Christian Schmidts & Martin Sulzer
Real-Time Narrative Environments – Avatars, Language Models, and Game Engines
Workshop, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Mondays, 16-20 h, 7 dates: 27.4., 4.5., 18.5., 1.6., 15.6., 29.6., 13.7.2026, Hardenbergstr. 33, room 110

Registration on Moodle starts on 9.4.2026:https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=3054
Enrollment Key: unreal

This course begins with worldmaking as an artistic and conceptual practice: the design of environments, relations, and conditions in which actions, voices, and narratives can emerge. Rather than starting from fixed stories, we begin with atmospheres, rules, and spatial constellations, asking how scenes become possible and how meaning takes shape through interaction. Students are invited to build speculative real-time environments in which avatars act, speak, and transform the conditions of the situation. Within this framework, the game engine is introduced not simply as a technical tool, but as a stage and meta-medium for composing, simulating, and testing such worlds in real time.

Drawing on media theory, posthumanism, and design research, we frame worldbuilding and avatar design as intertwined artistic and conceptual practices. Students are invited to treat space and language as co-authors in a shared digital ecology. The game engine is approached as a meta-medium that can absorb and re-stage multiple traditions of representation—from painting and theater to film, game worlds, and AI-driven simulation. We will examine how human representation shifts across these media forms, from theatrical bodies and cinematic figures to NPCs and autonomous AI agents, and how these shifts affect identity, subjectivity, and reality.

Students will develop speaking avatars that operate within a shared real-time environment using finely tuned or carefully configured large language models (LLMs). These avatars function not merely as characters, but as generative agents that shape dialogue, atmosphere, and narrative possibilities. The process can be understood as a form of conversational art, encouraging improvisation, freestyle, and the emergence of unexpected exchanges. Personal texts, theoretical references, images, and 3D models serve both as training material and as structural components of the virtual world. The aim is to create a dynamic ecosystem in which avatars interact with humans, one another, and their surroundings.

Avatar design may range from figures based on real people to free, abstract, or hybrid entities. Beyond dialogue and interaction design, students will shape and program the behaviors of both avatars and the 3D environments they inhabit. The course combines artistic research, ethical reflection, and hands-on modules in level prototyping and procedural programming. Tools include Unreal Engine, Metahuman and n8n, an open-source automation tool for orchestrating AI-based systems.

References: 
N. Katherine Hayles — My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts [Book]
Benjamin H. Bratton — The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty [Book]
Brenda Laurel — Computers as Theatre [Book]
Lev Manovich — The Language of New Media [Book]
Damjan Jovanovic — Worldmaking.xyz [Web Resource] — worldmaking.xyz/About (Worldmaking)
Parag K. Mital, Seth Rosetter, Arturo Castro Prieto, Jacobo Heredia Zurita, Breanna Browning — Orchestrating Emergent Storytelling with Embodied Multi-Agent Systems [Paper] — OpenReview (OpenReview)
Gati Aher, Rosa I. Arriaga, Adam Tauman Kalai — Using Large Language Models to Simulate Multiple Humans and Replicate Human Subject Studies [Paper] — PMLR (Proceedings of Machine Learning Research)
Epic Games — Unreal Engine Documentation (incl. MetaHuman) [Documentation] — Unreal Engine Docs / MetaHuman Docs (Epic Games Developers)
n8n — Documentation [Documentation] — docs.n8n.io

Fulfilment criteria for ungraded accreditation: Participants will work in groups to design their own avatars and narrative worlds around self-chosen topics. These may draw on personal material, but can equally incorporate external theories, literary texts, interviews, or conceptual fragments. The selected content will inform the avatar’s tone, perspective, and interactive behavior within the shared real-time environment.

Prerequisites for Participation: No formal prerequisites are required. The course will include introductions to Unreal Engine and n8n. We will also provide starter templates to help you get started. Students may also work with other similar tools they are already familiar with, where appropriate. At the same time, the course engages a relatively complex technical stack and is therefore particularly suited to students in higher semesters who are interested in working at the intersection of art, design, and technology. Openness to experimentation, collaborative work, and a willingness to engage with digital tools are essential.

Christian Schmidts is a Transylvania-born, Berlin-based designer, artist, and educator whose practice moves across architecture, media art, and research. He has worked across architectural practice, artistic production, and academic research, including many years as a research assistant in the Department of Digital and Experimental Design at the Berlin University of the Arts. His work engages with the conceptual and spatial potentials of computational design, focusing on how real-time environments, game engines, and machine learning influence performance and human–machine interaction. Christian has also contributed to research on integrating mycelium-based composite materials into computational fabrication processes, exploring sustainable approaches within architecture. He is involved in the interdisciplinary Master's program Design & Computation, jointly run by the Berlin University of the Arts and the Technical University of Berlin, which investigates the changing relationship between technology and society.

Martin Sulzer's interdisciplinary art revolves around questions of perception and how reality is constructed. In doing so, he intensively examines the promises of salvation offered by religious, capitalist, and technological systems, which not only imagine a certain reality but also actively create it. He contrasts the impositions of the creative class, to which he belongs, with trash, counter-culture, and hacking – in search of radical ideas accessible to many. In addition, he gives workshops for young computer nerds and is active as a researcher and lecturer at the Berlin University of the Arts and at Fraunhofer HHI in the field of immersive media. His practice ranges from video projections and interactive installations to public interventions and concerts.