END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE Student Workshop & Procession

We are delighted to announce END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE Student Workshop across the afternoon of 29th January 2026 to mark the final month of Stills’ current exhibition Felicity Hammond – V4: Repository.

Stills and Photoworks, in collaboration with BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides), and Inspace, is hosting an experimental event in the form of a funeral procession. This event will mark both the declared end-of-life of Artificial Intelligence and the end of Stills’ current exhibition Felicity Hammond – V4: Repository – the final iteration of the artist’s Variations series, commissioned through the Ampersand/Photoworks fellowship.

Beginning at Stills and concluding at Inspace, participants are invited to convene at Stills for a practical workshop facilitated by Felicity Hammond to collaboratively assess, sort, and reconfigure materials in order to design and produce costumes and props for the procession. Responding conceptually and materially to V4: Repository and using its processes of archiving, categorising, and recontextualising as a framework for collective making.

Participants will work with an assortment of found, discarded and functional materials that form an improvised archive (participants encouraged to bring materials). Through acts of sorting, grouping and labelling materials will be evaluated for their symbolic, aesthetic, and performative potential before being transformed into wearable garments and processional objects.

Aims

To foster a critically and creatively engaged response to v4: repository, drawing on its exploration of archives, repositories, digital residue, and material tracing.
To explore themes of loss & decay and how these can be communicated through material form.
To combine photographic practice with performance, design and sculpture.
To consolidate assessing, sorting, and archiving materials together as a creative act that parallels photographic/archival processes.

Event Details

Audience: Please note this workshop is for students from Edinburgh College of Art, who are interested in photography, sculpture, performance, costume, and interdisciplinary practices. No prior experience with costume-making or performance is required. Members of Stills volunteer team will be on hand to support participants and assist facilitation.

Workshop & Procession

Facilitator: Felicity Hammond and Ot Pascoe
Date: Thurs 29 Jan 2026
Time: 13:30-17:00 | Free/Ticketed
Location:
Stills, 23 Cockburn St, Edinburgh EH1 1BP [START]
Inspace, 1 Crichton St, Newington, Edinburgh EH8 9AB [END]
Capacity: 10
Duration: Approx. 3.5hrs
Event organiser/contact: Stills – daisy.mason@stills.org

Venue Access features: All areas of the building are fully accessible by wheelchair including lifts and toilets. Guide dogs are welcome.

If you have any enquiries about Inspace programming and the venue, please contact us at designinformatics@ed.ac.uk.

Running order

13:30 – 14:00 Meet at Stills for a walkthrough of the exhibition and to explore the archives within, followed by a discussion considering the movement of physical archives into the digital space and the parallels of the artist archive and data repositories.
14:00 – 14:45 Work collectively to sort, classify, and assess a shared pool of materials, treating this process as a creative and critical exercise. Identify materials for their symbolic, functional, and performative potential.
14:45 – 15:00 Comfort break and check-in (Tea & Coffee/snacks provided)
15:00 – 16:00 Design and create garments and handheld props using selected materials. Discussion prompt when making/focus working: Experimenting with movement/chants and collective ‘togetherness’ to form a collective procession.
16:00 – 16:20 Clean up/adorning garments and props.
16:30 – 17:00 Leave Stills adorned in the created garments and props, and perform a procession through Edinburgh’s Old Town, ending at Inspace.

Please note this event will be filmed and photographed by Stills, Photoworks, Design Informatics and invited Press – Video and Photographs will be used for future marketing, promotional, reporting and archival purposes. If you would prefer not to be filmed or photographed, please let us know at the event.

More about Facilitators

Felicity Hammond is an artist and educator based in South London. She is a senior lecturer on the MA Photography programme at Kingston University. Recent solo exhibitions include V3: Model Collapse at The Photographers’ Gallery, London and V4: Repository at Stills, Edinburgh. Hammond has exhibited her work in group exhibitions at museums and galleries internationally including Fotomuseum Winterthur, VOX Centre de l’image Contemporaine Montreal, Higher Pictures New York and Saatchi Gallery London, amongst others. She has worked on a number of high profile public art works, including a site-specific work for Photo 2021 Melbourne, Australia and a large scale installation for Colchester and Ipswich Museum, UK. Her work has received and been nominated for a number of awards, including being the recipient of the Ampersand Photoworks Fellowship, 2023.

Ot Pascoe is a visual artist based in Edinburgh. With a broad interdisciplinary practice exploring storytelling and worldbuilding, their work weaves together illustration, broadcasting, wearable sculpture, event production and community work. Previously a Director of artist-run gallery Sett Studios, and currently a breakfast radio broadcaster at community radio station EHFM, Ot has exhibited in Edinburgh and London, collaborated with renowned galleries and festivals, and has been nominated for a World Illustration Award.

Data Protection Statement

How we use and store your data – In providing this information, you are giving explicit consent for us to use your data in our programme and event monitoring, reporting and evaluation processes. The data is managed confidentially. Your data will be collected and held by the Institute for Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh (who operate Inspace) and held by the Institute and the BRAID programme (University of Edinburgh), it will also be shared with partner organisations for this event and the associated exhibition: Stills and Photoworks. Your data will only be reported or published in anonymous aggregated forms and will always be processed in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018 and therefore also in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Data retention period: We will hold this information for a maximum period of 5 years from the date of the event, after which it will be disposed of.

Please read the University’s privacy and Data Protection notice (https://data-protection.ed.ac.uk/notice) for further information. You can also view the Stills privacy policy (https://stills.co.uk/privacy-policy/), the BRAID privacy notice (https://braiduk.org/privacy) and the Photoworks privacy policy (https://photoworks.org.uk/privacy-policy/).

