Mark Schobben.

Inside the Robot Lounge in Heerlen, a living lab where art and technology converge, Mark Schobben reshaped the perception of presence and space.
His installation, and the moving robots developed during the Future Workshop: First Steps Robotics, go beyond a visual experiment: it is a sensitive ecosystem of relationships. Through sensor activated cameras screens and interactive projections, Schobben creates an environment that listens, reacts, and responds to human proximity.

As visitors move through the space, their gestures trigger subtle changes: light waves shift, projections tremble, and invisible boundaries come alive.
The installation behaves like a sentient membrane, a hybrid organism that translates movement and emotion into light. The camera’s hyper-sensitive lens captures even the slightest motion, converting data into chromatic frequencies that reveal the hidden dialogue between body and machine.

Schobben’s research begins with a fundamental question:
How far can technology amplify perception without replacing it?
At the Robot Lounge, this question becomes architecture, a physical, luminous environment where the human and the artificial coexist, negotiating their mutual boundaries.
Here, light is not a medium but a form of consciousness, a temporal trace that records presence as both energy and absence.

The workshop unfolded as a collective exploration of interactivity and emergent behavior. Together with Schobben, artists, designers, and developers explored how systems can react with empathy: how data, when shaped by artistic intent, can create emotional resonance rather than distance.

Within the broader mission of Future, Mark Schobben’s work becomes a statement:
the future of technology is not cold or detached, but responsive, a landscape where light, sound, and movement merge into shared awareness.
In this sense, Schobben’s installation doesn’t simply represent the future; it inhabits it, listens to it, and translates it into luminous form.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved