From Canvas To Code – How Art Inspires Innovation

Anhand von Beispielen aus Musik, Performance, immersiven Medien und digitalen Plattformen geht es um Fragen von Kreativität, Urheberrecht, Fairness und Diversität ebenso wie um die Potenziale künstlerischer Arbeitsweisen für Innovationsprozesse. Das Panel zeigt, wie Kunst nicht nur auf technologische Entwicklungen reagiert, sondern als Experimentier- und Denkraum neue Perspektiven, Methoden und Impulse für die Gestaltung technologischer Zukunft eröffnen kann.

Transkript des Panel Talks 15.07.2026 @ Tech Days.

Martina Taubenberger

We are really happy that we have this panel today. On my right you see Chagall van den Berg, some of you might have seen performing this morning. Her beautiful dress is at the same time her instrument.

Then I introduce Matthias Strobel. He’s the president of Music Tech Germany. He runs a conference on music and technology that’s called Musical Frontiers. He used to have an artist agency, the Wicked Artists, where he promoted artists to work with technology and innovation. (…)

Then I’m very happy to introduce Alla Kolpakova. She’s responsible for management, for the management strategy and growth in the govar GmbH, she’s by heart a political scientist and studied law. Very different field expertise also.

Then to my left, Mathis Nitschke (Sofilab, Corpus). Some of you might have heard his presentation in the Tonhalle.

Ralf Schmid (Pyanook) He’s a sound producer, and a professor of composition and music in Freiburg, and he also uses sensor gloves and sensoric gears and technology in his performances.

What a panel. Thank you all for coming from all over Europe to us today. We have forty five minutes and so much to talk about. For us, as coming from the arts, we could fill a whole day with this. So I tried to keep it as crisp as possible and want to concentrate on one question that is maybe relevant to you as well. Why should tech companies and developers work with artists?

What’s the benefit in connecting with artists and connecting with the arts? And I would like to start with Alla Kolpakova from govar GmbH because govar is a company that not only sponsors the arts a little bit, but the combination of arts and technology and solutions for the industry is ingrained in your DNA. Could you tell us briefly what govar does?

Alla Kolpakova

Yes. Thank you. Thank you for having me here. It’s a pleasure to talk about my favorite topic on how we can bring creativity to industry and make value. And I represent a team of people, the govar Studio. We are a software company, and we have basically two legs. This one is an industry and one is art. And art for us is intensity. It’s passion, and you can call it more serious R&D. And for us, it goes in both directions. When we work in our art exhibition and we develop there something for the core, we bring this to our industry application. And the aesthetics from the art is also very big value. And going back, we have also the robots from the industry and make the art stage ready. This intersection happens for us in our teams. They are very diverse, and it’s a lot of fun to work around like this. So not seeing invention in the silo. It’s not possible. And yeah, this I think it’s also the passion of the team, which always makes us to explore more and invent more and try more.

Martina Taubenberger

And I asked Alla, when we prepared the panel, how much of your resources or your not human resources go into the arts and how much goes into the economical part of your company? And you said it’s 50/50, and I think this is really amazing. (…) And Alla told me that’s basically in your own personal DNA as well. You bring passion for technology and the passion for art together. And for you to understand a little better what govar does, we have a short clip that shows both parts or both souls or sides of your brain, as to speak. (…)

And maybe can you maybe summarize in one or two sentences what does your development or the work for your customers, for your industry customers? We saw that you do AI learning for automobile for the automobile industry also. How do you profit from it? What do you learn from the art experiences for your work, for your customers?

Alla Kolpakova

Yes. I’ll make an example. In the late twenty-four, we premiered our EMIXAR art exhibition. And there, we have the first time 60 people on the same time with glasses on a big space. This was also then brought to the on the same core, on the same development core to the industry applications. And so you can imagine that in our core, the govar core. And we have the art and the technology application at the same time. We use the same technical devices for the industrial applications as for the art.

