" Realities in Transition | The Reciprocal Trap Residency open call #1 "
Realities in Transition | The Reciprocal Trap Residency open call #1
Residency in the Netherlands blends art with XR technology and explores human labour and machine world-building
Image: RiT
As part of RiT 2 – Unwritten Worlds, V2_ (NL) invites artists and designers to co-create a shared artwork during a residency in Rotterdam that explores the hidden loop between human labour and machine world-building.
Residency Theme
In the age of agentic AI, Extended Reality shifts from a space of immersion into a system of extraction. What was once seen as a means of accessing virtual experiences now continually captures our interactions to use as training data. While it feels like you’re interacting with a system and shaping your experience, the reciprocal tarp unfolds: the system learns from everything you do. Over time, it uses your input to guide your choices, so you gradually start behaving as the system expects. XR becomes an operative environment in which perception and production collapse into a single feedback loop—an ecology of isolated co-creation. Drawing inspiration from Greg Egan’s Permutation City, the project explores how human behaviour—gestures, choices, and “common sense” actions—can serve as data to train autonomous AI agents, generating dynamic, shifting simulated worlds in real time.
The hybrid production residency is designed as a communal creation process of one joint artwork, with all residents contributing according to their individual expertise and vision. In a collaborative work environment, the residency aims to provide a nurturing space for a community of XR creatives who want to critically investigate the interplay between simulation and reality.
- For each round, 3 artists will be selected and joined by a creative technologist. Together, they’ll work as a group, to create a collective XR artwork.
- The residencies will alternate between moments of shared work, critical discussion, and practical experimentation, allowing ideas to emerge, transform, and consolidate in dialogue between artists, technologists, and cultural contexts.
INFO
AMOUNT
The three selected residents will receive a grant of 15.000€ each. This amount covers the artist’s fee as well as travel, accommodation, and subsistence costs for the duration of the residency.
APPLICATION DEADLINE
March 29, 2026
ELIGIBLE COUNTRIES
ELIGIBILITY
Artists who are permanent residents in one of the EU Member States or countries associated with the Creative Europe programme (list here).
- Age Eligibility: you must be 18+.
- Be able to work and travel around Europe.
- Not having received a grant in the RiT1 project.
- Not be affiliated with any of the Realities in Transition consortium partners, their affiliated entities, employees and permanent collaborators.
- Each participant can get a grant for only one program but can apply to more than one call.
- Be available at all dates when the programme will occur;
- Be able to speak and write English fluently;
- Be able to issue invoices;
Not be under liquidation according to the Commission Regulation No 651/2014, art. 2.182, or not be excluded from the possibility of obtaining EU funding under the provisions of both national and EU law, or by a decision of either national or EU authority.
APPLICATION DETAILS
For more information about the application details and eligibility criteria, please visit the official website.NOTE
*The calls that are listed on our website are shared for informational purposes and are sometimes subject to change. Please visit the organization's official open call website for up-to-date information.
DEADLINE
2026-03-29
TYPE OF SUPPORT
Public funding
FUNDING COUNTRIES
All EU Countries