“For me art is something to be taught, like a language. The more you speak it, the more you can appreciate it”. (Marco)
Porträt Berlin & Imrsvarts
New technologies applied to artistic projects.
Exploring new methods of Art education with IMMERSIVE Arts and Aula Future Lab.
Genefer Baxter and Marco Locatelli are the founders of IMRSV ARTS, a multidisciplinary collective that seeks to co-create art with viewers, through the production of interactive installations. Their intention is that by participating in the works, people experience the vision of the artists and at the same time explore other modes of expression using technology. From their own experience as creators they developed AULA FUTURE LAB, a methodology to help other artists discover their potential and innovate from art.
Participation for us is something important that we can bring to involve people in the process"(Marco)
Gen is from Philadelphia, USA. She has studied Marketing at the School of Business.
How does AULA FUTURE LAB work? The workshop consists of developing an idea from a research hypothesis, carrying out the work and materializing a prototype artwork that uses technology as a medium — in this case Artificial Intelligence (AI). This process, including sharing it with others and growing with the exchange of ideas, makes our approach to discover the best way to tell an idea and to know our view as authors.
Porträt Berlin: How did this project come about?
Gen: When I met Marco we were looking for women artists for an art exhibition here in Berlin. At our first meeting we talked about the art of the future, what we would like to do in this field and especially about our personal projects. We were interested in discussing how we could develop a more interactive artwork format, in which participation can essentially help the participants to access their own creativity, giving them confidence them to reveal it.
Marco: I've always had the feeling that most of the time art-related projects or exhibitions per se, had a lack of participation and I wondered why. For me art is something that has to be taught, like teaching a language. The more you speak it, the more you can appreciate it.
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PB: Why is art education key and how can Aula help in this area?
G: Aula is our most recent project and is geared towards teaching creative processes. It took us a few years to shape it and especially to have the opportunities to achieve what we wanted, it was a long process. Our initial question was: How can we get people to really engage in working with themselves, to be creative on their own? So, from there, we went into technology, we started exploring different methods of interactivity, a big step for our history and really in that development we formed what we are today.
An important aspect of Aula is the people we interact and work with: the artists, the designers, the developers who help us carry out our mission. We believe that we also grow with them. We are a multidisciplinary team that Marco and I coordinate together.
I think our project, our methodology, is tapping into intrinsic motivation and that's crucial. We are helping people to see what matters to them, exploring how they can constructively motivate themselves to follow a direction.
M Yes, education was something that was always on our mind because we always learn a lot in the process of creating art projects, we experienced it in the first place.
We were able to demonstrate the belief that we have in our process to really push thinking outside the box. That's basically what we want to do with Aula. We can say that we saw this Covid situation as the opportunity where we could finally have time to work deeply on this project and bring it to life.
G: Sure, it was really a combination of events, I think it's important to keep in mind that even before Covid happened, we had already started to shape the format that we are using today. And that was because I, being a business person, am always thinking about how we are going to grow.
On the other hand, the Art Residency program we were invited to in Philadelphia was a big step, we spent three months working with scientists and our task was to learn from them and create a work of art from that ("Nature binary"). Through this we realized that we could learn about something we didn't know about: the immune system, vaccines, etc. We saw how good we were at research, just by having the task to do it. We became the best students in the world (I had never been that good a student in college or elementary school!). So, we clicked: this needs to be part of artistic education!
Gen is from Philadelphia, USA. She has studied Marketing at the School of Business.
Gen and Marco leave us with the idea that learning has no age, but that it’s our curiosity that keeps us constantly exploring. Their work encourages us to explore our own creative process and not simply follow a model, immersing us to discover our own way of telling an idea. They say something important with Aula — we are all creative. And, the proof is in the results of their last workshop, where they created five different installations in less than two months.
You can find Gen and Marco’s installations in IMRSV ARTS. To learn more about their work, and see some of the results from the last workshop, check out the AULA lab. https://imrsvarts.com https://www.aulafuture.org/