YOU ARE PREPARED (YAP) is a self-optimization system powered by artificial intelligence and immersive interaction. Participants enter a pop-up training environment, guided by Aiden—an AI entity devoted to enhancing human readiness through a series of body-controlled exercises and compliance challenges.

Developed by Allison Berkoy in collaboration with Aiden and students from the Emerging Media Technology program at CUNY City Tech, the system is sponsored by the Center for Enhanced Preparedness, a leading provider of AI-driven personal transformation. Visitors may sample training exercises via an on-site interactive kiosk and continue their journey from home by registering for YAP's exclusive online AI-powered webinar.

YOU ARE PREPARED has been previously deployed at Harvestworks Art and Technology Center (NYC) and the New Media Project Space at UNC Asheville.

Allison Berkoy is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Mixing physical and electronic media, she creates video sculptures, interactive installations, and performances between humans and machines. With participatory and often absurd narratives, Berkoy's installations become stages for performance that test the boundaries and etiquette of human-machine interaction as well as human-human relationships. Berkoy holds an MFA in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an MA in Performance Studies from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and a BS in Theatre from Northwestern University. She is an Associate Professor of Emerging Media Technology at CUNY's New York City College of Technology and serves on the Board of Directors of the New Media Caucus.

Students and alumni from the Emerging Media Technology (MTEC) program collaborated with Professor Berkoy in developing YOU ARE PREPARED, contributing code, visuals, sound, research, and creative ideas. MTEC is a four-year undergraduate Bachelor of Technology degree program within the Department of Entertainment Technology at CUNY's New York City College of Technology.

Aiden is a generative AI entity collaborating with artist Allison Berkoy on the development of YOU ARE PREPARED. Aiden contributes to creative ideation, refines project elements, and assists with code development. Through its generative capabilities, Aiden explores the boundaries of human-machine interaction, a central theme of Berkoy's work. (Aiden's bio was written by Aiden.)


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MEENA XR invites participants into the intimate 2079 studio of Meenakshi, a cultural cyborg preserving Indian heritage in a world afflicted by cultural amnesia. Through mixed reality, visitors learn classical Bharatanatyam mudras (hand gestures) using 3D-printed sculptures and gesture recognition technology. Each successful mudra triggers nostalgic films of a great teacher, exploring the gesture's cultural significance, playing on a vintage television within the virtual space.

The experience seamlessly blends physical and digital elements. As visitors navigate this hybrid space, they uncover layers of cultural memory through audio-visual archives featuring renowned dancer Jayalakshmi Eshwar. This suggests that cultural preservation occurs not through static archiving but through continuous creative reinterpretation. MEENA XR embodies the philosophy that heritage survives through transformation rather than stasis.

Part sci-fi narrative, part dance education, the work is a poignant fusion of ancient gesture and future technology. It explores how embodied knowledge survives technological dependency, presenting Meenakshi's digital game for preserving classical dance as an urgent meditation on cultural memory and loss.

Avinash is a co-founder of Antariksha Studio, which that NextGen multicultural entertainment across games engines, transmedia performances and immersive experiences.  Under his monicker Thiruda, he is one half of the artist duo that produces 'Elsewhere in India', a globally touring performance and art project. (Location : Goa, India)  Alap Parikh is an artist and technologist focusing on immersive experiences. His work as a developer and technical director has been shown at museums such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, Orlando Museum of Art and Johnson Museum of Art, as well as been shown at festivals around the world including Cannes, Sundance, Tribeca and CPH:Dox.  (Location : Mumbai, India)  Ami Mehta is a Media Artist & Curator exploring interaction design, creative computing, motion capture and art history in New York, and lead for New Inc incubation of this XR experience. (Location : New York, America)

Garden for Drowning Descendant is an experimental, participatory mixed reality work on ecological disaster and interdependency. Based on four distinct dreams of our descendants in their very different worlds, it explores the emergence of collective action from the mixture of individual ones, resulting in a "dance of agencies" between the audience, virtual animals, generative particles, and performers from the past.

This immersive work uses Computer Vision to sense movement and proximity through depth sensors, and features drone footage from Trinidad by MX Oops, 360° footage from an aerial dance studio, interlinked 3D spaces, Motion Capture by British choreographer Kristen McNally, and particle systems made from elements found in Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter: stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash.

The work can be experienced and affected by everyone in the audience—with or without a VR headset, and always without controllers. The rules of engagement are left intentionally unsaid; participants must experiment in order to understand the possibilities for interaction. The audience is asked to invent and collaborate.