Martina Taubenberger

I would like to give the same question to Matthias (Strobl). Matthias you are specialized in the music industry and performing arts. How would you answer the question? How would tech companies make profits from this collaboration. In terms of innovation but also other things.

Matthias Strobel

I think there’s a couple of things that go well when art and technology meets. Like, one thing is that an artist per se doesn’t have any KPIs or any pressure from any c level cost a lot of resources and a lot of time and a lot of yeah. It’s a lot of money that’s also then being used for experimentation. It’s good to collaborate with artists to figure out what can be done with the technology outside the intentional purpose or use case of it. And there’s a couple of examples in this world that came out of that, like, the first Chrysler airflow car was basically invented in a way because a theater designer kind of, like, came out of the concept for these days, there’s an artist that kind of, like, used, I don’t know, 10,000 silkworms to make them spin around the scaffolding. And that was basically the trigger for people who at NASA who are trying to figure out how we can actually make life on Mars possible. So bioengineering basically started with that kind of, like, inspirational art piece in that sense.

I think there’s a lot of potential when it comes to figuring out innovative products and services on top of what’s already existing. The other one is that society might know from another field, which then causes a bad reputation for that word, but you use it in a totally different ethical way. And you need to communicate it to the broader society. There’s no better way than art to basically communicate it and make it understandable to people.

I think that this probably the two the two biggest, yeah, assets that Art has when it comes to using technology and understanding the benefits for tech companies or manufacturers of technology.

Martina Taubenberger

I think we also saw it in the video how when you have it in an art exhibition and there’s this playfulness and for people actually to try it out and to play around with it. I think this emotionalization of talking about technology, or maybe it’s the only way for us to, on a broader level, talk about technology. Because I think that a lot of people out there would not understand half of the speeches or presentations here today. Art can be a bridge for this. You also mentioned how artists treat technology differently, and I would like to now talk to Ralf (Schmid) and Chagall. Both artists who at some point said, hey, I’m gonna try this. And I start with Chagall because you both basically work with this technology, the MiMU gloves.
Maybe you can show the MiMU gloves or the sensor.

And it’s really interesting because Chagall helped develop those gloves. So you’re also you also became a programmer. And Chagall actually helped Ralph work with the gloves, but they met here for the first time ever. So great that we have the TechDays.

Chagall

We met 5 seconds ago. This is the closest we have ever been together.

Martina Taubenberger

So maybe before we talk about why you are doing this, can you briefly explain us what the MiMU gloves are and how you got in touch with this technology?

Chagall

Right. Okay. They are pieces of fabric that you wear on your hands. And in each finger, there’s a sensor that measures the bend of each finger. And then there´s a sensor on the wrist which measures the way you move your arm through the air, basically. And then you can attach that to sounds and visuals, and you can kind of program and map that yourself as an artist. The interaction between your movements and the outcome, that will become the art.

Martina Taubenberger

But you weren´t originally a person who studied Art & Technology? You were just a singer and a composer in the beginning and then?

Chagall

I love music and I made music with my computer to produce, like, tracks and compositions behind my sounds that I sing. I produced my own music in my computer. Computers are amazing as we know because they can do a lot of things, and they can you can really easily create sounds and things that you can’t imagine with even, like, real physical instruments. But the problem lies, at least for me, but also other people, a little bit in that you make these, like, amazing compositions or amazing sounds that you couldn’t even thought possible. And then you take your computer on the stage and then you press a button to have the sound come out again. And for me, that wasn’t real life music making and because it took away all of the risk of playing an instrument and also the you lose the connection with the audience. Like, everybody’s been to a concert. Everybody knows what it feels like, what it sounds like, what it looks like when a drummer hits the drums or hits the guitar. And then you connect with the musician because you understand that they’re doing it right there for you in that moment, like you’re, like, witnessing this unique moment in time.

And with electronic music, when everything is, like, even in the screen, basically, you kind of lose that connection. So that’s why I joined the company that makes these gloves and became very fermentable.

