Bio

Isjtar Vandebroeck

Fragmented realities

For over fifteen years, Isjtar Vandebroeck has kept returning to one question: where does agency go when perception is shared between a body and a system. Beginning in electronic music and live audiovisual performance, the work has moved from early pieces with autonomous agents and cellular automata (Catatonic State Society, Code31) through Blue Brute, where performers disappeared from the telling entirely and the story was carried by camera movement through architecture, performed live in real time, to Delirious Departures and Anxious Arrivals, where human and system-driven figures become indistinguishable from each other.

Most recently, One To(o) Many explored what happens when a single performer’s body is distributed across multiple virtual presences simultaneously – research conducted at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and published as a book chapter in 2026.

New work shifts the question from performer to audience: interactive pieces that place altered embodiment at the center of the experience, making the visitor the site of the research rather than its witness.

Since 2019, Isjtar has worked with CREW as Artist & Research Lead. Much of this work has involved developing the technology needed to realise the artistic ideas. EXP, an open framework for XR performance developed with CREW, reflects his belief that artists should be able to build their own tools rather than limit their imagination to what existing technology allows. Alongside his artistic practice, he has published peer-reviewed research through ACM, collaborated with medical researchers and is developing a PhD project. These different strands of his work all return to the same questions explored in his performances.