Spatial Imaging & Digital Imaginaries

Emerging immersive and digital imaging technologies, including as generative Al, virtual, mixed and augmented reality, are developing at pace and propose a dynamic creative and critical context. In combination with more established discourses on the digitisation and visualisation of environments through photogrammetry, LiDAR, 3d modelling and games design, a rich, diverse and distinct complexity of nascent concerns can be distilled and subjected to creative enquiry. Collectively, these technologies simulate and stimulate new regimes of in/visibilities and spatial conditions with the capacity to propose rich and distinct imaginaries of space and experience.

The Spatial Imaging & Digital Imaginaries (SIDI) symposium will provide a critical academic and public platform to discuss and showcase a variety of modes of research and creative enquiry at this evolving technological interstice. The symposium aims to draw together a diversity of doctoral researchers and projects exploring these technologies to reflect on their role in spatial, visual, and cultural practices, and investigate how immersive and computational tools reshape modes of seeing, constructing, and narrating space. We encourage the exploration across a plurality of spatial contexts, including architecture, urban planning, virtual worlds, hertzian space and more.

We invite contributions of traditional paper presentations, as well as non-traditional and creative forms of research dissemination to reflect the speculative and experimental nature of the technologies involved. These can include lightening talks, performance-lectures, Al-generated lectures, workshops or 'labs' to test immersive content, live VR walkthroughs, or generative environments responsive to real-time data or participant input.

SIDI Symposium is hosted at the Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh.