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.
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.
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.
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.
This September, for Edinburgh Doors Open Day and marking European World Heritage Days 2026, we invite you to join us at The Bayes Centre and the Institute for Design Informatics to celebrate data and technological heritages.
Located within the University of Edinburgh’s city centre campus, as part of Edinburgh Doors Open Day 2026 programme, ‘Heritage at Risk: Revive, Resist, Reimagine’, this event invites you to explore the buildings and spaces across these two locations, where researchers, students and businesses work across AI, data science, design and industry to develop impactful projects and solutions for the good of society.
Come along to experience guided tours, view pop-up displays and hear stories about The Bayes Centre and the Institute for Design Informatics over the years. Gain insights into a snapshot of current innovative projects that seek to use digital technologies for good, that encourage new ways of thinking and that reimagine their role to ensure positive societal impact while supporting current and future innovation.
The Bayes Centre is the University of Edinburgh’s Innovation Hub for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. The technical strengths brought together in the Bayes Centre build on world-leading academic excellence in the mathematical, computational, engineering, and natural sciences in the University of Edinburgh’s College of Science and Engineering. The Bayes Centre offers a new kind of collaborative, multidisciplinary proving ground where we develop innovative technological solutions for the benefit of society.
Inspace is a dynamic exhibition and events space, part of the Institute for Design Informatics, which focuses on fusing design and creative methodologies with data, data science and data-driven technologies. Learn about the cutting-edge facilities at Inspace, including interactive technologies and pioneering design features that inspire creativity and exploration through connecting art, design, research and technology. Venture behind the scenes to visit our studio and workshop where student and staff create prototypes and experiences that make real to people the ideas that underpin the data society, and engage with multimedia displays and hands-on activities that highlight a snippet of the Institutes research.
Event details
Date: Saturday 26th September 2026 Time: 10:00 – 14:00 Locations: Bayes Centre, Inspace, Design Informatics Studio and Workshop
Exhibitors
As part of Doors Open Day 2025, Inspace will present a selection of research projects, these exhibits will be excerpts of current research being explored by researchers at the Institute for Design Informatics. More details to be announced in September.
Tours
First tour 10.15 am Last tour 1.15 pm Tours begin every 45 minutes
Drop-in visitors are welcome to visit displays, interactive activities and exhibitions across both venues, but please note, that official tours have a maximum capacity and attendance without a ticket cannot be guaranteed.
Route: Starts at the main entrance to the Bayes Centre. Attendees are taken up to the Bayes Centre roof top and then will be guided back downstairs while being provided with a brief history of the Centre before arriving in the Atrium with the robotics lab. Attendees are then taken for a Tour of Inspace, the Design Informatics studio and workshop. Attendees are welcome to stay in Inspace to view pop-up displays.
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), it will also be shared with event partners and organisations for this event/talk (e.g. The Bayes Centre). 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. 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
If you have any enquiries about Inspace programming and the venue, please contact us at designinformatics@ed.ac.uk.
Join us for this workshop led by Dorsey Kaufmann, part of Digital Ghosts exhibition programme.
Come along to this workshop to experience “digital ghosts” with artist Dorsey Kaufmann to discover for yourself how data visulisation can help us to better understand archives and their cultural significance.
This workshop explores “digital ghosts”—data that evolves, disappears, or behaves unpredictably. Led by artist Dorsey Kaufmann, whose work transforms Scottish web archive data into immersive visual experiences, you’ll get to examine how visual design can reveal patterns of digital disappearance and question how cultural memory is shaped by what is saved and what is lost.
We’ll begin with an exhibition walk-through of interactive visualisations addressing absence and missing-ness in data, then create our own visual metaphors using cyanotype, light, and other tactile media to illuminate archival gaps.
Designed for those working with non-linear or messy data, the session invites participants to bring questions and ideas for engaging with both presence and absence. Together, we’ll examine how archival choices shape what is remembered or forgotten, challenging the notion of data as whole or objective and reflecting on the narratives hidden in what’s lost or never captured.
