open call: experience lab

What does it feel like to smell coffee, hear a melody, or remember a loss? And what if that feeling could be mapped as data? Ohme is launching an open call for digital artists from the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles to develop an artistic project in residence with EXPERIENCE, a neuroscience research programme at ULB.

The selected artist will work with real scientific datasets mapping conscious experience — not to illustrate science, but to question and give it new form. Does your practice involve creative coding, generative art, data visualisation or computational media? Keep on reading.

Open Call: Experience Lab

Ohme is launching an open call for artists on the theme of consciousness, in collaboration with EXPERIENCE, an ERC-funded research project at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB).

This call is for digital visual artists connected to the contemporary art field of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles – that is, artists who live, work, or have a professional practice within the French-speaking art community of Belgium.

We are open to all media within the visual digital field, with a particular focus on practices engaging data as primary creative material – including but not limited to data visualisation, information design, creative coding, generative art, algorithmic or AI-based practices, and computational media.

About Ohme

Ohme is a research and curatorial platform investigating contemporary societal issues through transdisciplinary initiatives in arts and sciences. Operating at the intersection of artistic and scientific disciplines, Ohme aims to contribute to a more informed, curious and inspired society by initiating and facilitating encounters between artists, scientists, students and the general public.

Every year, Ohme supports and accompanies several artists through artistic and scientific residencies, actively supporting innovative artistic projects, offering solid curatorial and scientific guidance, fostering networking with experts and researchers, and encouraging exchanges between art, science, and society.

About EXPERIENCE / CRCN – ULB

EXPERIENCE is an ambitious five-year research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and led by Professor Axel Cleeremans at the Centre for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences (CRCN), Université libre de Bruxelles.

The project is dedicated to a fundamental question in consciousness science: What is consciousness good for? In other words: Why would we do anything at all if the doing was not doing something to us?

Consciousness – and more precisely the nature of subjective experience – is one of the most significant scientific challenges of the 21st century. Scientists have made enormous progress in understanding how our senses and brain processes work. But there is one question they still cannot answer: why does any of it feel like anything at all? Why does the smell of freshly brewed coffee feel good? Why does the memory of an unhappy breakup feel bad? Why does the taste of a madeleine feel nostalgic? The fact that our inner life has a texture, a colour, a quality – that is the mystery at the heart of this project.

This quality of inner experience is what philosophers call phenomenology – from the Greek phainomenon, “that which appears”. Phenomenology is simply the study of experience from the inside: not how the brain processes a stimulus, but what it actually feels like to live it.

Classical science has often treated this inner dimension as a side effect – a kind of passenger along for the ride, with no real role to play. EXPERIENCE challenges that view. The project proposes that conscious experience is not a byproduct but a function: that the very fact that things feel a certain way is what allows us to care, to choose, and to act. In other words, feelings are not decoration – they are how we assign value to the world.

To study this scientifically, the EXPERIENCE team collects large datasets of similarity and preference judgments – asking people to compare stimuli and rate how things feel in relation to one another. From this data, they build three-dimensional maps of what could be called the landscape of experience: visual representations of how different feelings relate to each other in the mind. Think of it as a kind of atlas of inner life – charted not through words, but through patterns in the data.

These maps – and the datasets behind them – are the primary material made available to the artist in residence.

Examples of such datasets can be found here: https://osf.io/suqkp/overview?view_only=fdc73f1485664a2c9c7571e0c62abe6a – data from the paper “Exploring the role of micro-valence in the phenomenal space: insights from similarity judgments and deep learning models” https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niag005

Website: https://erc-xp.ulb.be/

Residency Description

The call is open to individual artists or collectives (hereinafter “the artist”).

The selected artist will participate in the EXPERIENCE research programme at ULB, engaging in a series of discussions and working sessions on consciousness science, with a focus on the notion of phenomenal space – the mathematical space in which all conscious experience unfolds. The artist will meet and collaborate with researchers and specialists in these fields.

