What is Inter(mediate) Spaces?
Shared spaces are disappearing in today’s fast-paced and urbanizing, algorithmic world. People live close together yet often feel disconnected from one another. How might new technologies, like AI and XR, be used to create spaces where connection can be more meaningfully cultivated?
Inter(mediate) Spaces is an immersive, research-driven installation and living archive that explores how personal memory, collective experience, and place are formed, shared, and mediated in contemporary life.
The project creates participatory environments where visitors encounter fragments of lived experience—voices, stories, spatial traces—that overlap and intersect across cities and communities. Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, the work functions as a dynamic system, continually reshaped by those who enter it.
Structurally, the work unfolds as a two-part experience: Phase A, a series of AI-fostered community Living Labs, and Phase B, a co-created XR installation that blends virtual and physical spaces.
Phase A: The Living Lab
The first part, the Living Lab, introduces advanced, cutting-edge AI tools activated through dialogue and co-creation. Through in-person gatherings, memory journaling and hands-on experimentation, participants uncover the roots of their values. AI becomes a tool for expressing what matters, empowering people to visualize memory, desire, grief, and imagination.
Phase B: XR Installation
The XR installation is built from the Living Labs and narratively mirrors the way they unfolded. It is a multi-person experience where two people walk through a three-room journey, eventually arriving at a shared meeting point where their interactions shape the world around them.
Learn about the Installation →
The Path So Far
Inter(mediate) Spaces is currently in active development, with Phase 1 completion scheduled for late 2025. Supported by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, we have established our transnational foundation by hosting three intensive Living Labs in Montreal, New York City, and Berlin. These gatherings were not just workshops but proving grounds—prototyping a participatory framework that merges human storytelling with custom AI tools.
Our focus now shifts to the physical manifestation of these stories. We are currently touring demo activations of the XR installation across our three partner cities, beginning with a premiere in Montreal in August 2025 at the Goethe-Institut.
“I have some optimistic ideas, but a pessimistic feeling [about AI, the future]. I think the only thing that can create a counter today is community. I think these tools are potent, as are people, when they decide to use their powers... The simple fact of seeing who else is working on it, as real people, that’s the strongest thing - to make sure that people get together to do it.”
— Tim Summers, Berlin Living Lab participant