Martina Taubenberger

So, you mentioned some other things that I think are very important when talking about art and technology. Why we should bother. I don’t know who of you witnessed the opening key note this morning by Gabriel von Mitschke-Collande. And he talked about values. And I think this is an important keyword for us here. He talked about the loss of trust in connection with digitality and technology. And I think also loss of sense of control or self-efficacy and a loss of sense of place and time.

I think and I’m giving the question to Ralf also. How important is the sheer physicality on stage that maybe made you use those gloves? And Chagall already mentioned the risk taking, the being in the moment, the connecting to the audience in an actual physical way. Maybe you can comment on this a little bit from your side and also talk about how you use those gloves.

Ralf Schmid

Yes. Thank you. Well, I come on a different path to the gloves because I’m a pianist, and I’m also a composer and a writer of music for big ensembles, for orchestras, choirs, big bands. And I was always experimenting with electronics. That was a near run-in the years after 2010 or so when many pianists, especially in Berlin and some other cities, were experimenting the with electronics. Maybe you have heard of some of those artists, and I was one of them, not in Berlin, but in that in that in that scene. And I realized the same as Chagall, it is boring to have an artist on stage with a laptop, because you don’t know if this person is answering E-Mails or doing anything else. But the physicality of piano playing, I mean, we can literally see this in front of us even if we have a muted a muted screen or muted concert. It is a physical act. For me, having done so much music in analog in pure analog way, I didn’t want I didn’t want to lose that. And that moment when I started to work with sensors, especially the MiMU gloves, I felt that it’s possible to keep going in a in a organic way, sculpting music, triggering music, and not working with a button, not working with a fader or an op, but being wirelessly free in a room. I mean, imagine you can be standing up from the piano and I could keep going with producing sound or shaping something. That was very revolutionary.

Martina Taubenberger

Maybe at this point, so you get a sense of what we are talking about, the organic sculpting of sound, I suggest that we have a quick look of what you are doing in this production, that we did together. That is called the Human Touch and was a piano concerto with a Czech orchestra and singers that we did here in Werksviertel in 2022.

This is what we were saying, you don’t sit there with your laptop, you use your body. And when I was in your presentation, Mathis (Mathis Nitschke had another talk at TechDays), this morning, I had to think about this because you were talking about your sound producing and sound design and how we actually perceive our environment through sound. Wee live in a three-dimensional space, and the parenting technology, especially digital technology, is not necessarily connected to space that much.

You brought up the term of authenticity. Do you see a connection to what Ralf and Chagall were talking about? To that way of looking at sound as something that connects us to space and time? Sorry, I just made this up. (laughing)

Mathis Nitschke

I take it a bit from a different angle. I am an artist as well, but I do have history in industrial UX – sound design. There is interaction with non-verbal sound, and this is the topic where I come from thinking about sound and robotics. That is also why I was creating this company, collective for producing generative models. Authenticity here might be that we have some entity in the same room as a counterpart. There is something that is connecting and communicating with us on a shared level. And this is something that sound can actually do.

Martina Taubenberger

It is kind of mean because he was supposed to talk about something different on this panel. I’m really sorry. (laughing).

So through the arts we can keep humans in the technology. We can make it physical. At the same time, I was wondering maybe Matthias, because you are in touch also with a lot of tech companies, and you help musicians and tech companies to collaborate, to meet, to get together, to share experiences.

How difficult is it on the one hand to convince developers and tech companies to work with artists? How difficult is it for artists to get their hands on expensive technology?

Because we usually don’t have funds in in the arts. And how difficult is it on the other side to take away artist’s fear of experimenting with technology? Do you have some, maybe some experience from your work?

