Room to Expand #5
Fine Arts & Performance & Set Design & Lectureship
Anastasia Putsykina & Chang Gao & Sacha Benedetti & Mathilde ter Hejne & Janina Audick

Registration at: roomtoexpand_ @udk-berlin.de.
Please include your name, study program and current semester.

About
Room to Expand Festival is a transdisciplinary program at UdK in which students critically explore and renegotiate concepts such as authorship, exhibition space, sole authorship and artistic production. Room to Expand in the SoSe 2026 offers theoretical/critical input on historical, philosophical and contemporary approaches on emerging AI interactive systems and tools relevant in spatial and performative art practices - led by Sacha Benedetti and Dr. Chang Gao. In the WiSe 2026/27 the focus is on the development and presentation of time-based art projects and performative art formats that will be presented at the end of the semester.

Overview of SoSe 2026 Workshops:
Workshop “AI - Himmelsmechanik oder Scharlatanerie”explores AI in stage and spatial design, focusing on its critical implications and potential applications in creative practices. In this lecture students engage with historical and contemporary examples—from ancient theatre automation to current uses of AI and robotics in performance, film, and art - led by Sascha Benedetti.
Time & Date
4.5, 18:30 - 20 h
at Lietzenburger Str. 45,10789 Berlin, stage set faculty room.

Workshop “Embodied AI, Performance, and Affective Systems” explores embodied and affective AI in performance and media art, focusing on biofeedback, interaction, and responsive environments. Across four sessions, students engage with both theory and experimentation to develop concepts for performative AI systems – led by Dr. Chang Gao.
Email: gao.chang_ @network.rca.ac.uk
Time & Dates
4.6., 14 -17 h
5.6., 14 -17 h
11.6., 14 -17 h
12.6., 14 -17 h
at Salzufer 13 - 15, third floor, 10587 Berlin, seminar room of performance class.

Credits
2 SWS, 2 ECTS for Studium Generale, ECTS tba for Master

Dr. Chang Gao is a Berlin-based multimedia artist and postdoctoral researcher working across artificial intelligence, bioelectric sensing, sculpture, film, augmented reality, and real-time generative systems. She is an Adjunct Lecturer (Lehrauftrag) at UdK Berlin, where she teaches Real-time AI and Embodied Experience in relation to Performance/Time-Based Media and stage design within the Faculty of Fine Arts and Performing Arts. She is an Associate Researcher with the Intervening Arts Collaborative Research Center (SFB) at Freie Universität Berlin and holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art in London. Gao is also a board member and communications director of the feminist collective art&dialogue (Berlin), as well as the founder and director of the Social Innovation Research Lab at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China. Gao’s artistic and theoretical practice investigates affect, desire, and wonder as epistemic forces that challenge cultural hierarchies, anthropocentric AI bias, and regimes of technopolitical control. Her research explores how affective computing, sensory systems, and bioresponsive technologies reshape perception, agency, identity, and social structures. Working across robotics, augmented reality, bioelectric systems, sculpture, real-time AI installations, film, and immersive time-based media, she integrates eroticism and bodily affect as critical tools to destabilize normative boundaries between human and non-human intelligence. By mobilizing desire and embodied sensation as subversive forces, her work confronts structures of censorship and exposes the ideological biases embedded in contemporary technological systems.
Her projects seek to unsettle dominant imaginaries of control and efficiency, foregrounding instead vulnerability, intimacy, and affective resonance as sites of knowledge production and political imagination. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Berlin, London, Seoul, Utrecht, Graz, Tokyo, Helsinki, and across China.

Anastasia Putsykina graduated in 2024 from the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK), where she studied Fine Arts in the Performance and Time-Based Media class. Her embodied, biographical, intergenerational, and feminist time-based art practice is closely linked to her work as an educator, where she develops and leads workshops exploring collaborative, performative, and cross-media approaches. Within the Institute for Fine Arts (Klasse Mathilde ter Heijne), she has been actively involved in Room to Expand since 2023, contributing to program coordination, technical support, and teaching by facilitating collaborative and performative project development. In 2024–25, she worked on the project InKüLe (Innovation for Artistic Education), where she developed and implemented media-supported teaching formats with a focus on sound, movement, and performative interaction.

Sacha Benedetti is a German-French composer, media artist, and theater artist who lives in Berlin and Corsica. In 1996, he co-founded the pirate radio station and artist-run radio station TwenFM in Frankfurt am Main with Dr. Suso Kraut, which broadcast performative audio art and electronic music. TwenFM relocated to Berlin in 1998 and continued broadcasting there until 2015. From 2003 to 2005, Benedetti served as board member of the media lab Bootlab eV, which, alongside the WMF Club at Berlin’s Telegrafenamt, served as an international meeting place and performance space for media artists and net activists during the late 1990s and early 2000s. With TwenFM, he laid the foundation in 2009, together with other radio activists from RebootFM and Piradio, for the first non-commercial radio station in Berlin, which continues to broadcast today on 88.4 FM. Since 2012, he has been active as a theater artist, producing video works and compositions for modern auteur theater and performances for artists including Janina Audick, Verena Dengler, Christine Groß, Suse Wächter, AndCompany, Sybille Berg, and René Pollesch.

Prof. Mathilde ter Heijne see here.

Prof. Janina Audick see here.