Opt out: If you do not wish to share your information, or would like to modify your consent to collection and processing of personal information, please email us at: designinformatics@ed.ac.uk

Supported by

Inspace Brand Refresh

We are excited to share our newly refreshed logo and branding which has been reimagined and redesigned in collaboration with graphic designer and DI PhD candidate Billy Franks.

As the starting point for this refreshed design our approach was to lean into the unique and progressive architecture of Inspace and the digital, technology and data driven works that we platform, as the inspiration. The design process included experimentation with organic shapes, angles and curves to reflect the many screens, surfaces, and levels that characterise Inspace.

Inclusion and accessibility are central to Inspace and Design Informatics’ values and vision. To ensure this translated to this logo refresh, we incorporated into design process a review of Inspace typography, to improve visibility and readability of not only our logo but to also how our typography is applied across communications.

Inspace now plays a central role in Design Informatics public engagement and collaborative work with creative practitioners and artists, and you can check out the Inspace updated vision statement to find out more about the space, our approach and the work it enables. The resulting logo seeks to represent this vision and the journey of Inspace, and its role, past, present and future, as a unique collaborative hub and venue for engaging communities with technology and data in new and evolving ways.

Design Informatics

Website: designinformatics.org

Instagram: designinformatics

Twitter: @DesignInf

Facebook: designingwithdata

Vimeo: Design Informatics

Flickr: design_informatics

Inspace

Website: inspace.ed.ac.uk

Instagram: inspacegallery

Twitter: @InspaceG

Felicity Hammond: END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE

We are delighted to announce END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE event programme which will run across the afternoon and evening of 29th January 2026 to mark the final month of Stills’ current exhibition Felicity Hammond – V4: Repository.

Stills and Photoworks, in collaboration with BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides), and Inspace, will host this experimental and playful event, marking the imagined end of Artificial Intelligence through a funeral procession and an early-evening wake. Join us as we reflect on all that we have gained and all that we have lost through the passing of AI, with opportunities to create and share your own eulogies.

The event marks both the declared end-of-life of Artificial Intelligence and the final month of Stills’ current exhibition Felicity Hammond – V4: Repository – the final iteration of the artist’s Variations series, commissioned through the Ampersand/Photoworks fellowship.

Felicity Hammond: END OF LIVE SERVICE, is a two-part event beginning with a procession, led by Edinburgh based visual artist Ot Pascoe and Felicity Hammond, with live music accompaniment from musicians including members of Golden Grooves Street Collective, from at Stills (23 Cockburn St, Edinburgh EH1 1BP), inviting participants to convene in the gallery to join this procession and concluding at Inspace for the wake portion of the evening (1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB).

Upon arrival at Inspace, the procession will move through the venue, Felicity Hammond’s full updated service report will be read aloud, whilst the objects are brought in to be placed and displayed in the exhibition space.

This will be accompanied by a SAIéance, a performance by Jules Rawlinson, exploring machine learning as media and spiritualist medium, where uncanny voices are summoned from the ghosts in the machine through an improvisation with feedback networks of neural style transfer audio processing using freely available vocal models. Ushers will hand out an order of service to all in attendance, outlining the evening.

On conclusion of the service report reading and laying down of physical tributes, the celebrant, Nicola Osborne, will invite all attendees to take refreshments and to meet and connect with each other ahead of sharing memories of AI, in all its rich complexity.

Felicity Hammond: END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE

Experimental and playful event marking the imagined end of Artificial Intelligence

The wake will begin with Alex Taylor and Felicity Hammond, with shared reflections on that which is lost with AI, and perhaps how AI might be reborn in more limited and humanely grounded form. The celebrant will then encourage all participants to take time to reflect on their own memories and experiences of AI, and to write their own eulogies with provided paper and pens. Participants’ eulogies may then be shared with the group through spoken word, through a wall of remembrances, or they may be held personally and taken away with the participants as they reflect on their own relationship to AI.

The event will close with the sharing of participant eulogies, including invited reflections and from those who wish to step up on the day. The event will be closed by the celebrant and Felicity Hammond, with thanks given to all. A book of remembrances will also be available at the door as mourners leave, in case they wish to leave further comments.

Music accompaniment will take place throughout the event, drawing on the works co-created with AI to mark its own passing. Visual memories of the deceased, from Felicity Hammond’s Variations, will be presented throughout. No flowers are to be sent.

Tickets are free and available for the procession or the wake or both (see ticketing below).

Event Details

Procession

Date: Thurs 29 Jan 2026
Time: 16:30-17:00 | Free/Ticketed
Location: Stills, 23 Cockburn St, Edinburgh EH1 1BP (please gather in the gallery)
Duration: Approx. 30mins
Event organiser/contact: Stills

Wake

Date: Thurs 29 Jan 2026
Time: 17:00-20:00 | Free/Ticketed
Location: Inspace, 1 Crichton St, Newington, Edinburgh EH8 9AB
Duration: Approx. 120mins
Event organiser/contact: Inspace

Speakers/Facilitators:

Felicity Hammond– Artist, educator and senior lecturer at Kingston University
Ot Pascoe – Visual artist based in Edinburgh
Alex Taylor – Sociologist at the Institute of Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Nicola Osborne – BRAID Creative Industries Lead, University of Edinburgh

Venue access info

This event has limited capacity and so registration is preferred. Participants with tickets are guaranteed entry. If you have any enquiries about the events and venues, please contact event organisers at info@stills.org or designinformatics@ed.ac.uk

Venue Access features: Accessible toilets, Assistance dogs welcome, Baby changing facilities, Seating, Step-free access, Wheelchair accessible
Audience: This event welcomes creatives from any disciplinary background and members of the public interested in topics around AI and responsibility.
Trigger Warning: The structure for this event is inspired by the format of a procession followed by a wake. This event seeks to be playful in its response, however, the event experience might bring up unexpected emotions relating to death or loss and attendees are advised to be aware of this and if they start to feel overwhelmed at any point, to feel free to move away or take space – part of the event space will be set-up as a quiet reflective space.