Matthias Strobel

These are a lot of different questions. A new technology that can be used in a different way and therefore then solve one of these issues that we have in the music industry. So, all of these people are very open about that because then that’s what they do. With the fast of the even better access now to technology for everyone, it also opens up worlds for artists that weren’t there before. Two days ago, I had a call with a guy who used to be on tour with them. He’s pretty old. He went on tour as he was a bass player of Tina Turner. I like him. He’s really, like, a solid musician that knows his craft. And he spent the last nine months building a software that he was dreaming of his entire life, but now he can do it by himself because we have AI and all that kind of stuff. I think this is a huge enabler for people who always have, like, this kind of, like, gap or fear or missing access to technology. They have big shifts. It takes a lot of time to actually make decisions, and especially for an artist that I’m not alone, then it’s very hard to get access to this kind of technology, and you really need to explain how and why you wanna use it. One example, I started going into MusicTech in 2011 where we had we had created a software, which we also had a patent for, that we could translate any kind of data stream into music in real time. We could take anything that creates data and turn it into music. After a year with a, like, working MVP and everything, we went to Mercedes Benz and told them, like, look. We can all use all the sensors in your car and turn them into music. You basically can try the car and use the brake sensor, the accelerator sensor, or whatever it is, and kind of, like, give them a musical note so that it kind of, like, creates music that fits to the outside environment. But we were four guys, end of twenties, beginning of thirties from Berlin, and they talked with us for two or three months, but then they stopped. Fast forward two years ago, at CES in Las Vegas, Mercedes Benz launched MBUX with will.i.am because will.i.am is will.i.am. When he knocks at the door of, let’s say, his friends, then they kind, like, actually start working with him, and they feel exactly what we pitched to them ten years ago. I think that’s it’s very important, like, lots of the things in this world. If you have a name, it’s easier to get access to technology. If you don’t have a name, but you’re super creative and you could create some sort of value for the company, you really need to either have a warm introduction to the company or you have to be able as an artist to communicate in a way that people in the company understand what you actually do with their technology. And also make it possible for these people to put you engineers aside, etc.

Martina Taubenberger

You need to be able to express this to the company…

I also want to touch the best practice by example because, Ralf, you you’re using the MiMU gloves, which are gloves that are developed for musicians. Yeah. But at the same time, you’ve got in touch with a local censored developer and you convinced them to sponsor you and help you. And you helped them develop their technology and they helped you develop yours. Maybe you can share how you approached this and how the collaboration worked.

Ralf Schmid

It is a local company. I live in Freiburg. I am professor at the Music University. There is not much industry. But there are two leading sensor companies. And one of them, their CEO was an art friend. So he started to sponsor this project, PIANOOK, that we just saw. And then we we thought, why not taking this into a collaboration? Why not try out the sensors? And this is exactly what’s been said here. An artist will always take a technology somewhere else than you than you built it for. We started putting sensors up in these rigs and had dancers dance into sensor zones, And the audience could see the zone, and the music was changed by the behavior, by movements of the dancers. And many other examples. What we do now, and this is just in two weeks, we prepare a very big project that is called Subterra, which is a participative concert game. I’m working with a game designer now with a team of game designers in Zurich. And we, again, work with the company Sensopart, and it’s not just monitoring with their senses of stage, but an entire hall. Let’s say, it’s a bit bigger than this one. All the hall is monitored, and wherever the audience walks, something could happen and people see the feedback of their action. It´s a concert game, and I think Sensopart is more than happy. At least that’s what they tell me because they develop their craft with applications they would have never expected. It´s a very interesting collaboration and yeah.

Martina Taubenberger

And I think you can all check it out. Twenty ninth and thirtieth of July. It’s taking part live and an action, so you can go there. We come from a best practice example where you as an artist convinced the tech company, and your best practice example is the tech company that’s forcing the artists to win them over to use the technology. Right?

You are not necessarily working with artists who have already experienced with AR and VR. Right? You actually invite them.

Alla Kolpakova

We invite them. We give our technology to them as a brush. It’s a brush to the artist to express himself and extended reality. Every installation of ours is a mix of different disciplines from sculptural artists, from musicians, from light artists. And we bring different artists together. That’s always an invention for us. And we break the limits of technology, of perception, and we experiment. And in this experiment, we’d love to call it the happy little accidents, which bring us a lot of value and joy, but we also transfer in our exhibitions.

Martina Taubenberger

And I think we’ve not yet touched on one aspect that is really important, and that is aspect of content. Now we live in a time where we have a feeling, we don’t need the arts anymore because any artificial intelligence can do just as well as the artist can. And now we come to the company or the platform you funded, which is Corpus, which deals with this exact question, music and the sounds of the future. Maybe you want to tell us a little bit about Corpus, what it does, and why all of you and all of us should consciously use that kind of licensing platform in the future.

Mathis Nitschke

Before we get there to the licensing thing and legal thing. The whole terminology of AI is the worst. So, there is hardly anything intelligent in these systems. Especially not artificial, it is not the Supernatural thing. It is very human. The joy of acting with LLMs, so called AIs is that they have a lot of knowledge compressed in what we call the latent space. And it gives you an interface to interact with this compressed knowledge. But this is human. There is nothing artificial. It just gives you new ways to communicate with this huge library of knowledge. And that is the exciting part. But if you realize that this is actually a human to human or human to crowd thing. That is very natural.

We create a platform. Corpus is a producers´ collective. It is Group of producers, milk or wine, and they group together to build this factory where you make cheese or you make wine. And this is basically what Corpus is doing. It’s collecting the music from this community of musicians. It’s a voluntary contribution. You contribute your music, your music is registered…

Martina Taubenberger

Yeah. We could fill a whole panel with discussing this. So, we kind of try to squeeze the art into this one panel and try to put a bit of a kaleidoscope up what kind of different topics we can cover.

I think that if we talk about quality or we talk about what is lost, if we get rid of the arts and do everything and try to do it in different ways, I think it always remains a conscious decision. And I’m quoting Gabriel from this morning again: He said, technology must serve people the other way around. The humans are here to stay.

I think it’s a conscious decision that we all take to keep the human in the technology, and the arts can be a big, big, big contribution to this in all our physicality and in all to have gestures that we bring into the whole into the whole thing. For me, it’s really about self-efficacy. It’s about having the capacity to shape reality. And I think that audiences see this in art that works with technology, that there is self-efficacy, and that there is the possibility to shape literally in time and space. Art is foremost human expression, and my personal opinion is we will always look for the human expression in the other. We will always look for the other, as we said before, and we all have the wish to express ourselves. And this will stay on no matter how much we give our everyday craft to artificial intelligences or other technologies. It’s really about distinguishing between real authorship and crafts and between content and purpose.

That’s kind of my ultimate reason to keep the arts not separated from life, but actually as a part of life. And I want to say thank you to Peter Möhring and Kai Hermsen who were brave enough to put this in the center of a program for the tech days for the first time in this in this sense. We don’t only discuss this among ourselves, but we can discuss it with you.

Also, thank you to the technicians and I and named Peter and for everyone because I brought them the video files about an hour ago, and they included it. (…) What all of these artists (we curated at TechDays) have in common is that it’s a combination between technology and analog and humanity and between content and purpose. And now we have the honor to see Chagall perform again. And before you go on stage and we leave you here with you, could you briefly, as our last contribution to explain, what are you actually doing with your suit and how it is working.

Chagall

I am wearing the gloves and also this suit. It is covered in sensors, I am covered in sensors. So here is this is my Shake avatar. This is my avatar that’s basically doing exactly what I’m doing. Basically, point well, I’ve just told it to point at my feet and then now they’re following my foot. And I realized the lights will be following my foot too. So it’s a completely interactive I have an interactive experience with this giant light installation. So if you would like to see this in real life, then write a kind email to Tech Days, and then maybe next year, we’ll have the real B.A.B.Y. here. Nice. Yeah.

Martina Taubenberger

(…) Now we see a virtual representation of the project. And thank you to all my panelists, Matthias, Alla, Ralf, Mathis, and Chagall. Thank you very much, and I hope you enjoyed the conversation.

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Art meets Tech – Tech Days 2026