International Media Cultural Work’s artistic and scientific foundations address a huge range of innovative aspects of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). Students get hands on access to both through highly innovative technologies as for example 3D Audio and Fulldome Film, and are also encouraged to critically address and explore questions concerning the notion of reality, VR’s relation to illusion, and the psychological power of AR and VR. The mentioned fields as well as the
interdependency between human and virtual environments is still widely ignored and challenge by their critical attitude the current prevalent technocratically dominated discourses in this field.

By questioning current terminologies, exploring art and cultural history, media/acoustic ecology, philosophical approaches and critical psychology, and – last but not least – by practically producing with VR/AR tools, IMC’s examination of VR and AR technologies form a space for developing new perspectives and in-depth discourses on so-called immersive media and related new forms of art and culture.

For scientific, scholarly and artistic research purposes, the Master´s program International Media Cultural Work is one of very few programs that uses innovative VR and AR technology, like the 3D Audio “SpatialSound Wave System” and 360° Fulldome cinema, to produce AR/VR projects, igniting and fostering discourse and dialogue about it.

Our students are contributing to festivals e.g. the Fulldome Festival in Jena, the highly popular earplay series “Die Drei Fragezeichen”/”The Three Questionsmarks”, and the Center for Art and Media Technology ZKM/Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe. Our research conducted at our Soundscape- and Environmental Media Lab (SEM-Lab) has been invited to numerous national and international conferences and festivals. Since 2011, the SEM-Lab’s student researchers and artists received numerous awards for new design concepts and art forms within the realm of innovative “immersive media”.

The Master´s program International Media Cultural Work itself contributes to this field by initiating and organizing events, workshops, lectures, publications and exhibitions. Within its public presentations, as for example in its annual exhibition in the Museum Schloss Fechenbach, IMC’s students have been curating and displaying works reflecting latest media technologies, Virtual and Augmented Reality.

The international conference The Global Composition (July 2012 and October 2018) brought together more than 200 scholars, scientists, designers, engineers, educators, artists and composers from all over the world to discuss innovative cultural, artistic and educational auditory practices in media, with a special focus on Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Numerous IMC students were involved in these special events, who shared their productions, thoughts and knowledge with highly renowned experts.