Home › Program

Lift10 Experience: MODE:DEMO


Besides inspiring talks and workshop, one of Lift Conference's special treats is the Lift Experience. Think of a huge space where new media artists and interaction designers are invited to display pieces that address the conference topics in a different way. Meet other attendees and get inspired by a series of project aim to provoke a dialogue between people with different backgrounds and cultures from all over the world.

This year, our artistic partner for Lift experience is the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD-Geneva). This partnership is focused on both the exhibit and the scenography, relying on the Design Masters of this school. The project selection committee includes members from HEAD–Geneva’s Media Design teaching staff and from Lift’s committee. HEAD–Geneva also invited interactive art researcher and theorist Jean-Louis Boissier as the curator of the exhibition. In addition, the Lift Experience scenography was realized by the HEAD-Geneva's Espace Communication master.


This master, which focuses on space and graphic design, created the exhibition scenography and signage of Lift10. Projection is the presentation tool that has been chosen for the MODE:DEMO exhibit. Used as multiple light filters, screens become the center of the intervention. They progressively darken the interior space, showing gradually the projections. Step by step, the supports slowly disappear et fade into the hall immensity. In parallel, an element is propagated: the ballon is deployed as a rhizome in the various micro-spaces of the CICG. This balloon also serves as an unifying symbol for digital technologies, the main focus of the conference.

Under the title Mode-Démo and based on the conference theme, It offers a comment rather than an illustration of this theme, occasionally from an offbeat and ironic point of view. To emphasize their experimental dimension, in the context of Lift’s “Connected People”, the works are presented in “demonstration” mode. The exhibition unfolds as a serie of scenes with identical sets with a projected images and videos that will amplify the shared presence of works, authors and the public, and to create a certain distancing effect.

The notion of Mode-Démo also refers to the possibility of automatically projecting a short recorded version of the demonstration. Mode-Démo interprets the phenomena of persistent connexion, immediate transmission, mobility, distance work and social networks. In the process initiated by the creation of the Media Design program offered at HEAD–Geneva, this intervention at Lift10 aims at identifying the latest perspectives in the field of relational design. The exhibition brings together a diversity of artists, designers and researchers from several universities and schools belonging to HEAD’s international academic network.


  • Animal Superpowers (Design Interactions, Royal College of Art, London)

    Animal Superpowers (Design Interactions, Royal College of Art, London)

    Animals have senses beyond human experience, they instinctively sense approaching tsunamis through low frequencies, communicate through pheromones or can navigate through magnetic fields. We believe reality is tuneable and we developed a series of sensory enhancements as experiential prototypes... » read more

  • Bicycle Built For Two Thousand - Crowdsourced music

    Bicycle Built For Two Thousand - Crowdsourced music

    Bicycle Built For Two Thousand by Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey is comprised of over 2,000 voice recordings collected via Amazon's Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard. The result was a... » read more

  • Linyl: Records of light

    Linyl: Records of light

    Linyl is a project conducted in 2009 by Ishac Bertran, Shruti Ramiah, Benoit Espinola and Natalia Echevarria at
    the Interaction Design Programme (CIID/DKDS).

    Lynil are discs of colour created from photos or images of past experiences that can be played on a special record player to... » read more

  • Social Collider: A Google Chrome experiment

    Social Collider: A Google Chrome experiment

    The Social Collider by Sascha Pohflepp and Karsten Schmidt reveals temporal and lateral cross-connections between conversations on Twitter. The data we are constantly producing provide a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships. On Social Collider one can... » read more

  • Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots

    Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots

    This project from James Auger, Jimmy Loizeau (Auger-Loizeau) explores new ways of thinking about robots, through the medium of speculative design proposals.

