Artist Talk on «Riesen» with Gilles Jobin and Sabine Himmelsbach
On May 9 at 17:00, an artist talk with Gilles Jobin and Sabine Himmelsbach (Director of HEK) will take place on the lawn of the Kasernenareal in Basel.
The official launch of the project will take place on May 4, 2026 in the ARTour app. After that, the work will be continuously available via the app.
In Gilles Jobin’s work Riesen, two dancers move across the lawn of the Basel Kasernenareal in colorful clothing, performing fluid movements from contemporary dance and immediately captivating the audience. Full of expressiveness, their choreographies convey an atmosphere of joy and lightness. The figures and their movements were recorded using motion capture technology and transferred to virtual avatars. The larger-than-life avatars point to the relationship between humans and technology, raising questions of presence, scale, and identity in digital space.
Jobin’s work in the field of augmented reality is characterized by high artistic ambition, technical innovation, and a drive to push beyond the boundaries of traditional performance formats in contemporary dance. He succeeds in translating choreography into new visual and spatial contexts, opening dance to a broader audience, including those with an affinity for technology. Visitors can place the virtual dancers repeatedly across the site. Each time, they perform a sequence of about five to ten seconds before disappearing again; placing them in a new location triggers a new sequence or overwrites the previous one.
The work invites viewers to rethink dance as a form of encounter between body, space, and technology, while discovering both playful and poetic dimensions. With Riesen, Jobin creates a dialogue between reality and virtuality that not only shifts scales but also moves the essence of dance and movement into a new, poetic space of perception.
ARTour is made possible by Basel Tourism and was developed in collaboration with HEK (House of Electronic Arts).
The ARTour app can be downloaded free of charge from the App Store (iOS) and the Play Store (Android). Further information about ARTour and the artworks can be found at basel.com/artour.