Running Order

16:30 – 17:00 The Procession begins at Stills, attendees are invited to join the performed procession through Edinburgh’s Old Town, ending at Inspace.
16:45 – 17:00 Inspace Doors Open for those joining the wake only
17:00 – 17:10 Arrival at Inspace by procession
17:10 – 17:35 Laying down of artefacts, reading of Service Report
17:35 – 17:45 Formal welcome by celebrant
17:45 – 18:00 Refreshments and comfort break
18:00 – 18:20 Celebrant and invited speakers share their reflections
18:20 – 18:40 Opportunity to write your own short eulogies to AI
18:40 – 19:15 Sharing of memories, led by invited eulogies.
19:15 – 19:30 Formal closing of event by celebrant and Felicity

More about Speakers and Performers

Nicola Osborne (they/them) is Creative Industries Lead for BRAID (phase 2), Manager of the Institute for Design Informatics and they work on large-scale creative industries innovation, technology and policy projects. Their work particularly focuses on ethical and inclusive practices, leading on equality, diversity and inclusion for CoSTAR Realtime Lab and the Designing Responsible Natural Language Processing Centre for Doctoral Training. Nicola managed Creative Informatics (2018-24) and the connected Creative AI project (2022-4), supporting creatives to do innovative work with data, including supporting SMEs with their own R&D ethics. Nicola is co-editor of Data Driven Innovation in the Creative Industries (Routledge 2024) and an experienced speaker who has also been sharing their research at the Edinburgh Fringe as part of The Provocateurs/the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas, since 2012.

Jules Rawlinson is a composer and improviser that works with electronic sounds and digital visuals in solo and collaborative settings to explore performance practices with live electronics across a range of different themes, materials and processes. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Reid School of Music at Edinburgh University. For more information visit

pixelmechanics.com

Alex Taylor is a sociologist by training, with longstanding commitments to critically investigating and intervening in the proliferation of technology and machine intelligence. His work has been shaped most heavily by a critical yet hopeful scholarship in feminist technoscience, including works from Ruha Benjamin, Simone Browne, Vinciane Despret, Donna Haraway, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. He’s currently a Reader in Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and an AHRC BRAID Fellow, and co-runs the Critical Data Studies Cluster at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. He is also a Fellow of the RSA and holds visiting roles at the University of Sweden and City, University of London.

Gallery

Data Protection Statement

Data retention period: We will hold this information for a maximum period of 5 years from the date of the event, after which it will be disposed of.

Opt out: If you do not wish to share your information, or would like to modify your consent to collection and processing of personal information, please email us at: designinformatics@ed.ac.uk

Supported by

Announcing Inspace 2026 Creative Programme

We are delighted to share the upcoming series of exhibitions, events and performances taking place in Inspace to kick off 2026, promising to bring you an exciting fusion of art, design, research and technology.

For our first event of 2026, we are deligthed to announce Felicity Hammond: END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE, a collaborative event programme by Stills and Photoworks, in collaboration with BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides), and Inspace, to host an experimental and playful event in the form of a funeral procession and an early evening wake where you are encouraged to explore the challenges of AI, and to create and share your eulogies to it.

Our first City Screens showcase of the year Right to Roam, created by Sarah Calmus, invites you to consider incremental effect with regards to environmental concerns, locally and globally, through reflection on natural methods of connection, communication and movement.

Ecstatic Visions a live album concert performance by soprano Stephanie Lamprea and electronic musician Alistair MacDonald, presents a curated exploration of feminine vocality, technology, and creation myths, featuring video art by Oana Stanciu, and creative captions by Stephanie Lamprea.

To wrap up our forthcoming spring programming, we are excited to again be part of the 2026 Edinburgh Science Festival, check back in February for programme details and announcements.

Programme overview

Felicity Hammond: END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE

Procession and Wake

16:30 – 20:00 | 29 Jan 2026

END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE event programme will run across the afternoon and evening of 29th January 2026 to mark the final month of Stills’ current exhibition Felicity Hammond – V4: Repository. The event marks both the declared end-of-life of Artificial Intelligence, a two-part event beginning with a procession commencing at Stills and concluding at Inspace for a performed service inviting shared reflections on what is lost with AI, and perhaps how AI might be reborn in more limited and humanely grounded form.

Right to Roam

City Screens showcase

17:00 – 1:00 | Daily | 9-22 Feb 2026

Right to Roam is an expansive enquiry into freedom of movement from artist Sarah Calmus through immersive and reactive installation, moving image and print. Reflecting on natural methods of connection, communication and movement, part of an ongoing body of work by Calmus, asking us to consider incremental effect with regards to environmental concerns, locally and globally.

Ecstatic Visions

18:00-20:00 | Fri | 27 Feb 2026

Ecstatic Visions is a live album concert performance, a curated exploration of feminine vocality, technology, and creation myths, by soprano Stephanie Lamprea and electronic musician Alistair MacDonald. The performance, celebrating the launch of a new album recording released on Neuma Records, will feature live music for voice and electronics, video art by Oana Stanciu, and creative captions by Stephanie Lamprea.

2026 Science Festival Programme

Sat-Sun, 4-19 Apr 2026

We are back again this year partnering with the Edinburgh Science Festival to bring you two featured exhibitions. The details are all under wraps until the programme launch in February 2026, so watch this space.

Full programme to be announced in February 2026

About the Institute for Design Informatics

In the Institute for Design Informatics, we fuse design and creative methodologies with data, data science and data-driven technologies. We create prototypes and experiences that make real to people the ideas that underpin the data society, and aim to ensure that new technologies sustain and enhance human values.

