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How can digital tools translate images into virtual worlds?
• 13. Nov. - 11. Dec. 2025
• Online!
• Five-weeks, Thursdays, 6-8pm CET
• Small class of participants
• Certificate of Completion
Artist / Student (Full Time)
€245
Freelancer
€265
Professional
€295
Generous Supporter Ticket
€305
course
description
This course explores virtual environments as a new kind of pictorial space. We will work with image-making, digital architecture, and video game engines to rethink how pictures and spaces can be constructed, inhabited, and transformed.
A virtual environment is a constructed space and can be treated as a studio or stage where pictorial strategies are still central. While painting positions the viewer outside the frame, virtual space allows us to step inside, moving through images that shift with our perspective. Image-making becomes world-building, a place where multiple viewpoints and experiences meet.
Throughout the course, you will learn how traditional practices like painting, drawing, photography and collage can be extended into interactive, navigable, and participatory environments. Together we will explore how images are never neutral, how subjective framing and our politics influence perception, and how world-building in virtual space allows us to question structures and imagine alternative futures.
Each participant will contribute to a collectively built digital exhibition space, an evolving environment where individual works interact, transform, and grow together.
This class welcomes anyone interested in image-making: drawing, painting, illustration, digital art, collage, or photography. No prior technical experience is required: a shared template will allow beginners to dive in immediately, while those with technical knowledge can push their creative experiments further.
You will experiment with
Unity Game Engine, Unreal, and Blender 3D
Translating traditional image-making into digital space
Building and composing virtual environments
Animating and compositing 3D models
Designing and exhibiting work in a shared virtual gallery
who is this
class for?
This class is for artists, designers, and creative makers interested in translating traditional fine art techniques into virtual and interactive environments. It is aimed at those who want to explore how perspective, composition, light, color, and framing can shape immersive, time-based digital spaces.
Participants should be curious about world-building, dynamic virtual ecosystems, and the interplay between interactivity and visual storytelling. The class is also suited for anyone looking to experiment with VR, game engines, CGI, or computer-generated architectures as tools for creating living, evolving pictorial worlds.
course
outline
Week 1: Virtual Environments as Pictorial Space
Introduction to the historical relationship between painting, image-making, and virtual space.
From pictorial space to interactive worlds: strategies of representation.
Case studies: Gustave Courbet, Francisco Goya, Avery Singer, Philip Guston, Marlene Dumas.
Introduction to Unity, Unreal, and Blender: creating simple images and 3D environments.
Discussion: how pictorial strategies and spatial morphologies shape collective experience.
Week 2: Not All Images Are Pictures
Making virtual environments as you would a painting: from drawing and painting to digital forms.
Case studies: Laura Owens, Ian Cheng, Sara Sadik, Oscar Murillo.
Theory: Erwin Panofsky and Merleau-Ponty on cultural perception and embodied seeing.
How digital space makes images navigable and participatory: turning space into lived experience.
Week 3: Forms and Actions
Virtual environments as studios or stages where pictorial strategies remain central.
Collaborative world-building: integrating participants’ digital images, photos, paintings, and collages.
Technology as an extension of social relations: how personal experience becomes spatial.
The politics of digital space: curated content, coexistence, and dialogue between works.
Week 4: Composition in Virtual Worlds
Rethinking image-making as immersive world-building.
Extending traditional tools—perspective, light, color, framing, composition—into computer generated images and digital architectures.
Practical: setting scenes, building environments, compositing 3D space.
Sandbox platform training: experimenting with tools and workflows.
Week 5: Politics and World-Building
World-building as a political and cultural practice.
Designing a collective exhibition space that merges individual and shared perspectives.
Collaborative merging of digital environments into one evolving space.
Exploring how virtual worlds enable new narratives, resilience, and alternative futures.
about online classes
Classes are 'live' meaning that you can directly interact with the instructor as well as with the other participants from around the world. Classes will also be recorded for playback in case you are unable to attend for any reason. For specific questions, please email us and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.
about
scholarships
We are offering a limited number of reduced fee scholarships for this online class for those facing financial hardships. These allow participants to pay a reduced fee and are reserved for women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ who otherwise would be unable to attend. To be considered for one of these scholarships, please use this form.
To apply for a reduced fee scholarship, you must fill in the form no later than two weeks before the course begins. We will not accept any class sign-ups or scholarship applications after this date, as our regular sign-ups will determine the amount of scholarships we can accommodate. We will notify you only shortly thereafter if your application has been approved.
We are a small organisation with no outside funding and like many, we are also in survival mode. We depend on tuition fees for reimbursing class instructers, space fees, and operational costs. We ask you to consider this when applying for a reduced fee scholarship. <3
meet the
instructor
Mario Mu
Visual Artist, Director
Mario Mu is a visual artist and director living in Berlin, Germany.
Mario works on various research projects which are often constructed as extended gaming platforms. Apart from frequently incorporating sound and drawing, his practice mainly shifts between game design, 3D animation, and performance. He received a BFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia, and an MFA from the University of Arts in Berlin, Germany. He has been working on a series of events as an author and collaborator in the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb; Singapore Art Museum; TAP-Théâtre auditorium de Poitiers, France; V2 Rotterdam, The Netherlands; MGLC Ljubljana, Slovenia; MAAT Lisbon, Portugal; Play Co and Seager, London, UK; Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Research Center for Proxy Politics, Ufer Studios, Galerie gr_und, and Silent Green in Berlin, Germany; in Croatia Pogon and GMK in Zagreb, Metamedia Pula, Manus Split, among others.
Digital and online projects include collaborations with AVYSS, Mizuha, The Killscreen, The Carillon, BoCA Biennial, Milan Machinima Festival, Gamescenes, Itch.io, Gestalten Publishing, FACT Magazine, Wrong Biennale, The School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe, STYLY, Lima Sky, Pivilion, and Inquiry Inc.