interest in questions of human perception and the relationship between reality and virtuality in the exhibition space starting at 6:00 pm.

The research and the exhibition were funded by the program Common Ground - Art in the Lab, Science in the Studio, initiated by the Ernst Schering Foundation. The focus is on transdisciplinary engagement that brings art and science into dialogue with each other.