In this context, the artist will develop an artistic research project in dialogue with the programme’s interdisciplinary community, benefiting from Ohme’s curatorial support throughout.

The residency is specifically designed for artists working at the intersection of data, information design, and artistic practice – those who engage with scientific data not merely as content to be communicated, but as raw material to be questioned and given form. The core resource made available to the artist is a set of empirical datasets mapping phenomenal quality spaces: structured collections of similarity judgments and subjective preference data describing how individuals perceive, compare and value conscious experience. These datasets are not illustrations of scientific results – they are an invitation to explore what it means to represent inner experience through the tools and languages of information design and data visualisation, and to interrogate the assumptions embedded in those very tools.

Possible artistic directions include, but are not limited to:

• Information design projects that engage critically with the visualisation of scientific data on consciousness – questioning the choices, conventions and blind spots involved in making subjective experience legible
• Generative or algorithmic works that use the structure of subjective valuation datasets as a compositional or visual grammar
• Data visualisation as artistic practice – transforming datasets into visual or spatial experiences that go beyond legibility to evoke emotion, ambiguity, or new ways of knowing
• Creative coding projects exploring neural space, latent space and their relationship to perception, emotion and subjectivity
• Critical or poetic approaches to data – questioning what it means to measure, map and represent inner experience

Residency Commitment

The residency is structured around a 20-day engagement with the EXPERIENCE research programme, taking place between September and December 2026. The schedule will be agreed between the artist and the CRCN team, and can be adapted to balance immersive collaboration with independent studio time.

The selected artist will actively participate in EXPERIENCE programme activities, develop an artistic research project in ongoing dialogue with the researchers and the Ohme team, and engage with the programme’s interdisciplinary community.

The residency will culminate in a public presentation as part of Ohme’s activities programme in December 2026.

What We Are Looking For

We are looking for artists with an established practice in data visualisation, information design, or related computational and digital fields, who are curious about – and willing to engage critically with – questions at the intersection of science, knowledge production, and subjective experience.

We are not looking for artists who already work on consciousness or neuroscience. Rather, we are interested in practitioners whose existing methods, research sensibilities, and design approaches could be meaningfully mobilised within this scientific context – and who are drawn to the challenge of working with empirical data produced by cutting-edge research on the mind.

The artist should:

• Demonstrate an established professional practice in digital art, data visualisation, information design, or a related field
• Show experience working with data as creative material – through code, custom tools, or creative use of platforms and languages (e.g. Processing, p5.js, openFrameworks, TouchDesigner, Max/MSP, or equivalent)
• Demonstrate a critical engagement with the tools, systems and processes underlying the production, collection and dissemination of information – treating visualisation not as neutral representation but as a site of interpretation, choice and potential critique
• Show an interest in questions relating to the mind, perception, cognition, neuroscience or the nature of experience – whether through previous projects, research, or a clearly articulated curiosity
• Be willing to engage actively with the EXPERIENCE programme, both theoretically and practically, and to work in genuine interdisciplinary dialogue with the research team
• Applicants should clearly articulate how their practice and methodological approach could evolve within this programme, and what they bring to the exploration of its central questions.

What We Offer

• Artist fee: €5,300, corresponding approximately to 20 working days based on CP 304 salary scales (at maximum 10 years of experience). The amount can be invoiced excl. VAT (HTVA) via an independent status (e.g. Smart), or paid as a salary through the Ohme ASBL social secretariat
• Production budget: up to €2,000 for production costs
• Professional documentation of the artistic research and outcomes
• Access to the EXPERIENCE research programme at ULB, including datasets, tools and documentation
• A preparatory reading list and onboarding materials provided to the selected artist over the summer (July–August 2026)
• Support from Ohme’s team
• Workspace at Ohme’s premises at USquare, Brussels (according to needs)
• Residency restitution in the framework of Ohme’s activities programme in December 2026