After five editions in France, Canada, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, NUMIX LAB returns from December 1 to 5, 2025, with an edition in Austria and Hungary. This Canada-Europe event is an initiative of the French agency {CORRESPONDANCES DIGITALES] and the digital producers’ association Xn Québec. It is aimed at creators (studios, artists and audiovisual producers), cultural venues (museums, concert halls, art centers, immersive rooms, cultural districts, festivals or general public venues) and public and private financial partners (foundations, national and regional funds). It fosters encounters and collaboration between these three types of players to stimulate the co-creation, co-production and co-distribution of immersive works and installations, in all their forms. At the last edition, over 270 participants from 20 different countries had the opportunity to exchange ideas through conferences, networking events and site visits.
The theme of the sixth edition of the meeting of Hungarian and Austrian ecosystems will be “Beyond Borders”. This theme will be explored from three angles:
- Beyond boundaries in terms of venues – new cultural venues: we’ll be highlighting new players who are keen to host immersive exhibitions (real estate developers, transit areas, creative labs, railway stations, etc.).
- Beyond disciplinary boundaries – artistic and cultural hybridity: we will give a voice to new projects at the crossroads of books and digital creativity, video games or augmented live performance;
- Beyond age boundaries – youth and immersive, digital creativity: we’ll be highlighting how different cultural venues are developing programming aimed at young audiences.
This year, panels will be organized in co-production with renowned partners such as Museum Booster (an international museum innovation platform based in Austria), MUTEK (an international festival dedicated to emerging forms of digital creativity based in Quebec City) and MBRANE (a festival dedicated to audiovisual programs for young people based in Sweden). Academics and editorial partners will also be present for this sixth edition.
New cultural venues – Monday December 1 to Wednesday December 3 in Budapest, then Veszprém.
The first part of NUMIX LAB will be dedicated to new cultural venues. A panel will highlight how digital creativity is inviting itself into unexpected spaces, far from traditional venues: sports halls, natural spaces or shopping malls.
Among the projects presented:
- PIXIM (Hungary): in the heart of a shopping mall in Budapest, a Black Box has been installed to broadcast high-quality programming dedicated to the digital arts (5 to 6 experiences offered simultaneously). This 25-seat projection space helps to transform this shopping center into a cultural destination. Visitors can reserve tickets remotely or via screens installed on site.
- Moment Factory (Canada): the Montreal-based studio will be presenting a range of projects designed to renew the way people look at and experience natural spaces, through the creation of animated trails and visual works to be discovered at night.
- Alfa5XR (Spain): With the support of Catalan creative studio Layers of reality, a sports hall was converted into an immersive sports experience room.
Other presentations will be added to this first panel. TheImmersive Centers Alliance (ICA), a network of immersive cinemas launched at the previous edition of NUMIX LAB, will present their challenges after a year of existence. Festivals such as Germany’s Fulldome Festival and Greece’s Athens Digital Arts Festival will present their projects and ambitions.
Tours will be organized during the first few days of events in Budapest to highlight particularly inspiring venues such as the Light Art Museum (a former covered market dedicated to kinetic and immersive art), the Ethnographic Museum or the House of Music (a museum dedicated to music, with a multi-sensory and interactive trail and a sound dome for augmented musical experiences).
On Wednesday December 3, before heading to Vienna, NUMIX LAB will spend an afternoon in Veszprém (European Capital of Culture 2023) to meet with CODE. The Center of Digital Experiences is a former cultural center of the county of Veszprém, now an interactive digital arts center. The shows offer an immersive experience based on interaction with visitors. The venue comprises two zones: the exhibition area on the first floor with permanent and temporary digital and analog installations. On the upper floor, the Hexagon, a 400-square-meter former theater, hosts mainly 360-degree immersive shows, as well as hybrid events and theatrical and musical productions.
This visit will also be an opportunity to see Deep space, a 2-wall projector accompanied by a human meditation on scientific subjects, developed with Ars Electronica and equipped with this system since 2009. Since 2020, the system has been used in a number of locations: the West Bund Museum in Shanghai (China), the M511 complex in Hangzhou (China), the Natural History Museum in Zagreb (Croatia), the DAS MORGEN hotel in Vitznau (Switzerland) and the Sinaloa Science Center in Culiacán (Mexico). A major initiative to develop digital links with the Hungarian ecosystem.
Artistic and cultural hybridity and museum innovation – Thursday, December 4 in Vienna.