This workshop has limited capacity and so registration is preferred. Participants with tickets are guaranteed entry, drop-in attendance is welcome, but will be on a first come first served basis.
If you have any enquiries about the events and the venue, please contact us at designinformatics@ed.ac.uk .
Please note this workshop will be photographed, and may be used for future marketing, promotional or archive purposes. If you would prefer not to be photographed, please let us know at the event.
Facilitator
Dorsey Kaufmann is a data visualisation designer, artist, and researcher who creates interactive data interfaces and participatory art installations. Employing digital design, data visualisation, code, sculpture, video, and technology; her work embodies the intimate and personal aspects of data collection and use – concerning people’s health, homes, local environment, and body politics. Her research further examines the use of visualisation as a creative medium to increase data literacy and shape human cognition, attitudes and behaviour in relation to the natural environment (see Nature article).
Join us for this exhibition late and panel discussion, part of Digital Ghosts exhibition programme.
Step into the forgotten corners of the internet with an exhibition that transforms real web archive data into playful, thought-provoking artworks. From vanished websites to fading digital traces, this exhibition invites you to reflect on what’s preserved, what’s lost, and what that reveals about our identities and values.
As the lines blur between online and offline life, the exhibition asks: who decides what’s worth remembering, and how does that shape our shared story?
During the Exhibition Late, the team behind the project will host a panel discussion on Scotland’s digital footprints. We’ll explore how web archives are created, what gets included or left out, and why those choices matter, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the politics of web preservation.
Speakers: Andrea Kocsis – Chancellor’s Fellow in Humanities Informatics Dorsey Kaufmann – Data visualisation designer, artist, and researcher Graeme Hawley – Head of Published Collections, National Library of Scotland Eilidh MacGlone – Web archivist, National Library of Scotland Parker Kaufmann – Data visualization specialist and web developer Coleman Tharpe (moderator) – Independent Heritage Researcher
Date: Thurs 6 Nov 2025 Time: 18:00-20:00 | Free/Ticketed Location: Inspace, 1 Crichton St, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB Audience: General public (under 18’s must be accompanied by an adult)
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 the venue, please contact us at designinformatics@ed.ac.uk
Please note this event will be recorded and photographed. Video and Phorotraphs will be used for future marketing, promotional, reporting and archival purposes. If you would prefer not to be filmed or photographs, please let us know at the event.
Speakers
Dr Andrea Kocsis is a Chancellor’s Fellow in Humanities Informatics, specialising in digital cultural heritage. Her recent research explores how web archives can be made more accessible, usable, and engaging through user-centred design and creative practice and how they can be repositories of collective memory. To explore this topic, she has held the National Librarian’s Research Fellowship in Digital Scholarship at the National Library of Scotland (2024–25) and the Archives of Tomorrow Methods Fellowship at Cambridge University Library/Cambridge Digital Humanities (2022–23), and is the lead investigator on the BA/Leverhulme Small Grant project Digital Ghosts – Exploring Scotland’s Heritage on the Web (2025–26), that serves as the basis for the exhibition.
Dorsey Kaufmann is a data visualisation designer, artist, and researcher who creates interactive data interfaces and participatory art installations. Employing digital design, data visualisation, code, sculpture, video, and technology; her work embodies the intimate and personal aspects of data collection and use – concerning people’s health, homes, local environment, and body politics. Her research further examines the use of visualisation as a creative medium to increase data literacy and shape human cognition, attitudes and behaviour in relation to the natural environment (see Nature article).
Graeme Hawley is Head of Published Collections at the National Library of Scotland, where he has worked since 2002. The collection he is responsible for begins with a copy of the Gutenberg Bible and continues to grow every day with the receipt of modern publications across a range of formats, including websites. He finds the challenges of working across centuries of publications in different formats endlessly fascinating, with similarities and contradictions to be explored at every turn.
Eilidh MacGlone’s varied library career has taken in working in the library of John Wheatley College and cataloguing film at the Scottish Screen Archive, later the Moving Image Archive at National Library of Scotland.
