We are delighted to announce END-OF-LIFE-SERVICE which will run across the afternoon and evening of 29th January 2026.
Stills, in collaboration with BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) and Inspace, will be hosting this 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. 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.
Full details and tickets will be launched after we return from the festive break but do get the date in your diary and keep an eye on this page!
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.
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 exctied to again be part of the 2026 Edinburgh Science Festival, check back in February for programme details and announcements.
Programme overview
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.
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.
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 the programme launch in February 2026, so watch this space.
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.
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.
An expansive enquiry into freedom of movement through immersive and reactive installation, moving image and print.
Right to Roamis an expansive enquiry into freedom of movement from artist Sarah Calmus. Reflecting on natural methods of connection, communication and movement, the first iteration of this work will launch on Inspace City Screens, viewable along Potterrow Edinburgh, in February 2026. Join this artist talk event to hear from Sarah Calmus, the artist behind the project. This talk will be follwong by a reception and viewing of City Screens.
This City Screens shocase will be follow by Right to Roam immersive installation May 2026. Both are part of an ongoing body of work by Calmus, asking us to consider incremental effect with regards to environmental concerns, locally and globally.
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.
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.
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.
Photos taken by Chris Scott at the Digital Ghosts opening.
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.
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.
An expansive enquiry into freedom of movement through immersive and reactive installation, moving image and print.
Right to Roamis 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, the first iteration of this work will launch on Inspace City Screens, viewable along Potterrow Edinburgh, in February 2026. This will be followed by an extended immersive installation, in Inspace in May 2026. Both are part of an ongoing body of work by Calmus, asking us to consider incremental effect with regards to environmental concerns, locally and globally.
Right to Roam
An exploration of natural methods of connection, communication and movement
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.
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)
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.
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’sEllipsis maps the three phases of the moon (waxing, full, and waning), in association with three archetypes of woman(virgin, mother, and crone).
• Eric Chasalow’sThe 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’sPost-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.
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).
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.
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.
Science is more than knowledge – it’s a shared pursuit that transcends borders, uniting people, ideas, and discoveries in a global endeavour to create a future that’s fairer, healthier and sustainable for all.
Exploring the theme Going Global, Edinburgh Science Festival 2026 will showcase the research and innovation created through international partnerships that address shared challenges, directly aligning with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The Festival will highlight Scotland’s contribution to scientific advances through research, innovation and its extraordinary people.
Edinburgh Science
Check back with us in February for the announcement of this year’s featured exhibitions!
After decades of AI cycles—hype, collapse, resurgence—we find ourselves in a new emotional terrain: not one of domination or replacement, but of resonance.
I & AI: Mirror(Co-Authoring Identity in the Mirror Realm) is an interactive mirror-world where audiences and AI observe, reflect, and shape one another.
Set within a softly responsive, ambient environment, participants move through three experiential phases: interaction, interpretation, and intimacy. The AI does not simply display data—it listens, learns, and gradually reveals how it perceives human presence. As interactions accumulate, participants’ inputs are transformed into co-authored outputs. By integrating immersive technologies with AI—such as motion capture, generative AI, augmented reality, and spatial augmented reality—the work transforms your input into real-time, dynamic mosaics of identity.
The AI becomes more “I-like” (I-dentity), while the human becomes entangled in the AI-dentity. By softening traditional techno-aesthetics and foregrounding emotion, transparency, and co-creation, I & AI: Mirror invites co-reflection—rethinking identity as something constructed in tandem with intelligent systems.
I & AI: Mirror
An immersive installation exploring Human–AI intimacy
Throughout the exhibition, audiences’ input becomes part of a shared memory network. These traces are visualised and interpreted in a scheduled live performance, at 6pm on Friday the 24th October, where human performers, audio-visual artist and dancers, collaborate with the AI in real time to embody this growing relational “I”dentity and “AI”dentity. Through this installation and the accompanying performance AI’s process is made transparent and explainable—not hidden behind opaque systems, but revealed through dynamic visuals and emotional cues that invite audiences into its learning logic.
AI can be seen as collaborator, predator; mentor, manipulator; listener, snitch; lover, rebound partner. This work seeks to create a version of AI that is more ‘I-like’ (I-dentity), where the human becomes entangled in the “AI”dentity, questioning if it is possible to meaningfully co-author with AI.
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).
If you have any enquiries about Inspace programming and the venue, please contact us at designinformatics@ed.ac.uk.
Performance
I & AI: Mirror performance is a real time live collaboration with AI, featuring human performers, to accompany the installation. This performance seeks to embody the growing relational “I”dentity and “AI”dentity, visualising and interpreting I & AI Mirror evolving immersive installation.