The last two days of the event will take place in Vienna, at the Belvedere, the city’s most innovative museum.
A panel will be devoted to artistic and cultural hybridity, in co-production with the MUTEK international festival which, since its creation in 2000, has combined electronic music and digital creativity. This time of exchange will provide an opportunity to present several projects at the crossroads of artistic and cultural disciplines, such as :
- Between opera and digital creativity with Opera Now! (Germany) . Opera Now! is a collective founded in 2024 by directors, set designers, authors, actors, playwrights, cultural managers and game designers from a variety of artistic disciplines and backgrounds. Challenging and reinterpreting conventional notions of opera, the collective explores hybrid forms of storytelling, through the interaction of music, theater, immersive arts and creative digital elements. From this perspective, Opera Now! seeks to experiment with innovative, plural and complex modes of expression, likely to shape the opera of tomorrow. An opportunity to present new projects such as No One’s City, a virtual reality experience offering an immersive and sensitive understanding of migration.
- Between public spaces, live and digital arts with Brussel major events (BME). As a partner of the 2023 edition of NUMIX LAB in Belgium, BME works on major events in the city of Brussels, through hybrid projects and innovative venues. For example, BME organized the installation of an artistic installation, “Lucia”, created by studio Mirari and multimedia artist Anne Lagacé. A project developed above all to transform a public space into a living, interactive space, and to offer an inclusive venue for art, not only through access outside traditional institutions, but also through sound (classical music), sculpture, immersive animation and multimedia.
In addition, the Vienna event will showcase a wide range of museum innovations, with workshops, presentations and visits to museums to discover their projects. These events will be organized in partnership with the Vienna-based international museum innovation platform Museum Booster. This consulting and research platform has been involved for many years in the digital transformation of museums and cultural institutions on an international level, with programs such as FUTURE MUSEUM and EXCENTRIC (to develop collaborative practices around cultural data).
A workshop will therefore be dedicated to these programs, along with feedback from museums on their innovative projects selected by {CORRESPONDANCES DIGITALES] and Museum Booster. Among these projects, the new virtual reality experience “Les jardins disparus du roi soleil” offered at the Château de Versailles by GEDEON in co-production with GEDEON, will be presented. The many projects undertaken by CosmoCaixa in Spain will also be shared. In addition to the magnificent science center opened in Barcelona, the Caixa Foundation runs a network of over 10 venues in Spain (CaixaForum), a digital streaming platform CaixaForum + dedicated to audiovisual content on culture and science, and a traveling exhibition project in a truck criss-crossing Spain and Portugal.
These presentations will be followed by tours of digital projects in Austrian museums such as :
- The MUMOK
- Le Belvédère, which will unveil its new temporary exhibition and projects with Roblox
- The MAK
- The Vienna Museum.
Immersive youth audiences and platforms for digital and territorial innovation – Friday, December 5 in Vienna and Linz.
This final day will be devoted to programs for young audiences at a variety of immersive venues, and to regional innovation platforms.
A panel will be dedicated to immersive venues that have chosen to open up to family and school audiences. This panel will be organized in partnership with the Swedish festival MBRANE, dedicated to audiovisual programs for young audiences. It will feature contributions from MINA (Museum of Immersive New Art – Romania), an immersive venue in Bucharest dedicated to children: Mina Kids. 1000 m ² with 15 interactive and digital installations, deployed to encourage creativity and interactivity with children.
The Philharmonie des Enfants (France) will also be in the spotlight: a play area dedicated to children aged 4 to 10, where they can play, explore, listen to, experience and feel music through interactivity. The Philharmonie is deploying a range of themes (sound forest, sound machines, on stage!, voices by the thousand, music this way) to help youngsters discover the history of music and sound. Finally, Vienna’s National Library will be sharing behind-the-scenes details of its Bookworms project, an augmented reality story that lets children explore the Austrian National Library in an entirely new way.
Finally, before leaving to visit Ars Electronica in Linz for those who wish to do so, a final time of sharing will be dedicated to the role of festivals, events and creative labs in structuring territorial platforms for the creation and dissemination of digital creativity. This panel will be organized in association with SAT, the Society for Arts and Technology (Canada).
The theme Beyond borders – New countries will be discussed at NUMIX LAB, with a focus on new markets and Eastern European countries. Registration is now open! For further information, please contact us ( bonjour@correspondances.co) !
This event is organized with the support of the European Union, the Government of Quebec, the CNC and the French Ministry of Culture.
Charlotte BAUGE and Antoine ROLAND