A festival exploring the intersection of Arts, Design & Technology, running from March 4 to 7, 2026 at Swissnex in San Francisco.
REFRESH 2026 is a 4-day festival featuring keynotes, masterclasses and an exhibition running until April 12 – bringing together acclaimed designers, artists, and researchers from Switzerland and the US to envision possible futures and new fields of action for design and the arts.
The festival is an initiative of the Department of Design and the Immersive Arts Space of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), and is traveling to the US for the first time. This 7th edition of REFRESH focuses on “Algorithmic Entanglements”, reflecting the impact of digital technologies on society and the planetary well-being. The line up highlights the crucial role of creative practitioners and thinkers engaging critically and responsibly with digital transformation.
REFRESH 2026 is a partnership between the Department of Design and the Immersive Arts Space of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), and Swissnex in San Francisco.
Wednesday, March 4
5:30pm // Curator-Led Exhibition Tour with Maike Thies
6pm // Opening Night & Keynote: Worldbuilding – Liminal Bodies
Thursday, March 5
11am // Exhibition Tour
2pm // Curator-Led Exhibition Tour with Maike Thies
6pm // Keynote: Futures of Uncertainties – New Ecologies
Friday, March 6
11am // Exhibition Tour
2pm // Curator-Led Exhibition Tour with Maike Thies
6pm // Keynote: Algorithmic Entanglements – Digital Literacy
Saturday, March 7
11am // Exhibition Tour
12pm // Masterclass: You’re Absolutely Right!
2pm // Masterclass: Anatomy of Non-Fact: The Boardgame
ALL SESSION REGISTRATION
Speaker Line Up
Please contact Lucas Hagin, Creative Industries Program Manager, for any questions.
Wednesday, March 4
6–8:30pm
Swissnex, Pier 17, Suite 800, San Francisco
6:30pm // The Arts and Politics of Immersion: Sensing, Bodies, and Machines
Keynote by Prof. Dr. Christopher Salter
The interest in immersion as a model for aesthetic experiences that involve «walking into artworks» rather than observing them at a distance has gained interest from creators, curators, and audiences over the last decade. Yet, the issues brought up by the immersion understood as digital-technologically mediated experiences, have remained unresolved.
In particular, questions of absorption/saturation versus reflection/critical distance and how immersive environments produce knowledge and experience based on the role and presence of audiences’/participants’ bodies, continue to shape discussions among art historians, anthropologists, sociologists of science in addition to practitioners.
This keynote explores the question of why artworks that «forego history in the name of a kind of intensity of experience» (as Rosalind Krauss once wrote) have become so popular in an age of increasing loss between fiction and reality, the physical world and its digital doppelgänger.
7pm // Sensing Machines
Keynote by Yasaman Sheri
As computation gains perception, the infrastructures of knowledge and understanding become increasingly legible through sensors, outsourced and infrastructural conditions of contemporary life. From machine vision to environmental sensors, sensing systems determine what becomes visible, actionable, and governed. Airborne Particles, Biological Exposure, Meta Data & Datasets and Planetary Infrastructure, are just a few examples of modern life’s imperceptibility without technical mediation. Within such a condition, sensing apparatuses operate simultaneously as tools of understanding and instruments of power.
Through examples from machine sensing, material science, and ecological monitoring, the talk examines sensing across practices and histories as sites of critical inquiry for technological and ecological entanglement. Machines, materials, and environments co-define new knowledge and ecological relationships. The talk speaks to the increased dependency on technical mediation, carrying political, cultural, and ethical questions. Drawing from design, science, and critical ecology, Sheri argues that sensing technologies do not only reveal the world, they actively configure it.
Thursday, March 5
6–8:30pm
Swissnex, Pier 17, Suite 800, San Francisco
6:30pm // Ecology Data Mourning
Keynote by Marina Otero Verzier
This keynote presentation analyzes the case of Tuvalu and its plans to become a fully virtual and digitized nation. Amid the unraveling of worlds, the possibility of Tuvalu’s digital twin opens questions on how to address the fragility of environments and communities, their care, custodianship, preservation, and eventual loss in the face of the climate catastrophe. Otero will delve into the inherent tension between digital custodianship and the unsustainable practices of the data storage industry and explore notions of preservation, proliferation, and decay.
7:00pm // Big Players
Keynote by Thibault Brevet
AATB treat robotics like a material—flexible, unpredictable, almost tender. The duo, Andrea Anner and Thibault Brevet, pushes industrial automation far beyond factory logic, transforming robotic arms into performers, collaborators, and sometimes awkward companions. Their practice merges engineering with choreography: software becomes gesture, precision machining becomes play, and human–machine interaction turns into a staged, slightly uncanny intimacy. By placing robots in everyday, non-industrial contexts, AATB reveal how deeply automation already choreographs our movements and desires. Their work asks a simple, radical question: what happens when machines stop producing things—and start producing experiences?
Friday, March 6
6–8:30pm
Swissnex, Pier 17, Suite 800, San Francisco
6:30pm // Echo Disco Foxtrot
Keynote by Dr. Joëlle Bitton
We run on echoes—signals bouncing back from the past, materials extracted elsewhere, labour rendered invisible. The future has already happened, but it is still used as an excuse to snub the present. AI makes us wonder where we are going, all the while we are here and now ignoring the intelligence of others – animals, plants, minerals, rarely wondering where they are going. Whether we deem them useful or useless too often steers our actions. We trade commodities as if fairness is built into the system or we’re just happy pretending it is.
So let’s dance: in the talk «Echo Disco Foxtrot», usefulness wobbles, agency gets distributed across clay and AI, trade gets redesigned, and we relish changing our minds.
7:00pm // Blobsters, Slop and Hyper-Events: Negotiating Visual Trust in a Post-Optical Era
Keynote by Martyna Marciniak
In early 2023 a series of highly realistic synthetic images produced by newly advanced, generative tools marked the perceived ‘beginning of the end of visual truth’. Any image from now on would fall into two categories: real or fake. Identifying the fake, as the argument goes, is our best defense against the possibility of a mass misinformation event… Yet, could there be a value in ‘staying with the fake’? Can it reveal something much more meaningful about our collective beliefs and misconceptions around the aesthetics of visual evidence?
In this keynote talk Martyna Marciniak will unpack the complex landscape of synthetic image misinformation using a collection of images from 2018 until now. The talk will use her recent research and artistic explorations as a strategy to navigate the tension between the techno-doom on one hand, and AI ‘gold rush’ optimism on the other. Approaching synthetic images as exaggerated portrayals of our past visual language, the talk will unpack selected case studies as a pretext to reconsider and organise the visual language of trust, evidence and attention.
The second part of the talk will question the AI misinformation panic as a potentially dishonest reversal, ignoring existing problems of visual evidencing and policies, while potentially inflating the value of the state of AI technology, ultimately acting as a market manipulation tool.
It’s time to reconsider the otherwise hidden mechanisms of synthetic image misinformation, and who benefits from them. Countering the prevailing dichotomy of the real vs fake, a dubious gift of post-trumpian political parlance, the talk will propose a new lexicon that names the nuances of the synthetic and evidentiary images and identifies their operational value, while undoing the harmful anthropomorphisation of AI concepts.
Saturday, March 7
11:30am–1:30pm
Swissnex, Pier 17, Suite 800, San Francisco
12pm // You’re Absolutely Right!
Masterclass by Andrea Anner and Thibault Brevet
Andrea and Thibault will first introduce their work – AATB was founded around a strong interest in the diffusion of robotics and automation technologies outside of factory floors. The studio has been exploring and questioning the use of robotics as a creative tool for research and practice in the fields of art, design and architecture, developing along the way the necessary infrastructure and skills to build upon these highly specialized systems.
The second part of the masterclass will take place by their new installation «void avoid (return nothing)», part of the exhibition, where they will share some insights into the research, development and production of the work, and highlight how new tools are enabling their production process.
Saturday, March 7
1:30pm–3:30pm
Swissnex, Pier 17, Suite 800, San Francisco
2pm // Anatomy of Non-Fact: The Boardgame
Masterclass by Martyna Marciniak
As consumers of visual media we interact with each image on our feeds for less than 3 seconds, on average. In that short duration we are unable to engage with the images critically, to counter their affective impact.
While post-truth framing of visual evidence encourages dismissal of the ‘fake’ image, while we’re waiting for the authorities of truth to define categories of visual fact, and while the contours of trustworthiness are constantly shifting, this workshop shows that there is a value in staying with the fake.
Using the Anatomy Of Non Fact research archive the participants of this workshop will get a hands-on opportunity to find patterns among seemingly disconnected images and track the changes in the benchmarks of the visual reality, as well as the technical and cultural evolution of synthetic images.
During the 1,5-2 hours session the participants will learn how to engage with the alternative, slower modes of seeing, to name different types and qualities of synthetic and evidentiary images and to find empowerment in visual literacy.
An international group exhibition featuring games, video works, and interactive installations under the title 'Algorithmic Entanglements' is the heart of REFRESH 2026. The exhibition is open to the public on select days.
More detailsDuring REFRESH 2026, the exhibition has tours available at the following times:
Thu, March 5 at 11am
Fri, March 6 at 11am
Sat, March 7 at 11am
Registration coming soon
REFRESH curator Maike Thies will give a behind-the-scenes look on select days:
Wed, March 4 at 5:30pm
Thu, March 5 at 2pm
Fri, March 6 at 2pm
To register, please contact Lucas Hagin, Program Manager Creative Industries.
Bio
Andrea Anner and Thibault Brevet, founders of AATB, are artists and designers, both graduates from ECAL. Their ongoing research around human/machine interactions led them to investigate the potential of robotics and industrial automation to exist outside the realm of factory floors. Their artistic practice involves a tight connection and understanding of manufacturing processes, ranging from software programming, electronics to mechanical engineering and precision machining. Reflecting on the dissemination and assimilation of robotics into mundane activities, their work critically explores novel situations arising from these shifts. The studio is based in both Zurich and Marseille.
