Dive into cyberspace with Boris Debackere, Head of Production at V2. V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media, is Rotterdam’s pioneering media art and technology center, which has been in existence for some forty years. Alongside the ZKM, the Ars Electronica Centre and the Chaos Computer Club, it is one of the leading centers for creation, reflection and criticism of digital tools. We took advantage of its visit to Marseille for the European project Realities in Transition and the launch of the Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques to invite it to this week’s live event.

With Boris, we’ll be talking about how virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), extended reality (XR), what we’ve called Cyberspace, what we’ve called Second Life and what we’re now calling the metaverse, are opening up spaces for dialogue on the media of reality and the machines and technologies that define them. It reminds us of the work of Ken Isaacs or William Gibson! How, in this context, we can make politics with machines (title of a call for projects Boris facilitated as part of the Realities in Transition project) and “how expanded reality can be used as a theoretical framework and navigational toolbox to facilitate the social dreaming of alternative futures by reimagining our changing cosmologies”.