ArtPrize is an open, citywide art competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the entire downtown transforms into a sprawling gallery. For several weeks each fall, museums, public spaces, and even perfumeries become exhibition spaces, drawing artists from around the world and inviting the public to explore, debate, and vote on the works that reshape the city. At Aroma Labs, one piece in particular is pulling people in through quiet intensity: Aqua Limina. Visitors interact with a virtual river world alive with spirits rendered through motion capture, AI, and CGI. Their flickering anatomies, drawn from myth and performance research, shift as players move. The work feels like an experiment in progress, where a water cycle doubles as a database of ancestral memory.
Mesmerizing as it is, Aqua Limina is also unapologetically technical. “Worldbuilding in game engines is built on the relativist knowledge that we live in a world of many realities,” says lead creator Yiou Wang.
Through independent intellectual curiosity, Wang expanded upon her Masters of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design to “materialize wild imagination.” Departing from notions of formalism, her work in interactive hologram and XR has been featured by the MIT Museum, SXSW, and many more. Since her 2024 collaboration with performance artist Alina Tofan, Wang has been developing immersive environments where water links performance, 3D art, and interactivity into a single current.
The project, built with motion capture by Tofan, sound by Yuj Archetype, and Wang’s technical fluency, reflects a broader shift in contemporary art. Technical literacy has become a medium in its own right. Arts organizations increasingly favor works that merge creativity with research and hard skills.
Across festivals and awards cycles, many of the most talked-about works are research experiments. Think of X.S. Hou’s slime-mold installations at OFFLINE Gallery or Christie’s auction of Refik Anadol’s Memory Temple, a data-sculpture that replayed Leo Messi’s most cherished goal.
This emphasis on research extends beyond new media. A recent exhibition at the Nairobi National Museum, Debe: A Container for Material Culture, exemplified how research and industrial design skills can amplify the impact of an installation. The solo artist featured, Adam Yawe, is trained as a biomedical engineer.
“Very often, I have an idea for a work I want to make or a process I want to engage with, but I stop myself…I spend time reading, talking to people or just walking around trying to find a connection or spark that would trigger the work,” Yawe reflects. “I think of this as a more abstract form of literature review, engaging with the existing ‘literature’ of the world, and making a connection to the work in order to give it some weight.”
Yawe’s work reconfigures mass-produced functional tools into aesthetic cultural objects by expanding upon the fabrication skills imparted during his technical training. Contemporary matatu (bus) speakers are converted into traditional instruments. Industrial clamps become handbags. Concrete drainage systems transform into modernist furniture. His work is creative, beautiful, and functional while remaining ideologically cohesive, exercising technical skill to serve concept and narrative.
For some creatives, the title of “researcher” now holds just as much weight as “artist.” While Yawe reconfigures material culture, Italian researcher-designer Tiziana Alocci probes memory and perception. Trained in industrial design, her practice begins with painstaking observation: mapping responses, studying acoustics, modeling interactions. Only after months of listening and measuring does she begin to build visuals.
Image Credit: Frequencies of Belonging, Tiziana Alocci
“Everything I create stems from extensive research,” Alocci says. “This research could span months, capturing visual, behavioural, biometric, sonic, and spatial data. More simply (or perhaps more romantically), it's an act of intentional observation and listening. These practices become powerful tools for focus and care.”
Her latest installation, Frequencies of Belonging, lit up Torre Piacentini in Genoa with generative audiovisuals shaped by emotional data and voice archives. For Alocci, research isn’t background—it’s the foundation: “The marriage of research and art gives my practice a meaning that goes beyond borders and aesthetics… Today, I cannot begin any work—not even at the conceptual stage—without inspiration from research, observation, or listening.”
Today’s leading artists are as much investigators of the world as they are makers of its images, objects, and systems. In Alocci’s work, as in Aqua Limina and Debe, the art is both object and experiment: a laboratory for experience, inquiry, and discovery. These projects exemplify a new paradigm in contemporary art, one in which technical skill, research fluency, and conceptual ambition converge. The resulting works are immersive, intellectually charged, and, above all, alive.