Their work has been exhibited in institutions such as ZKM (Karlsruhe), V&A (Dundee), Ars Electronica (Linz), Chengdu Biennale (Chengdu), New Museum (New York), Venice Biennale of Architecture, Zollverein (Essen), Unfold X (Seoul), APS Museum (Shanghai), HEK (Basel), Istanbul Design Biennial, Milan Design Week, Museum für Gestaltung (Zürich). AATB have been artists in residence at CERN and at Atelier Luma in Arles. They have been awarded the Swiss Design Award in 2021.
AATB have been teaching in most Swiss Art and Design universities (ZHDK, ECAL, HEAD, FHNW, HKB, SUPSI), as well as internationally: Seoul University of the Arts, Design Academy Eindhoven, HFG Karlsruhe, Iceland University of the Arts, amongst others. They have been lecturing and speaking at conferences internationally: Tokyo, Prague, The Hague, Seoul, Madrid, Berlin, Cannes, Torino.
Bio
Joëlle Bitton is an «undisciplined» artist. She currently teaches at the Zurich University of the Arts where she experiments with pedagogy as an artistic practice. In her projects, Joëlle explores a sense of intimacy and drift with everyday machines and systems. Above all, she seeks to mix strangeness and familiarity, especially in material forms. As such, in her doctoral dissertation at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, she created interactive fabrication experiments, inviting personal data to control production machines.
Over the years, she has conducted research in various labs around the world and created interactive pieces about relationships between two cities, banality to counter stereotypes, bodies as interfaces, materializing messages into landscapes, etc. She also graduated in contemporary history from the University of Paris Sorbonne with a study on the rise of nations in the 19th century, in correlation with the development of networks and technologies.
Bio
Informed by a critique of political structures, research on systemic violence and their visual strategies, Martyna’s practice bridges aesthetics, media theory, and legal imaginaries. She traces how power inscribes itself through image regimes and visual narration infrastructures. Her work engages in a form of pataforensics—poking at the tropes of scientific and forensic aesthetics, revealing their absurdities, contradictions, and the risks of mistaking them for truth. By writing visual counterhistories, Martyna tries to smuggle in other ways of seeing.
Martyna’s work has been shown by Onassis Stegi, Copenhagen Contemporary, Ars Electronica, Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, Warsaw Biennale and LABoral Centro de Arte, among others. She is currently the Arts at Cern, Collide Resident. In 2025 she has been awarded the Award of Distinction Prix Ars Electronica, Artificial Life and Intelligence category.
Bio
Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher exploring the intersection between digital infrastructures and climate catastrophe. She teaches at Harvard GSD and leads the Data Mourning Clinic at GSAPP, Columbia University. A 2022 Harvard Wheelwright Prize winner, she collaborates with scientific institutions such as the DIPC Supercomputing Center on developing prototypes like Computational Compost awarded by Ars Electornica and the Spanish Biennial of Architecture. She contributed to Chile’s first National Data Centers Plan alongside local communities on the front lines of extractivism.
Otero authored En las Profundidades de la Nube (2024), proposing new paradigms and aesthetics for data storage, integrating architecture, preservation, and digital culture. Previously, she headed the MA Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven (2020-2023) and directed research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (2015-2022). Her curatorial work includes Opera Aperta (Special Mention, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2025), Wet Dreams (2024), Compulsive Desires (2023), and Work, Body, Leisure, the Dutch Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. She has co-edited Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation(2019), and After Belonging (2016), among others.
Bio
Chris Salter is Professor for Immersive Arts and Director of the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). He is also Professor Emeritus, Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal and former Co-Director of the Hexagram network for research-creation in arts, cultures and technology and Co-Founder of the Milieux Institute at Concordia.
He studied philosophy and economics and completed his PhD in theatre studies with research in computer music at Stanford University. His artistic work has been seen all over the world at such venues as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Barbican Centre, Berliner Festspiele, Wiener Festwochen, HeK, ZKM, Kunstfest Weimar, Musée d’art Contemporain, Muffathalle, EXIT Festival and Grand Palais Immersif-Paris, among many others. He has given more than 100 keynotes and talks in academic and cultural institutions internationally and is the author of Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance ( 2010), Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (2015) and Sensing Machines (2022), all from MIT Press.
Bio
Yasaman Sheri is a designer, writer and researcher at intersection of science, technology and society. Her work specializes in machine and biological sensing and explores new forms of perception enabled by advanced technologies, interrogating their cultural, ecological, and social implications. With a hands-on, exploratory approach, Sheri conducts critical investigations that range from material science, computing politics and design of novel sensing, revealing complex human–nature entanglements. She brings over 15 years of experience designing new computing interactions through machine sensing from industry.
She is also an educator teaching at ArtCenter College of Design, RISD, and CIID where she creates novel curricula notably Sensing School, Critical Ecology and Everything as Input. She is currently Principal Investigator of the Synthetic Ecologies Lab at Serpentine Galleries and is Associate Professor at Media Design Practices at Art Center College of Design.