As Web Archivist, she has helped the Library’s curators build collections around the online aspects of Scotland’s public sphere since 2014. This has included its news, the Scottish Independence Referendum debate and government information; more recently, working cooperatively with other legal deposit libraries in the UK, including the British Library and National Library of Wales, to build a collection for the Women’s Rugby World Cup.
Parker Kaufmann is a data visualization specialist and web developer with a passion for translating complex data sets into meaningful visualizations that empower users to make informed decisions. Throughout her career, she has worked with diverse clients from industries like aerospace, healthcare, marketing, and journalism. Using tools like D3.js and React, she conceptualizes and implements robust web applications that host custom built data visualizations.
Coleman Tharpe is an independent heritage researcher based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His research explores the interactions between cultural heritage and Generative AI. In addition to academic research, his practice includes areas such as equity, inclusion, and accessibility in digital transformation, data governance, and community and creative heritage strategy and implementation.
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.
A performance of real time live collaboration with AI, featuring human performers exploring Human–AI intimacy.
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.
Performance Details
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.
If you have any enquiries about Inspace programming and the venue, please contact us at designinformatics@ed.ac.uk .
Immersive installation
Set within a softly responsive, ambient environment, participants are invited to 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.
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).
We are delighted to share the upcoming series of exhibitions and events taking place in Inspace over the coming months, promising to bring you an inspiring fusion of art, design, research and technology.
Our pop-up exhibition for Edinburgh Doors Open Day and Explorathon 2025 presents several visual and interactive displays inviting you to gain insights into cancer treatment through a series of intimate portraits, to reflect on the role of AI in the context of aging, to experience ‘Flow’ protoype headset: a tool to measure mental states for wellbeing, and to share your own stories about AI in everyday life.
I & AI: Mirror, performance and immersive installation invites you bathe in the interactive mirror-world, created by Jiarong Yu, through experimental platform Co-STEAM, a softly responsive, ambient environment, where human becomes entangled in the “AI”dentity, questioning if it is possible to meaningfully co-author with AI.
Digital Ghostspresents students’ work alongside a commissioned centerpiece by multimedia artist Dorsey Kaufmann, and data visualization developer Parker Kaufmann, inviting you to go on a reflective journey to explore real web archive data and question what’s preserved, what’s lost, and who decides what’s worth remembering?
Programme overview
Edinburgh Doors Open Day and Explorathon
Where architectural heritage meets technology driven futures
10:00-14:00 | Sun | 28 Sept 2025
As part of Doors Open Day 2025 and Explorathon 2025, we are delighted to be opening the doors of Inspace and the Institute for Design Informatics Studio and Workshop to showcase a snapshot of behind the scenes activity and current research taking place at the Institute. This pop-up exhibition with will be accompanied by guided tours of this unique progressive exhibition facility, and the adjacent Bayes Centre. Inspace was designed by Reiach and Hall architects in 2009, and serves as a collaborative hub, commissioning and producing an ambitious events and exhibitions programme bringing together art, design, technology and research.
Set within a softly responsive, ambient environment, this exhibition invites you to interact with, interpret and get intimate with AI. This exhibition programme will feature a real time live and collaborative performance where AI and human performers come together to explore Human–AI intimacy.
Through the softening of traditional techno-aesthetics and foregrounding emotion, transparency, and co-creation, this work invites you to take part in co-reflection and to rethink identity as something constructed in tandem with intelligent systems.
Join artists and students from the University of Edinburgh as they invite you to step into the forgotten corners of the internet with an exhibition that transforms real web archive data into playful, thought-provoking artworks. From vanished websites to fading digital traces, this exhibition invites you to reflect on what’s preserved, what’s lost, and what that reveals about our identities and values.
This exhibition will also feature a late event, with panel discussion and a workshop where you are invited to join multimedia artist Dorsey Kaufmann in examining how visual design can reveal patterns of digital disappearance and question how cultural memory is shaped by what is saved and what is lost.
