Oğuz Emre Bal
Oguz Emre Bal is a Barcelona-Istanbul based artist and creative technologist whose work examines how physical and digital realities intersect, overlap, and transform one another. Drawing from architecture, spatial computing, and embodied cognition, his practice investigates how human presence constructs and reshapes space across XR environments, virtual simulations, and mixed-reality interfaces.Working with emergent technologies such as XR, 3D printing, Bal creates interactive installations and data-driven sculptures that explore how bodies perceive, record, and alter space. His projects including Specularism, İçlek AR/VR, X-Scapes and Space Hackers build multi-layered forms of digital matter that behave as active, responsive interfaces. Bal’s contribution to the artworld lies in his ability to merge architectural theory, embodied cognition and spatial computing into a unified artistic language, one that reveals how future digital realities will be materially and sensorially constructed. Through these works he interrogates the fragility of perception, the phenomenology of presence and the algorithmic construction of new realities within virtual environments.Bal’s artistic research is closely connected to his PhD at Istanbul Technical University, where he studies spatial awareness, digital twins and embodied experience in architectural education. Since 2017, his works were exhibited in major international festivals and institutions including the CYFEST (Saint Petersburg), ADAF (Athens), Connect for Creativity / British Council (Belgrade) and Sónar+D (Istanbul). His practice has also been presented across the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe.He is the co-founder of UNIO Design Studio, established in 2017 in Istanbul, through which he continues to develop art and design projects that merge nature, technology and speculative digital realities. Operating at the intersection of art, architecture and technological experimentation, Bal proposes that reality is not given but constructed, continuously reshaped by the body, its trajectories and the computational systems that now mediate our experience of space.