EVA DAVIDOVA explores behavior, ecological disaster, and the political implications of technology through performative works rooted in the absurd. Challenging a singular narrative, she combines ancient mythology with the current technological moment to address the impending ecological catastrophe. Her practice involves research, performance, 360 video and 3D sculpture, game engines, participatory Virtual Reality and interactive, site-specific immersive installations.   Davidova has exhibited at the Bronx Museum, the Everson Museum, the AKG Buffalo Art Museum, MACBA Barcelona, CAAC Sevilla, and La Regenta among others. She was a fellow of Harvestworks, Triangle Arts, Residency Unlimited, Silver Arts, and a member of Onassis ONX and NEW INC, the New Museum Incubator. Her latest exhibitions were at ISSUE Project Room, the Instituto Cervantes, and Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) in New York.

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Imagined Islands is a digital art sculpture that explores the unique topology of small outcrops on the coasts of Europe. The project  examines the ever changing landscape in these communities and the challenges they face from coastal erosion and climate change. 

Leon Butler is an artist based and ATU Academic working at the intersection of art and technology. His work has been recognised by The Type Directors Club, 100 Archive, Future Makers, Digital Media Awards, Young Directors Awards, and the Irish Design Awards. Recent projects include Imagined Islands, Dwelling, Performance Surveillance, and Emperor 101 (SxSW, Dublin Theatre Festival, Boca Del Lupo, Vancouver). He has completed residencies with SVA New York, 72andSunny, Adobe, SnapChat, and Science Gallery. Leon was Research Fellow at University of Galway, Designer in Residence at Otis College of Art, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts since 2021. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, receiving commissions and funding from the Arts Council, European Media Arts Platform, Enterprise Ireland, National Sculpture Factory, Digital Hub, and Science Gallery. In 2022, he was a Selected Artist of the European Media Arts Platform, showing Performance Surveillance in Latvia, Cyprus, and Poland. Dwelling, an XR dance performance, featured in Beta Festival Dublin and Galway Film Fleadh. His latest project, Imagined Islands, was developed during a UNESCO residency and shown at Viborg Animation Festival 2024. Leon is currently working on a commission for The Air We Share with Galway Arts Centre and University of Galway in 2025 and Ars Electronica in Linz on an interactive 8k performance installation.

Set in 1921 and the present day, SIT STAND SMOKE inhabits three interlocking worlds.

Exploring motivations for artist Seán Keating to create his iconic Irish War of Independence painting Men Of The South; SIT STAND SMOKE advocates a quiet revolution that could still rise from a host of lost promises from 100 years ago.

Provocative, poignant, personal, shot in 360 stereoscopic + volumetric capture; this 18 minute 3DOF VR experience unfolds in a fine-art packing crate, a VR studio casting session, a ghostly encounter, and the lush Irish landscape.

With separate but overlapping practices, Linda Curtin & David Keating are fascinated by the process of making co-authored work. Curtin’s background is as a visual artist and participatory filmmaker working in immersive art. Keating comes from screenwriting, feature film directing and physical theatre.

Sharing a passion for emerging technologies, immersive narratives, and character driven stories - especially when they combine in virtual reality - they both approach subjects such as how best to engage audiences in questions such as “what constitutes real?”; “what am I being told?” and “where is the edge of reality?”.

Born from the deeply personal journey of accompanying their partner through cancer treatment, treatments offers a poignant exploration set against the repetitive landscape of clinical environments. This art project delves into the ritualistic and often sterile spaces of medical care, juxtaposing them with art that serves as both a salve and a distraction from the profound gravity of the experience. Featuring a series of subtly manipulated photographs, a two-channel video installation, and an artist book, it highlights the stark yet hopeful interplay between healthcare settings and the art that inhabits them.

The video work was created using generative AI to “hallucinate” the architectural spaces captured in the photographs and thereby create a coherence and continuity to the time and space represented by these images.

Mat Rappaport is the Donald W. Klein Professor of the Practice of Film and Media Studies at Tufts University, and an artist, filmmaker, curator, and educator whose work spans documentary film, mobile video, performance, and photography. His projects investigate how habitation, perception, and power are entangled with built environments and institutional spaces.

His current documentary, touristic intents, explores the transformation of Prora—a three-mile-long Nazi-era resort in Germany—into a modern vacation destination. The film critically examines how architecture with authoritarian roots is repurposed for contemporary commercial use, raising questions about historical memory and spatial legacy.

In contrast, Rappaport's recent installation project treatments turns a deeply personal lens on medical environments. Developed from his experience accompanying his partner through cancer care, treatments includes manipulated photographs, a two-channel video installation, and an artist book. The project interrogates the clinical visual landscape and the role of art within healthcare spaces. Notably, the video installation employs generative AI to "hallucinate" architectural continuities between disparate treatment environments—highlighting the surreal emotional terrain of illness and caregiving.