    Mousetrap Coffee Table Robot. A mechanised iris is built into the top of a coffee table. This is attached to an infra red motion... » read more

  • RR. headbanging simulator

    RR. headbanging simulator

    Headbanging by Antonin Fourneau (ENSAD) is a type of dance which involves violently shaking the head in step with the music, most commonly rock and heavy metal music. RR is a set of wigs used to simulate headbanging while playing music. The goal is simply to wear a wig and violently move your... » read more

  • Eternal Summer Storm: Experiments on muscle memory transfer

    Eternal Summer Storm: Experiments on muscle memory transfer

    Eternal Summer Storm by Ka Fai Choy (Design Interactions, Royal College of Art) speculates on a future digital library of body movements or dance techniques that can be experienced beyond the audio-visual conventions of historical documentation. The project translates acoustic muscle vibration... » read more

  • Devices for Mindless Communication: Speculating about the future of real life mundane conversations

    Devices for Mindless Communication: Speculating about the future of real life mundane conversations

    This project from Gerard Riallo (Design Interactions, Royal College of Art) speculates satirically about possible roles of technology in face to face communication. Modern human behavior is largely driven by time efficiency and a clear tendency to minimize the cognitive impact of all actions... » read more

  • Les Editions Volumiques: interactive books

    Les Editions Volumiques: interactive books

    Interactivity, particularly the video game, leads to a new conception of narration and of the role of the reader. How can one introduce the practices and user experience of digital media into the printed book to update it, to extend its field and to engage the reader in a new way? The Éditions... » read more

  • Mobilizing: A creation tool for interactive narratives on mobile screens

    Mobilizing: A creation tool for interactive narratives on mobile screens

    Mobilizing by Cédric Brunel, Matthieu Cherubuni, Dominique Cunin, Clovis Duran, Max Mollon,
    Mayumi Okura and Arthur Violy (EnsadLab-Paris; HEAD-Genève/Media Design) is an application creation tool for mobile screens of the iPhone or iPod type, specifically devised as part of the research... » read more

  • Touch_Me: Installation textile interactive

    Touch_Me: Installation textile interactive

    The interactive carpet Touch_Me by Juliette Sallin (HEAD–Geneva) is intended to highlight the mediatory qualities of textiles by incorporating electronic means to render the textile object more expressive and ludic. Touch_Me employs a new technological process – shape memory wires – placed... » read more

  • Think Thrice v.3: Interactive sound installation

    Think Thrice v.3: Interactive sound installation

    Think Thrice v.3 explores the interdependencies and the cross relationships between the notions of sound, space, resonance, duration and time. Without space, air or architecture, no sound is possible since there is neither displacement nor connection. One of the intrinsic values of a space is to... » read more

  • The pursuit of happiness: Visualisation of dialogues on Facebook

    The pursuit of happiness: Visualisation of dialogues on Facebook

    The Pursuit of Happiness by Matthieu Cherubini (HEAD–Geneva/Media Design) attempts to explore what people are really seeking through a service like Facebook. The experiments presented exploit the network's access flaws and show some of the content and the main features of the dialogues which... » read more

  • Still Life: Mobile Aquarium

    Still Life: Mobile Aquarium

    Still Life by Clovis Duran and Nicolas Rivet (HEAD–Geneva/Media Design) is an aquarium which functions as a moving interface and as a mobile architecture. This object thus loses its sculptural character by providing a vehicle for the fish which inhabits it. Still Life offers a model for a... » read more

  • Scolu: Aquatic creatures on mobile devices

    Scolu: Aquatic creatures on mobile devices

    In Scolu one discovers a virtual and interactive aquarium – also a multi-tactile interface – inhabited by aquatic creatures created by Leïla Jaquet in collaboration with Stanislas Bernatt (HEAD–Geneva/Media Design). By placing their iPhone on the interface, visitors see the behaviour of... » read more

  • Multiuser Arena: Shared works: networked multi-user artistic environments

    Multiuser Arena: Shared works: networked multi-user artistic environments

    Resulting from research into networked multi-user spaces, four projects for mobile screens are presented. Three of them propose passing an image between interconnected iPhones/iPods in the form of potentially narrative multi-user scenes. Engravings taken from an edition of the Fables of La... » read more