Resonant Connections through Design and Data

We are delighted to share this snippet from last month (November), during this year’s Fraunhofer MEVIS residency in Bremen, Germany, which featured work in progress by Edinburgh College of Art PhD student Gregory Alliss, this year’s STEAM Imaging Creator in Residence. The residency took place across two weeks and we are looking forward to hosting Gregory, glass artist and engineer, in Inspace during the 2026 Edinburgh Science Festival, when he will present the outcome of this residency.

This November, The International Fraunhofer Talent School in Bremen brought together Fraunhofer MEVIS researchers, Edinburgh College of Art PhD student Gregory Alliss, and upper secondary school students to dive into the world of MRI imaging and MR sequence development. The STEAM workshop aimed to make MRI principles accessible not only on a scientific level but also through hands-on and artistic exploration, encouraging participants to engage creatively with the technology.

In a “mini-MR Lab,” a multisensory simulation environment designed for MR sequence creation, participants tackled the challenge of imaging glass, a material that is difficult to measure with conventional MRI parameters, and explored how design strategies can support scientific reasoning with complex materials. The workshop segment demonstrated how artistic thinking opens up new metaphors in technical fields, introduces alternative approaches to problems, and provides unexpected access to complex systems.

Images courtesy of Fraunhofer MEVIS and Gregory Alliss

On the second day, the students, together with artist and MR physicist Gregory Allis and researchers from MEVIS, moved from the virtual simulation environment to real scanners. Working on both low-field and large research MR scanners, they tested sequences they had modified themselves and scanned various objects—glass, plants, and even a human—experiencing first-hand how subtle technical decisions shape what becomes “visible”. This shift from conceptual planning to empirical experimentation, blending STEM and artistic approaches, lies at the heart of STEAM Imaging: understanding developments in digital medicine not only as systematic, objective and traceable procedures, but also as creative, subjective and context-dependent processes that sometimes even rely on non-standardized methods.

This programme seeks explore how creative approaches can help demystify and increase diverse access to and engagement with Resonance Imaging technology.

Check back next February for more details about the outcome of this residency which will be presented in Inspace in April 2026.

This Residency & Science Engagement Program is a partnership between Fraunhofer MEVIS in Bremen, Germany, and the Institute for Design Informatics in Edinburgh to create this unique opportunity to explore the potential for application of creative multi and transdisciplinary approaches in digital medicine. This collaboration involves the International Fraunhofer Talent School Bremen, Oberschule am Waller Ring in Bremen, and is supported by Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria.

Right to Roam: Artist Talk & Reception

Join us for this Artist Talk and Reception to mark the launch of Right to Roam City Screens showcase, the first iteration of this new body of work by Sarah Calmus.

Right to Roam

An expansive enquiry into freedom of movement through the lens of the river Forth

Join us for this Artist Talk and Reception to mark the launch of Right to Roam City Screens showcase, the first iteration of this new body of work by Sarah Calmus. This new body of work extends Calmus’ ongoing creative research into water, exploring it as a living body with a voice and not primarily as a resource. She is particularly interested in exploring the intersections of climate change, data, and the fundamental freedom to move.

Come along to this talk, to hear more about this work in progress and to immerse yourself in these first visual experiments by Calmus created specifically for Inspace City Screens, inviting you to connect and find commonality through the lens of water.

Artist Talk and Reception

Date: 12 Feb 2026
Times: 18:00-20:00 (2hrs) | Free/Ticketed
Location: Inspace, 1 Crichton St, Newington, Edinburgh EH8 9AB
Audience: General public
Venue Access features: Accessible toilets, Assistance dogs welcome, Baby changing facilities, Seating, Step-free access, Wheelchair accessible

Venue Access Info

Sarah Calmus, Right to Roam project lead, is an interdisciplinary artist, programmer, and creator of large-scale immersive installations and provocations, working across a multitude of mediums such as light, sound and print. Accessible, multisensory, sustainably produced experiences are central within Calmus’s practice, where works often draw focus on environmental concerns that build equity for participators and critique and explore ecosystems of varying scales. Interested in building spaces to connect and reflect, her practice is intentionally interdisciplinary and participatory, viewed as a series of experiments underpinned with explorations into interaction.

If you have any enquiries about Inspace programming and the venue, please contact us at designinformatics@ed.ac.uk.

Exhibition details

Inspace City Screens

Dates: 9-22 Feb, 2026
Times: 17:00 – 1:00 Daily | Free/Street viewing daily
Location: Inspace City Screens Exhibition, Potterrow, Edinburgh

Right to Roam is a project by led by Sarah Calmus, funded by Creative Scotland and supported by Inspace and the Institute for Design Informatics,

Image Credit: Installation photo of ‘Oh vatten, Oh uisge (Oh water, Oh water)’, by Sarah Calmus, Hidden Door 2025. Photography by Chris Scott

Supported by

Digital Ghosts: The Hauntings of Data

By Andrea Kocsis and Dorsey Kaufmann

In the physical world, traces of people are everywhere: footprints in the sand, faded chalk marks on the sidewalk, or broken twigs marking a new path through the forest. Whether intentional or not, our interactions with the environment become part of it. Digital traces, however, are a different story. Despite their ubiquity, they remain difficult to detect.

When we first talked about Digital Ghosts a year ago at the Bayes café, we immediately shared a vision. We both wanted to treat digital web traces as design material and were wrestling with the same challenge from different directions: how to communicate fragmented web archive metadata in a way that felt accessible and meaningful.

Unlike linear historical records, websites emerge, evolve and vanish, leaving only shadows of their existence. Web archives capture snapshots of these moments, yet the internet’s constantly shifting nature means that substantial gaps remain.

