Monday, 19 October 2026 at 7 pm
Lecture:
The Body Beyond Its Boundaries: Prosthetic Daydreaming
(Bodies, Illusions and the Future of Presence)
Eric Joris (Brussels, Belgium)
Fifth session of the Eurokaz School of Performing Arts
Eric Joris is a Belgian visual artist, director and researcher, founder and artistic director of the CREW group, a transdisciplinary collective of scientists and artists who have been developing immersive performances at the intersection of live art and technology since 2000. He studied fine arts, film directing, languages and art history in Antwerp and Brussels, at the Sorbonne, Cambridge, and the Collegium Palatinum in Heidelberg, as well as economics as part of the European Commission's European Executive Programme in Japan.
Joris is a pioneer of performances in virtual (VR), augmented (AR) and so-called alternative reality (AltR), which, unlike VR, is fully grounded in bodily, tactile, proprioceptive and vestibular experience. CREW collaborates with the universities of Hasselt and Antwerp, and the Fraunhofer and Max-Planck institutes. CREW's projects have been presented at leading festivals worldwide. Explorer was nominated for the Ars Electronica Prize in 2016 and the BNG Theater Prize 2015, and Collateral Rooms was nominated for the NTTA New Technological Art Award 2016.
In the 2025/2026 season, CREW realised Tremens, a project that will be part of next year’s Eurijala contemporary theater and performing arts festival programme.
Joris first presented his work to Zagreb audiences as part of the Eurokaz festival in 2012 with the project Terra Nova, which Eurokaz co-produced with his group CREW and international partners. The work was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art using VR headsets.
Joris's lecture approaches immersion not primarily as a technological category, but as a developing relationship between the body, media and experience. It starts from a theme that has found expression in myths, rituals, religions, theatre and art: the ever-present cultural aspiration to experience the world beyond the biological boundaries of one's own body. To travel without moving, to adopt another perspective, to expand perception, to encounter other realities – such dreams have accompanied the human imagination for millennia.
Viewed from this perspective, immersive media are not a technological disruption, but only the latest chapter in a much longer history. The history of media is not just the history of devices; it is also the history of how human experience is constantly reshaped.
Each new medium changes the way we perceive, remember, imagine, communicate and are present in the world.
“Presence” occurs when the medium is no longer perceived as an external device, but becomes part of perception itself, like a prosthetic extension of a feeling body. This is the moment when we are no longer looking at the image, but are instead located where the image is. It is precisely in this shifting relationship between the body, the medium, and experience that immersion becomes possible.
Instead of asking what immersive technologies can do, this lecture asks what they do to us. Artistic practice begins not with the tool, but with the question.
What experiences does it create?
What relationships does it establish?
How does it reshape perception?
How does it change our relationship to space, to others, and to ourselves?
How does meaning emerge through the body, rather than through representation?
Joris argues that the performing arts offer a unique space in which prosthetic dreams are imagined, embodied and shared – long before they become technologies – and a space where new forms of presence are first rehearsed.
The lecture will be in English.
The programme is supported by the Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb, the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, and the Kultura Nova Foundation.