30 September 2026 | 17:30 – Talk
1 October 2026 | 16:00 – Workshop
09/26
Paula Strunden, PhD
Jana Čulek
/ Studio fabula /
Supported by the Kultura Nova Foundation
The Spatial Practices series continues with its third two-day event, this time focusing on architecture and extended reality.
Our guest is Paula Strunden, a transdisciplinary artist and researcher working at the intersection of material bodies, physical objects, and virtual spaces. Across a public talk and hands-on workshop, the event explores virtual environments not simply as representations of physical space, but as spaces that can be built, inhabited, and experienced through the body.
Through The Weight of the Virtual and Build Your Own Dream in VR, Strunden invites us to consider XR as a tool for spatial imagination: a medium through which architecture, memories, dreams, and stories can become environments we can physically enter and move through.
What if we could walk inside each other’s dreams, enter the subconscious, and wander through our thoughts as if they were buildings?
Paula Strunden presents her artistic research through a series of inhabitable extended reality (XR) models: spaces built at 1:1 that visitors enter with their whole body, touching, crawling, and moving through architectures that exist between physical objects and virtual worlds. Following the female VR pioneers of the early 1990s and their concept of embodied virtuality, she treats these models not as a way of representing architecture, but as a tool for building spatial experience directly through the body.
The talk concludes with her ongoing work Mirrorworlds, in which a single spoken dream is translated into a world you can walk into, and with the question her work keeps returning to: What if we stopped treating the virtual as an image and started treating it as a material to build with?
The talk will be followed by a conversation with Paula Strunden, moderated by Jana Čulek / Studio Fabula.
Bring a memory of a dream, a fragment, a recurring image, or a room you have only ever visited while asleep.
In this hands-on workshop, we turn dream memories into virtual worlds you can step into. Participants begin by drawing in VR, sketching dream spaces at 1:1 with the headset on. From there, we work with 3D mesh prompting and AI world-generation tools to grow those first sketches into environments, before bringing everything together in a game engine. What starts as a story becomes a place you can walk through and share with others.
The focus is on process rather than polished outcomes, using AI as a tool for spatial imagination. No previous experience with VR, 3D modelling, or game engines is required. Bring a laptop if you have one. Dr. Paula Strunden is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher working at the intersection of material bodies, physical objects, and virtual spaces. Through multisensory XR models, she reframes virtuality not as an escape from the physical, but as something deeply entangled with our bodies.
Trained as an architect at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais, and The Bartlett, UCL, and having worked for Raumlabor and Herzog & de Meuron, her design-led PhD recovered the work of female VR pioneers of the 1990s and applied their concept of embodied virtuality to XR.
She is currently an ETH Postdoctoral Fellow at Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich, and was Acting Professor for Emerging Technologies at Bauhaus University Weimar. Her immersive installations have been exhibited internationally, from the Royal Academy of Arts in London to MUNCH in Oslo.
The Spatial Practices programme was developed in collaboration with Jana Čulek of Studio Fabula.
The programme is implemented with the financial support of the Kultura Nova Foundation.
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Places are limited, so please reserve your place for: