The official launch of the project will take place on May 4, 2026, in the ARTour app. The work will then be available continuously via the app.

On May 9 at 5 p.m., an artist talk with Gilles Jobin and Sabine Himmelsbach (director of HEK) will take place on site on the lawn of the Kaserne area.

On the lawn of the Kasernenareal, visitors can use their smartphones to discover the new work Riesen by Gilles Jobin, which the Geneva-based artist and dancer developed for ARTour and in which they can interact with virtual dancers and figures. The augmented reality exhibition is a journey between the digital and real worlds that allows art to be experienced in new and innovative ways.

In Gilles Jobin's work Riesen, two dancers in colorful costumes move across the lawn of the Basel Kaserne area with the flowing movements of contemporary dance, immediately captivating the audience. Full of expressiveness, their choreography conveys an atmosphere of the joy of life and lightness. The figures and their movements were recorded using motion capture technology and transferred to virtual avatars. The larger-than-life avatars refer to the relationship between humans and technology, to questions of presence, scale, and identity in digital space.

Jobin's work in the field of augmented reality is characterized by high artistic standards, technical innovation, and the urge to transcend the boundaries of classical performance formats in contemporary dance. He succeeds in transferring choreography into new visual and spatial contexts, thereby reopening dance to a broader, tech-savvy audience. The audience can repeatedly reposition the virtual dancers within the space. They then dance a sequence of approximately five to ten seconds before disappearing again and triggering a new sequence with their new placement or overwriting the existing one.

The work invites us to rethink dance as a form of encounter between body, space, and technology – and in doing so to discover both playful and poetic dimensions. With Riesen, Jobin creates a play between reality and virtuality that not only shifts standards, but also transports the essence of dance and movement into a new, poetic space of perception.
 

ARTour is made possible by Basel Tourism and was created in collaboration with HEK (House of Electronic Arts). 

The ARTour app can be downloaded free of charge from the App Store (iOS) and the Play Store (Android). You can find all further information about ARTour and the artworks on the website basel.com/artour.