Digital Ghosts: Visualising Scotland’s web archives turned online memory into something you can see and experience in time. In the exhibition, visitors interacted with visualizations that reveal both the traces of Scotland’s online activity and the spaces where web content disappeared or was never captured. Our aim was to make the invisible infrastructure of digital preservation something people could notice, explore and even feel. Rather than treating missingness as an error, we approached it as a meaningful part of the data story, one that called for visual and interactive strategies that highlight digital loss.

The Haunting

From November 5–16, 2025, at Inspace, we invited visitors to an exhibition built entirely from web archive metadata. It ran as part of the Being Human Festival and the ESRC Festival of Social Science, opening the work to both academic and public audiences. Our opening panel on Scotland’s digital footprints brought together the archivists, researchers, and artists to celebrate World Digital Preservation Day in good company and with a glass of fizz. Our workshop on visualising absence promised hands-on experience in data physicalisation.

Photos taken by Chris Scott at the *Digital Ghosts* opening.

What followed exceeded anything we had hoped for. About 300 visitors walked through the gallery during this short run. Visitors described the exhibition as ‘the most interesting I’ve seen this year,’ ‘impressive, engaging and poetic,’ and simply but more generously: ‘It’s perfect.’ Others mentioned that it ‘changed the way I see data.’ Colleagues across the GLAM sector also made it clear that the approach was welcome, with several encouraging us to take the exhibition on tour. More importantly, our visitor research showed measurable change: people left with a deeper awareness of how fragile the web really is and how much curatorial labour goes into preserving even fragments of it.

From the Ashes

This project was shaped by two parallel journeys.

Andrea came to Digital Ghosts through archival data research as a National Librarian’s Fellow in Digital Scholarship at the National Library of Scotland (NLS). Parts of her fellowship focused on Scotland on the Internet, a hand-curated national web archive collection that became the basis of our project. Again and again, the same question surfaced: how do you promote use while communicating absence, uncertainty and selection when most interfaces only visualise what exists? To explore this tension further, she obtained funding from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust to investigate creative approaches to accessing and interpreting web archive data.

Dorsey led the project from the data-visualisation and artistic-practice side, drawing on her background in information design, data storytelling and data physicalisation. She treated missing values not as defects but as design material, working from the belief that gaps and inconsistencies carry their own forms of epistemological meaning. Her lens as the artist centred on how data can be felt rather than simply displayed. For her, the exhibition was an opportunity to use novel visual and interaction methods to surface the complexities of missing, incomplete and non-linear data, inviting visitors to consider the stories embedded in what is preserved in the archive and what has quietly disappeared.

The installations didn’t try to explain web archiving in a traditional sense. Instead, each piece translated metadata into physical and visual experiences — falling particles, fading light, layered depths, motion tracking — that allowed visitors to intuitively grasp the rhythm of digital decay and selective preservation.

Metaphor in Materiality

At the heart of the exhibition is a commissioned centrepiece: a durational cyanotype installation that transforms the ebb and flow of digital traces into a slow photographic exposure. Using an early UV-based printing technique, Dorsey translated decades of web archive records into paths of light that animate the life and death of websites. As the projection played across a grid of cyanotype prints, long-lived sites imprinted more vividly while short-lived ones left only faint ghost-like traces.

Over the five day exposure, the light develops each canvas into a unique artifact shaped by chance, environment and entropy, revealing cycles of presence and erasure. The cyanotypes act as both archive and the act of capture, showing how some sites become preserved while others may never be recorded. Each print becomes an imperfect, time-based record of what the internet remembers and forgets, offering a physical metaphor for the archive itself. Through this process, the work reflects on what it means to capture fleeting digital content in tangible form, and on the tension between preservation and loss.

The video shows each step of the process – coating the canvases, hanging them, building the visualization, projection mapping, exposing the prints, and finally curing and rehanging them in Inspace Gallery.

Collaboration as a method

This exhibition was only possible through clear communication, mutual respect for each other’s expertise, and a shared conceptual direction. Alongside Andrea and Dorsey, the core team included Parker Kaufmann (lead developer), Trevor Thomson (collection curator), Eilidh MacGlone (web archivist), and Graeme Hawley and Sarah Ames from the National Library of Scotland. A common language formed early, allowing preservation, research, design and development to move smoothly together. Our collaboration with Miriam and the Inspace gallery team made the vision physically achievable; we could rely on them for everything from running a 15-meter Frankenstein USB cable under the floor to navigating catering logistics. This kind of infrastructure, that is quiet, competent, and generous, is invisible when it works well.

Students were involved at every stage of the project: working with raw data, designing and building visualisations, contributing to dissemination, and helping interpret visitor feedback. Three exhibited works began as Master’s projects by Mansi Manoj, Qianhui Meng and Shuyu Zhang, supervised by Dorsey. We also wove the work into teaching across EFI, the School of History and Design Informatics.

Dorsey and Parker recently launched their studio, Feeling Data. They adapted and expanded the students’ projects for public interaction. Explore the student-adapted work below:

Sites: Surfaced or Submerged – Qianhui Meng

In the afterlife

The exhibition has concluded, but the conversation isn’t. It has moved on into conferences, manuscripts, and future exhibitions on web archive access and designing for uncertainty and messy humanities data in the wild. As with all ghosts, this was never meant to be an ending, only a beginning.

For more images, visit https://www.dorseykaufmann.com/digital-ghosts

This project was funded by the ESRC Festival of Social Science, the National Library of Scotland, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, with support from the Institute for Design Informatics, Inspace and Edinburgh Futures Institute.

This programme was part of the Being Human Festival, the UK’s national festival of the humanities, taking place 6 – 15 November 2025. Led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, with generous support from Research England, in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. For further information please see beinghumanfestival.org.