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.
An exciting support opportunity has opened in the Institutes for Design Informatics, Inspace and OPENspace!
We’re Hiring
Research Centres Support Assistant
Research Centres Support Assistant
The successful postholder will provide and contribute administrative assistance and support, working within established processes and procedures, as well as advising of new ones, for the running of two of ECA’s Research Centres: Design Informatics and OPENspace. Design Informatics works across teaching, research and engagement, including the public-facing Inspace venue which this role provides additional support for (e.g. though venue booking and diary management, front of house invigilation during exhibitions). This role also supports the ECA Postgraduate Office with administrative assistance for the student placements and field trips within the Design Informatics teaching programme. OPENspace is an international research centre for inclusive access to outdoor environments, this role provides administration for work including OPENspace’s research seminar series.
Inspace runs a select programme of exhibitions, open to the public, at key times throughout the year. During these times, the working days for this role are usually Tuesday – Saturday 9.15am-5.15pm. In the month of August and occasionally for key strategic events (e.g. Science Festival, Edinburgh Doors Open Day, Summer Festivals), the working schedule can be adjusted to include Sunday and Monday working (maintaining a 5-day week).
This post is full-time (35 hours per week). This role will usually be based on campus but we are able to accommodate some limited hybrid working.
The salary for this post is £26,093 – £29,588 per annum.
Your skills and attributes for success:
Excellent communication skills orally and in writing, with the ability to communicate well with both internal and external contacts.
Strong numeracy skills with previous experience of financial administration, and financial and database systems.
Highly developed IT skills and experience, and ability to quickly learn and use new packages and booking systems.
Ability to understand own work priorities and those of colleagues, in order to plan and prioritise workload on a daily basis, to facilitate achievement of research project timetable of events, and to manage time across two research centres.
Ability to work under pressure in a busy environment, to use initiative and judgment to resolve many day-to-day problems independently.
Click below to view a copy of the full job description (opens new browser tab)
Please ensure you include the following documents in your application: – CV – Cover letter
As a valued member of our team you can expect:
A competitive salary
An exciting, positive, creative, challenging and rewarding place to work.
A work environment where we support and nurture your talent and reward success.
To be part of a diverse and vibrant international community
Comprehensive Staff Benefits, such as a generous holiday entitlement, competitive pension schemes, staff discounts, and family-friendly initiatives. Check out the full list on our staff benefits page(opens in a new tab) and use our reward calculator to discover the total value of your pay and benefits
Championing equality, diversity and inclusion
The University of Edinburgh holds a Silver Athena SWAN award in recognition of our commitment to advance gender equality in higher education. We are members of the Race Equality Charter and we are also Stonewall Scotland Diversity Champions, actively promoting LGBT equality.
Prior to any employment commencing with the University you will be required to evidence your right to work in the UK. Further information is available on our right to work webpages(opens new browser tab)
Key dates to note
The closing date for applications is [9th October 2025].
Unless stated otherwise the closing time for applications is 11:59pm GMT. If you are applying outside the UK the closing time on our adverts automatically adjusts to your browsers local time zone.
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.
Inspace is part of the Institute for Design Informatics and is a collaborative hub, commissioning and producing creative activity. Our public programme connects data, research and creative talent. We host events and exhibitions where people can explore, learn, debate and create. Our programme unlocks digital technologies, tools and data and explores their role in society through a creative lens. We are home to Inspace City Screens, a unique seven screen street front projection space visible from Potterrow in Edinburgh.
About OPENspace
OPENspace is an international research centre, based in the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Edinburgh College of Art, collaborating with colleagues in other Schools both within the University of Edinburgh and beyond, contributing new evidence on why inclusive access to the outdoors matters. Addressing the full spectrum of open space environments, from city parks and squares to remote rural landscapes, our work informs policy on health and wellbeing, social inclusion, countryside access and sustainable urban development. We focus on the benefits to be gained from getting outdoors and the barriers currently experienced by different users, particularly those from disadvantaged groups.