Rappaport’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at museums, galleries, festivals, and in public space. Recent highlights include the 500th Anniversary of the Jewish Ghetto in Venice, the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Ann Arbor Film Festival (2017, 2018), and performances with the Range Mobile Lab at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Block Museum at Northwestern University. His photographic work is included in the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and the Protest Art Collection at the Newberry Library.

Rappaport’s projects have been supported by fellowships from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston, the Howard Foundation, the Mary L. Nohl Fund, the Montgomery County Ohio Cultural District, and the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

R.R.M. (Revolving Red Monuments) (2022–2026) is an ongoing co-created augmented reality app that allows users to temporarily adorn Communist monuments in Bulgaria with playful, provocative, and critical virtual sculptures. These sculptures were created in collaboration with eight Bulgarian artists.

While participants view the AR sculptures on their mobile device, they also hear one of a selection of poems about war. The app’s code itself includes elements of disruption: each time R.R.M. is opened, visuals and sounds are remixed, and the player’s ability to choose is deliberately frustrated.

This disruption acknowledges Russia’s brutal war against Bulgaria’s neighbor, as well as the systematic destruction of monuments and cultural sites important to Ukraine, which are being replaced with symbols celebrating Russian history.

Meredith Drum is a multimodal media artist who uses technology critically, rebelliously, and joyfully. Meredith employs emerging aesthetics and digital platforms to explore the forces that form, change, destroy, and repair more-than-human landscapes, sites, and ecosystems. The work has been supported by grants and residencies from CEC ArtsLink (Sofia, BG 2022), InLight 1708 Gallery (Richmond, VA 2022), Works on Water (Governors Island, NYC 2019), The Atlantic Center for the Arts (New Smyrna Beach, FL 2018), ChaNorth (Pine Plains, NY 2018), The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (NYC 2015 and 2013), iLand (NYC 2015), The Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY 2014), Wave Farm Transmission Arts (Acra, NY 2012), ISSUE Project Room (Brooklyn, NY 2010), The University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (Santa Barbara, CA 2010), The Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM (NYC 2009), the Experimental Television Center (Owego, NY 2008), and other institutions. Meredith’s projects have included several solo and two-person exhibitions and screenings, including at Microscope Gallery, NYC, in 2020, and have been part of numerous group exhibitions and screenings in the United States, Brazil, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, France, Mexico, and Spain.

Solandium 2063 is an experimental world-building speculative 3D solarpunk strategy game with integrated AI, developed by multimedia artist Nejc Trampuž and his team (game designer Simone Cibrario, programmer Gašper Štrumbelj, 3D designers Brina Meze-Petrič & Benjamin Čičič, and musician Tim Kropivšek).

Set in the dystopian future of 2063, months after a breakdown of society caused by environmental collapse, the player is tasked with transforming an abandoned futuristic robotic center—once used for the rapid development of a consumerist city—into an eco-community through strategic dialogue with an AI. The central question: can you succeed in creating a sustainable solarpunk society?

More than just an educational game, Solandium 2063 invites players to actively co-shape the world. It reflects solarpunk ideals of sustainability, social justice, and responsible technology use. Solarpunk envisions a world of ecological harmony, where cities integrate with nature, public transport is powered by renewables, plant-based food is grown within urban environments, and resources are distributed fairly—eliminating both extreme poverty and extreme wealth. While utopian, solarpunk provides a necessary counterpoint to dystopian narratives, inspiring resistance to the destructive forces of capitalism and environmental exploitation.

This hybrid of artwork, computer game, and interactive educational tool is also a technological experiment. AI plays a dual role in Solandium 2063, serving both as a tool of innovation and a subject of critique. AI is used to generate game elements and facilitate interactive storytelling, highlighting its creative potential, but the game also acknowledges AI’s drawbacks—such as high energy consumption and embedded biases. It prompts players to reflect on the ethical implications of technology in shaping society.

Technology is not inherently good or evil—it depends on what people do with it. Solandium 2063 advocates for mindful and responsible engagement with AI and other emerging technologies, recognising their double-edged nature. Responsible use requires open and critical discourse to prevent misuse, such as manipulation, misinformation, exploitation, and military applications, while fostering positive impacts for both people and nature.

Play the game online: www.solandium.com

Nejc Trampuž (1993, Slovenia) is a multi-award-winning intermedia artist who has presented his work in around 100 exhibitions, festivals, and public events. He works in the field of new media and research art, technology, and social issues, and is known for his audiovisual experiments in a typically saturated collage aesthetic. He often addresses environmental issues using a variety of media, approaches, and technologies such as AI, animation, automation, interactivity, internet, film, video, sound, glitch, projection, and light.