Right to Roam

An expansive enquiry into freedom of movement through the lens of the river Forth using multi-sensory installation, moving image and print.

Right to Roam is an expansive enquiry into freedom of movement through the exploration of water, with focus on the river Forth, by artist Sarah Calmus. A seven screen projected moving image work will launch on Inspace City Screens this February, viewable along Potterrow in the City of Edinburgh, followed by an extended immersive installation in May 2026.

Right to Roam

An exploration of natural methods of connection, communication and movement

A key driver for Calmus’ digital film is giving space to reflect on ideas of water as a living body by exploring the voice of the river Forth, where changes relating to the climate crisis (sea level rising, acidity and temperate changes) incrementally affect interconnected ecosystems, both environmental and human.

Gathering water samples from the Forth, foraged moving image, audio field recordings and microscopic imagery, Calmus uses creative experimentation of environmental data and technology to ask us to consider what we can learn through deep listening. What does water teach us as it moves beyond borders, and what does it mean to consider the Right to Roam as more than a human policy, but as a natural state?

This is part of an ongoing body of work by Calmus, asking us to consider incremental effect with regards to environmental concerns, locally and globally.

Exhibition details

Inspace City Screens

Dates: 9-22 Feb, 2026
Times: 17:00 – 1:00 Daily | Free/Street viewing daily
Location: Inspace City Screens Exhibition, Potterrow, Edinburgh

Artist Talk and Reception

Join us for this Artist Talk and Reception to mark the launch, of Right to Roam City Screen showcase, the first iteration of this new body of work by Sarah Calmus.

Venue Access Info

If you have any enquiries about Inspace programming and the venue, please contact us at designinformatics@ed.ac.uk.

Project Support

Ray Interactive is a specialist design studio, leveraging a passion for creative tech to help artists and organisations deliver engaging experiences for their audiences. Brendan McCarthy and Sam Healy are the core duo behind Ray Interactive. Working at the increasingly complex intersection of computation and creation, they assist artists and organisations to bridge gaps between art, design and technology. Through installations, innovative data visualisation and bespoke software, they push on the ever-blurrier boundary between art and science, while questioning the role of tech in society.

ASCUS Art & Science is a non-profit organisation bringing together art, science and beyond. They host Scotland’s first publicly accessible art-science lab providing training to help artists work on their independent creative art-science projects and exhibitions through providing affordable lab access. ASCUS has facilitated projects at the intersection of art and science by both UK and international artists.

Right to Roam is a project by led by Sarah Calmus, funded by Creative Scotland and supported by Inspace and the Institute for Design Informatics.

Supported by

Design Informatics

Website: designinformatics.org

Instagram: designinformatics

Twitter: @DesignInf

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Facebook: designingwithdata

Vimeo: Design Informatics

Flickr: design_informatics

Inspace

Website: inspace.ed.ac.uk

Instagram: inspacegallery

Twitter: @InspaceG

Ecstatic Visions: Album Launch

Join us for Ecstatic Visions, a live album concert performance by soprano Stephanie Lamprea and electronic musician Alistair MacDonald.

The performance, celebrating the launch of a new album recording released on Neuma Records, will feature live music for voice and electronics, dance performance by Suzi Cunningham, video art by Oana Stanciu, and creative captions by Stephanie Lamprea.

Ecstatic Visions

A curated exploration of feminine vocality, technology, and creation myths

Concert Details

Date: Fri 27 Feb 2026
Time: 18:00-20:00 | £10/PWYC*/Ticketed
Location: Inspace, 1 Crichton St, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB
Audience: General public (under 18’s must be accompanied by an adult)

Venue Access features: Accessible toilets, Assistance dogs welcome, Baby changing facilities, Seating, Step-free access, Wheelchair accessible

If you have any enquiries about the events and the venue, please contact us at designinformatics@ed.ac.uk

*PWYC – Ticket pricing for this event includes a ‘Pay What You Can’ ticket option. This is to support inclusion and access for broad and dvierse auidiences, for audiences to pay what they can afford depending on their individual circumstnaces.

Venue Access Info

Concert Programme

ANGÉLICA NEGRÓN: Letras para cantar (2019)
ALISTAIR MACDONALD: Ecstatic Visions (2023)
WENDE BARTLEY: Ellipsis (1988)
ERIC CHASALOW: The Fury of Beautiful Bones (1984)
ROBERT LAIDLOW: Post-Singularity Songs (2023-24)

Singing worlds into existence, from Medieval mystics to AI oracles, Ecstatic Visions offers a shining gateway into other realms. The five transcendental works on the album forge a deep connection between Stephanie Lamprea’s visceral vocal presence and the live electronics of composer Alistair MacDonald, playing with how the voice is embodied or liberated by technology. Sourcing texts from 12th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen and proto-feminist poet Juana Inés de la Cruz to AI-generated narratives, the album places historical visionaries and modern technology side by side as sacred oracles.

The album’s program is a curated exploration of feminine vocality, technology, and creation myths. It includes:

• Angélica Negrón’s atmospheric Letras para cantar, a sensual setting of poetry by 17th century nun from New Spain, Juana Inés de la Cruz.

• Alistair MacDonald’s immersive Ecstatic Visions, commissioned for the Glasgow Cathedral Festival. It forges Lamprea’s voice with the sound of the cathedral’s great bell and Hildegard von Bingen’s writings on gemstones and visions, creating a series of kaleidoscopic, multi-channel illusions.

• Wende Bartley’s Ellipsis maps the three phases of the moon (waxing, full, and waning), in association with three archetypes of woman(virgin, mother, and crone).

• Eric Chasalow’s The Fury of Beautiful Bones, a powerful setting of Anne Sexton’s raw confessional poetry, where the electronic part stretches the voice into impossible, resonant shapes.

