XR-History Award 2026

Digital tools reshape our understanding of history and the way we remember and preserve the past. They allow us to challenge dominant narratives, bring previously unheard voices to the forefront, and expand opportunities for collective memory. While historians and their books have long shaped the most visible spheres of history-telling and commemoration, new forms of digital storytelling and immersive media offer their own possibilities to experience, question, and reinterpret the past.

We are interested in addressing events or figures from the past, structures of violence, oppression, and injustice rooted in history and still shaping intercultural relations, as well as new digital methods of archiving and remembrance. Today, when multidirectional memory culture is under threat, we are explicitly interested in projects that evoke solidarities between communities with intergenerational traumas.

We always welcome diverse and cross-media formats and approaches – artistic, narrative-shaped, or experimental – that engage with gaming aesthetics and understand XR as a method of connecting worlds: digital and analogue, past, present and future, and beyond.

For the third edition of the award, we collaborated with A MAZE. / Berlin 2026 – 15th International Games and Playful Media Festival. The winning project was rewarded with 2.000 EUR during the A MAZE. Festival in Berlin. Our three nominees were exhibited at the festival, and representatives were invited for a panel talk.

We are excited to announce the winner of the third XR-History Award: Sickness International with "Flesh Network"!

What happens when the history of technology is not merely recounted, but can be physically experienced? With "Flesh Network", the artist collective Sickness International provides a striking answer to this question. The game-based performance combines physical movement, familiar – and less familiar – computer interfaces, and the logic of our digital present to create a spatial, interactive experience of the history of modern communication technologies.

The jury recognised "Flesh Network" for opening up a sensory and social perspective on the history of technology. Rather than presenting digital culture as a neutral story of innovation, the project draws attention to questions of accessibility, dependence, participation, and power as embodied conditions.

"Imagine that the systems of communication that we use everyday on our phones – imagine that these systems are the same systems that also distort our bodies and senses. imagine that the networks through which you talk to your family, or access entertainment, or gather knowledge, or play games – imagine that these systems at the same time work through your body, your flesh and your senses. imagine that the media technologies that connect you to the world, that they simultaenously use you and your body as a prosthetic, as a battery, as conduit, as raw material. They extract, they distort and reshape, they hijack and loot your body.

They always did that, thats how they were built. That is their history, a history of the body. There are bodies in the network. And that history is nothing like the matrix, where Neo sleeps like a baby in a pod as a human battery and dreams the simulation. IT’S NOTHING LIKE THAT.

You are hooked up into the network, there is constant noise of dial up modems, the rhythms of information being pushed through cables and nerves. The network doesnt just plug into you. It rearranges and invades, it turns your measurements into code. It steals your hands, your eyes, using them for itself. There are commands, orders, there are people complicit, you are complicit and compromised. Hands finger you, they hook you in, steal your breath. You feel like a floppy disk, like a telephone, like a battery leaking acid. You are that, a data dog, a computer, a modem, a part of the network. You were used to built the internet, the machine, the network.

The history of technology is a bodily history, a history that mangles the machine and body together and always has. The History of technology is written in flesh and nerve currents, intimately. The body history of technology disables the body to enable itself, it violates to be seamless. And this is what you might learn by imagining: What connects is what makes sick, the same body that is yours and not yours.
With the work the jury has selected, you dont have imagine this alternate history of the technological, eugenic and embodied present.
You can feel it, you can become complicit in it, you can watch. You can experience this other history. You can extend history onto your own body, where it always was."

Laudatory speech by Simon Strick

Ren Loren Britton: "Coalition Constellation: Constellating Reparations" is a multisensory installation following nonlinear stories about affirmative, collaborative practices of social justice. The stories consist of past and contemporary examples of collective self-empowerment that have led to success over time as a result of sustainable coalitions between disabled people, trans people, those affected by racism, and other oppressed groups. This work is part of the larger research project, Coalition Storytelling, and is directed against forms of passivity and negativity in our present society and moves toward a ‘we’ that is multiple, complex, maintaining a multitude of goals, practices, collectives, and oppositions, while still making political change possible.

Sickness International: "Flesh Network" is a game-based performance that presents a history of communication systems leading up to today’s Internet, focusing on the role of disability in the design of the sound processing and networking technology that undergirds the modern web. Accompanying the historical content, the project uses interactivity to stage awkward performances and bodily encounters, raising questions about the role of technology in negotiating boundaries and configuring human ability.

Cuerpos Migrantes / Veronica Sabat: "Unsettled" is an interactive immersive installation that explores migration as a shared human and ecological condition through responsive light, sound, and spatial interaction. Visitors embody the experience of entering and negotiating a new habitat within the historically layered context of the Mediterranean. The work engages with the Mediterranean as a historical border space shaped by centuries of migration, colonial exchange, and contemporary crisis, transforming migrant testimonies into a collective living archive. Rather than presenting history as fixed, the work activates it through embodied experience and shared memory.

The supporting programme, co-curated by us, included the German premiere of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s performance “It’s Time to Make a Choice” at HAU Berlin. In this interactive performance by the internationally acclaimed artist – whose video game-based works have already been shown at MoMA PS1, the Serpentine Galleries and Tate Modern – the audience itself became part of a science fiction role-playing game. Through collective and individual decisions, the participants explored societal values, hard decisions and driven commentary to expose our social climate and turbulent times.

Margarete Jahrmann is an artist, artistic researcher and professor for Experimental Game Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 2025 she was awarded the Österreichischen Kunstpreis Medienkunst. She curates and leads artistic research projects such as The Psycholudic Approach: Exploring Play for a Viable future or ROBOPSY. An Artistic Exploration of Collective Memory through Role-Playing with AI Language Models on AI and e-commemoration.

Max Czollek is an author and co-editor of the magazine Jalta – Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart (Yalta – Positions on Jewish Contemporary Life) and curator of the Coalition for a Pluralistic Public Discourse (CPPD) for a pluralistic memory culture. Since 2023, he has been moderating the discussion series „heimaten“ at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. In 2024, he was DAAD Distinguished Chair in Contemporary Poetics at New York University, NYU. His poetry collections are published by Verlagshaus Berlin, his essays by Carl Hanser Munich.

Vanessa Amoah Opoku is a German-Ghanaian interdisciplinary artist exploring history, digitality, and marginalized narratives through mixed realities. Her world-making practice constructs alternative epistemological frameworks that challenge conventional notions of innovation and future visions. Opoku is part of the artist collective PARA, which uses an interdisciplinary, research-based and performative approach to explore various phenomena of globalization and politics of memory.

The XR-History Award is a biennial award initiated by Körber-Stiftung’s eCommemoration programme, honouring projects using immersive technology to explore artistic approaches to history-telling, history education, and commemorative culture.

First awarded in June 2022 in collaboration with VRHAM! Virtual Reality & Arts Festival, the second edition has taken place in cooperation with Hamburg’s leading contemporary art space, Deichtorhallen. The XR-History Award is currently the only digital arts award that explicitly addresses and encompasses digital projects interweaving past, present, and future.