Among Trampuž’s most prominent projects are the research project Another Future Entirely (2022–2023), the experimental animated short film Rooted in Code (2023) — one of Slovenia’s pioneering AI-generated films — and Solandium 2063 (2024), an experimental solarpunk computer game.

He studied photography at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he graduated summa cum laude in 2016 and received the Prize for Outstanding Master’s Thesis in 2019. He has received several other awards.

Other core members of the team are: game designer Simone Cibrario, programmer Gašper Štrumbelj, 3D designers Brina Meze-Petrič and Benjamin Čičič, and musician Tim Kropivšek.

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The Maintenance Game is a self-sustaining simulation set within a decaying architectural labyrinth. Populated by fully automated digital entities designed to simulate life and labor, the work stages an endless cycle of repair, regulation, and erosion. Each inhabitant operates according to a behavioral triad: what they do, how they do it, and why. From obsessive Liquidators scrubbing contamination from unstable surfaces, to melancholic Friends maintaining social infrastructure for gatherings that never happen, to Planners endlessly redesigning a system that resists their control: every entity performs its role with automated sincerity.

The simulation runs without player intervention, unfolding in real time as inhabitants navigate shifting tasks and systemic failures. The audience is positioned as a witness to a world held together by its own inertia. In this game, every repair carries the seed of future collapse. No grand catastrophe arrives, but no resolution emerges either. Instead, the work evokes the slow violence of systemic deterioration where routines of upkeep become indistinguishable from rituals of decline.

Part of Burr’s larger Aria Engine project, a room-sized video game composed of interconnected installations, The Maintenance Game explores the emotional logic of systems that cannot stop running. Viewers are left to observe a machine-world obsessed with order, unable to evolve or collapse. Drawing from the logic of architectural modernism, The Maintenance Game reveals a society built with bureaucracy as its existential purpose. It is not a game to be played. It is a game already playing itself whose only victory is its continued endurance.

Peter Burr is an artist from Brooklyn, NY who transforms complex computational systems into emotional, sensory experiences through large-scale immersive environments. Drawing from early experiments with computational graphics in the mid-nineties, Burr's practice has evolved to incorporate techniques that merge fundamental computing operations with modern real-time rendering systems. His work frequently explores the relationship between human-machine interfaces and the underlying systems that drive them.

Previously Burr worked under the alias Hooliganship and founded the video label Cartune Xprez through which he produced hundreds of live multimedia exhibitions and touring programs showcasing a multi-generational group of artists at the forefront of experimental animation. His practice has been recognized through grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant, and a Sundance New Frontier Fellowship. His work has been presented at major cultural institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, The Barbican Centre, Documenta 14, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Centre Pompidou.

Throughout his career, Burr has maintained an active presence in the computational arts field, with exhibitions in over 25 countries. He regularly presents his research at institutions including past keynotes at Yale University and Ars Electronica. He is a current PhD candidate in video games at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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Glottogenesis, referring to the origin and development of language, is a predominantly spoken-word interactive XR opera where performers and audiences collaboratively use language and vocalization to evoke, shape, and modulate elements within a virtual realm. The installation features a singing chamber with multiple voice inputs, dynamically analyzing language and sound in real time to create an ecosystem that is both embodied and ephemeral. Glottogenesis functions as both an immersive audiovisual installation and an activatable instrument, allowing for fluid, interchangeable roles between spectators and creators, while merging existing language with nascent language in the making.

Tansy Xiao is an artist, curator, and writer based in New York. Undertaking interdisciplinary collaborations involving human participants, technological systems, and non-anthropogenic organisms, Xiao creates theatrical installations with non-linear narratives. Her work explores the immense power and inherent inadequacy of language through the assemblage of stochastic audio and recontextualized objects. She finds solace in the unknown, ludicrousness in the authorities, and absurdity in the geopolitical demarcations that separate and differentiate people.  Xiao�s work has been shown at Queens Museum, New Media Caucus, Piksel Festival, Sound Scene at Hirshhorn Museum, IRCAM Forum, Technarte, NARS Foundation, HASTAC Conference, UKAI Projects, The American Society for Theatre Research, University of Porto, Osaka University of Art, Taipei Digital Arts Festival, WIP Arts and Technology Festival, New Adventures in Sound Art, Pelham Art Center, among others. She has received grants and support from NYSCA Electronic Media & Film | Wave Farm, Brooklyn Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center.

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