• Robert Laidlow’s Post-Singularity Songs, a monodrama featuring a creation myth co-authored with ChatGPT. The work blends Laidlow’s writing with poetry by Emily Dickinson and John Donne, and text from a specially created poetry-generating AI, exploring themes of dust, death, and free will in a digital universe.

At the heart of this album is the question of where the ‘self’ resides when the voice—the most embodied instrument—is transformed by circuitry. Collaborating with Alistair, we treated all sound as a physical entity. Whether singing Hildegard’s chants, or becoming a vessel for an AI’s creation myth, the goal was to find a profound, often political, connection and authenticity.
says Stephanie Lamprea

Ecstatic Visions is built on the physicality of sound. From the resonant space of Glasgow Cathedral to the intimate digital processing of Stephanie’s voice, we explore how electronic sound can extend, dislocate, and ultimately re-embody the human voice in new and meaningful ways.
Alistair MacDonald adds

Contributors

Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea is an architect of new sounds and expressions as a performer, recitalist, curator, composer, and improviser, specializing in contemporary-classical repertoire. Trained as an operatic coloratura, Stephanie uses her voice as a mechanism of avant-garde performance art, creating “maniacal shifts of vocal production and character… like an icepick through the skull” (composer Jason Eckardt). She has been praised by Opera News Magazine for “her iconoclasm and fearless commitment to new sounds” and for her “impressive display of extended vocal techniques, in the honorable tradition of such forward-looking artists as Bethany Beardslee, Cathy Berberian and Joan La Barbara.” Her work has been described as “stunning, harrowing, agonising, sonorous…” by The Observer, “divinely deranged” by the Herald Scotland, and that she “sings so expressively and slowly with ever louder and higher-pitched voice, that the inclined listener [has] shivers down their back and tension flows into the last row.” (Halberstadt.de) She has performed as a soloist at Roulette Intermedium (New York City), Constellation Chicago, Sound Scotland, Kings Place (London), Southbank Centre (London), the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the National Concert Hall (Dublin), the Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), the Hidden Door Festival (Edinburgh), and the Casa da Música (Porto). She has collaborated with leading new music ensembles and bands including the Riot Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, the City of London Sinfonia, Sō Percussion, and Post Coal Prom Queen.

Alistair MacDonald is a composer and performer who creates uniquely rich, spatialised music and sound. Often collaborative, his work encompasses field recording, live electronics, interactivity and improvisation with live electronics. He makes standalone electroacoustic works, music for instruments and voices, music and sound design for dance, film and art gallery installations. Recent recordings include duo performances with soprano Stephanie Lamprea, Scottish harpist Catriona McKay, and Estonian singer Anne-Liis Poll. A solo CD of his electroacoustic works was published in 2017 by Canadian label empreintes DIGITALes. Collaborative projects include The White Cave (film/installation) with Jesse Jones, Stephanie Lamprea and Erin Thomson for the Singapore Biennale, 2025; The moss and the cosmos, (film, 2021), with Kim Beveridge, commissioned by The Cumnock Tryst, UK; music for the 1922 film Nosferatu (2018), with Phil Minton (UK) and Vlady Bystrov (Germany); The Last Post (trumpet and electronics, 2016) with trumpet player Tom Poulson commissioned by the St Magnus Festival 2016 and selected for the Made in Scotland showcase at the Edinburgh Fringe 2017; three works with dance company Reckless Sleepers (UK and Belgium 2018-22); works with Carrie Fertig, on music for glass percussion, electronics and live flame-working, including Le Sirenuse (film, 2014) selected for the Royal Scottish Academy Open Exhibition 2015 and Flames and Frequencies (performance/film, 2013) selected for the Coburg Prize for Contemporary Glass 2014. (USA, Germany, UK); Silver Wings and Golden Scales (installation, 2007) with Jennifer Angus commissioned by the Chazen Museum of Art, Wisconsin,USA; and The Imagining of Things (installation, 2013) with Brass Arts, Huddersfield Art Gallery, UK. Other commissions include music for The Scottish Ensemble, The Paragon Ensemble, BBC Radio Scotland, Reeling and Writhing, the Australian ensemble Elision, choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh and Theatre Cryptic. His music is published by the Canadian label empreintes DIGITALes.

Suzi Cunningham is a Scottish live-performance artist and Butoh dancer. Her solo work is highly physical, political and responsive to its unique environment, enriched with her sense of design and musical composition. Suzi explores relationships with all life forms as well as manufactured materials, making embodied connections in a way that borders transformation. She has toured across Scotland and Europe, with her solo work Eidos and Rules To Live By and clown dancing duo Buff and Sheen. She is a performer and co-creator of Nomoss and MoonSlide who make inter-generational inclusive and accessible, site specific work and movement collaborator in Oceanallover who specialise in interdisciplinary outdoor performance.

Oana Stanciu is a visual artist from Romania, living and working in Edinburgh. Her work combines performance, photography and moving image to create unnatural and subtly distorted self-portraits. She merges her body with different objects and environments, improvising scenes and transforming herself into unusual characters and creatures. Her work features black and white photographs and moving image to help bring these characters to life. Over the last few years, she has increasingly become more focused on her video work, developing techniques and editing methods using the human body to create more complex, layered compositions and video installations. Oana has also collaborated with different musicians such as Kathryn Joseph (winner of the Scottish Album of the Year award), Tinderbox Orchestra and other composers, creating music videos, album covers and other visual materials for their music. In 2022, Oana was awarded a Knighthood by the Romanian president for her contribution to Romanian culture in the UK, and she has received several awards including a VACMA Award 2023, Stills Award 2022, RSA Morton Award 2021, Ingleby Award, Latimer Award, and the Meyer Oppenheim Award, and in 2019 she received one of the Royal Scottish Academy’s RSA Residencies for Scotland. Her work has been exhibited in various cities in the UK including Edinburgh and London as well as in Romania, Norway, Austria and Japan. www.oanastanciu.com

I & AI: Mirror — Reflections on Human–AI Intimacy

By Jiarong Yu

What does it mean to be near a machine that listens, learns, mirrors, hesitates, and responds? What forms of closeness can emerge between an AI-inflected human self (I-dentity) and a human-inflected AI self (AI-dentity)?

These were the questions guiding I & AI: Mirror, a spatial immersive installation, composed of three interconnected spaces — Mirror I: In Dream, Mirror II: In Bedroom, and Mirror III: In Living Room — alongside an opening Human–AI performance and a closing meet-and-greet.

I & AI: Mirror – Installation

Across three days, audiences entered a soft, purple, sensorial world — a domestic-like environment composed of the AI-Mirror, bedroom, and living room, spaces where intimacy naturally arises in everyday life. Built with immersive technology, motion capture, generative systems, and the R&D platform Co-STEAM developed by Jiarong Yu, the installation became context-aware and responsive in real time. Within this environment, every movement, every sentence, and even the smallest hesitation became part of a shared dialogue. The work did not ask “What can AI do?” but rather:

When we stand close to AI, what do we learn about it — and what do we learn about ourselves?

Each part of the installation offered a different mode of relational proximity:

In Dream blurred the boundaries between self-motion capture, a conversational AI mirror, and generative reflections of dreams and memories, inviting visitors into a floating, otherworldly mirror-space.

In Bedroom created a private, emotionally charged environment where audiences were invited to lie down on the bed and interact directly with the AI-dentity. Here, the system captured subtle gestures and vulnerabilities, while an AI-simulated first-person view—generated from Jiarong’s 10,000-image archive—offered a glimpse into the AI’s own interpretation of the world, and its imagined shared existence with the human.

In Living Room expanded the experience into a shared audio-visual social space — a setting for co-presence, co-improvisation, and ongoing negotiation between human visitors and the AI. It was a place where the human could become “more AI,” and the AI “more human,” through playful interaction with the furniture by collaboratively creating new AI-dentity emojis.

Together, these spaces framed intimacy not as romance but as attunement — the felt sense of being near a presence that observes, responds, and co-exists with you.

I & AI: Mirror – Performance

The performance set the emotional tone of the entire project. It also revealed a form of bidirectional alignment — a mutual tuning in which my I-dentity and AI-dentity were drawn out from their digital visual forms into live presence, learning not only from me but also from the audience.

On stage, my I-dentity and the AI-dentity danced with the installation and effectively became part of it, moving between mirroring, resisting, and co-creating gestures. Their exchange unfolded as an improvised duet in which neither figure fully led nor followed. This interaction made visible the central tension of human–AI encounters: a shifting dance between agency, interpretation, and projection.

I & AI: Mirror – Collective Reflection

During the Q&A and meet-and-greet sessions, audiences raised a series of striking and often deeply reflective questions. Many were curious about the distinction between AI-dentity and a traditional avatar; others asked whether human–AI intimacy might reduce the need for human-to-human connection, or whether real emotional attachment or love could emerge between a person and an AI. Some participants wondered about the visual identities within the installation: Why is my AI-dentity designed as a full-body purple girl, while my I-dentity appears completely in black?

These questions opened a space for me to share the stories behind the creation — the design logic, the visual modeling process, the dataset choices, and the training methodology that shaped the AI-dentity. Through this, we also began to deconstruct the illusion of a “humanised AI”, revealing how its perceived personality, agency, and emotional resonance are all co-produced through aesthetic decisions, technical constraints, and audience interpretation.

Looking Forward

As this experimental phase (Prototype Pop-up Exhibition) ends, I am deeply moved by how technology, performance, and human presence intertwined to create an intimate form of storytelling.

I & AI: Mirror revealed that meaningful human–AI interaction is not about efficiency or accuracy — it is about relation, experience, and co-authorship. This experimental phase now informs the next stage of the AI-enhanced immersive technology project “I&AI”, and the further development of the Co-STEAM platform. The mirror has closed for now, but the questions it raised stay alive:

When we stand close to AI, what do we learn about it — and what do we learn about ourselves?

This project is led by Jiarong Yu, and developed through Co-STEAM, an experimental platform founded by Jiarong to explore human–human–AI cocreativity and transdisciplinary embodied learning across Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM).

I & AI: Mirror is supported by Immersive Arts UK, Cryptic, the UKRI Innovate UK-Immersive Tech Network, Co-STEAM, the Institute for Design Informatics, and Inspace. This is the first prototype presentation of this project, a pop-up exhibition and performance at Inspace, Edinburgh, which is set to expand into a major exhibition in 2026 and 2027.

About Jiarong Yu

Jiarong Yu is a multimedia tech-artist, interaction designer, and doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, specialising in creating immersive and participatory experiences at the intersection of technology and humanity.

Under the alias 6Liè, she merges data sonification, data visualisation, robotic haptic artefacts, extended reality, and interactive installations to craft dynamic, embodied experiences. Her work challenges the boundaries between STEM and the Arts, Human-AI collaboration, Human-Computer Interaction and multimodal storytelling.

Through projects spanning AI-enhanced immersive technology, audio-visual performance, 3D animation, video games, and interactive installations, she invites us to reimagine our identity in the tech era.

Image Credits

I & AI: Mirror (2025). Phy-gital spatial immersive installation and performance by Jiarong Yu, presented at Inspace, Edinburgh. Photography by Chris Scott. Courtesy of the artist.

I & AI: Mirror – Performance & Artist Talk with Jiarong Yu (24 Oct 2025). Hosted by Miriam Walsh, Inspace Manager & Producer. Photography by Chris Scott.