This interview is part of an ongoing series published by the BIMA Immersive Tech Council that aims to draw attention to the groundbreaking work happening in the area of art, technology, and innovation.
Ivaylo Getov is a technical director and producer of interactive art experiences, collaborating with contemporary artists to enable unique encounters that surprise and delight. He regularly works with the French artist Pierre Huyghe, including on his recent exhibition Liminal shown at the Punta della Dogana in Venice, and has previously worked with Ian Cheng, Jakob Steensen and Hito Steyerl for projects at the Serpentine in London. Most recently, he was Technical Director on Ryan Waiting, an AI/virtual reality durational artwork by the artist Ryan Gander.
The following interview took place in December 2024 between Ivaylo Getov and Samantha King, Head of Programme at VIVE Arts (HTC). The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
First let’s begin with an introduction. Can you talk about how you came into your role as a Technical Director on contemporary art projects and what that involves?
My background is in very traditional filmmaking, specifically documentaries. I studied cinematography at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. After graduating into the world of freelance independent film production, I basically stumbled upon an application for a programme with Tribeca Interactive – an offshoot of the Tribeca Film Institute and an early player in bringing nonlinearity and experimental technology into the storytelling space. Tribeca Interactive was interested in bringing together film practitioners with creative technologists so they set up a series of events, one of which was a week-long hackathon at CERN in Switzerland. I remember not being sure how to define my role when I applied. The application had a series of check boxes: “are you a scientist, a filmmaker, a technologist”, etc. The last option was to declare yourself as a “black box,” some otherwise uncategorizable quantity. I was really drawn to that flexibility and to the fantasy of what that label could mean. To their credit, Tribeca didn’t ask me to justify why I felt that this was the best box for me even though my credits on paper were very clearly definable as “filmmaker.” They accepted me into the cohort as a black box and now I had a somewhat legitimate label to encapsulate all the weird skills that had been crystalizing in my practice and philosophy.
That process and event helped me to define a certain set of skills that later evolved into my current role as Technical Director. I realised that for certain experimental artistic projects there needed to be a team member leading the investigations, someone who was willing to take on the risk of finding out how to do something that had never been done before and potentially balancing an entire project on the foundation of this initial limited research.
What are some key artistic projects you’ve worked on that have had an enduring impact on your work?
There were a handful of instances where I was brought into a project which was already in production in order to solve a specific new problem or explore a late-stage concept. These were crucial opportunities for me to observe how artists were approaching their relationship with technology.
Shortly after the hackathon at CERN, I became part of an open source community of like-minded people also dabbling with creative applications of technology, both in New York City and in Europe. Around 2015, someone from that community recommended me to the artist Pierre Huyghe who had just received a commission for the sculpture festival Skulptur Projekte Münster in Germany. He had been given a disused ice rink that was set to be demolished and he terraformed the space into a new world: he dug into the ground, he mounded earth, he introduced animals, and he modified the structure of the building itself.
A current throughout all of Pierre’s work is systems: ecosystems, logic systems, cellular automata. Pierre wanted to simulate a living, emergent behaviour in a digital space using augmented reality – a layer of reality that was persistent but was only visible by looking through a device. This predated any standard tools for making augmented reality. So we (my collaborator Mandy Mandelstein and I) were tasked with figuring out how to situate a digital world definitively in the physical world and to create a shared experience for audiences. I will be forever grateful to Pierre because he was willing to take a risk on a technology that was only beginning to see some traction in the general public and to do so with someone so early on in their career. I’ve ended up working with him four or five times now. Working with Pierre on that project became a bridge into an echelon of other very smart artists, all of whom were perhaps that much more inclined to trust me by association.
Pierre Huyghe, installation view of real-time responsive mobile augmented reality work as part of After ALife Ahead, 2017. Credit Ola Rindal.
After Skulptur Projekte Münster, I was connected to Ian Cheng’s producer, Veronica So. Ian was working on a new project for the Serpentine called BOB: Bag of Beliefs, a self-contained autonomous AI entity. Ian has a background in neuroscience and computer science, and his projects up until then were inspired by these fields as narrative constructs. Through BOB, Ian wanted to explore emotional autonomy and anthropomorphism, whether a virtual life form could believably interact with real people as well as learn and evolve over time. There were six parallel independent instances of BOB, so they learned differently as people interacted with them differently. I was brought onto Ian’s team to specifically look at how to align the physical space to the digital space and allow visitors to interact with BOB in the gallery. At the time, optical motion tracking was prohibitively expensive so we decided to give visitors a selfie stick with a phone attached allowing us to track just the object rather than human bodies in the gallery space.
As a result of that project, I met Ben Vickers and Kay Watson (current Head of Serpentine Arts Technologies) in 2018. I started informally helping them to problem-solve some of the gaps in technical implementation that they were noticing on their projects. I was brought on at project conception not just at a late phase when the technical concept had already been identified. They recognised the need to build more technical expertise within the institution to support the artistic projects they were commissioning. After that we did something like five projects back-to-back together, mostly AR projects, starting with Jakob Steensen’s The Deep Listener. 
Ian Cheng, installation view of BOB, Serpentine Gallery, 2018. Credit Hugo Glendinning.
How do you usually structure an R&D phase with an artist? Is it different every time? Are there certain questions you always ask at the outset of a collaboration?
My first question to artists is usually: how important is it that the thing you want to explore actually works? Not that we ever want to lie or pretend that something works when in reality it’s totally fake, but sometimes an error or incorrect behaviour is actually germane to the concept. What level of error or glitch are you willing to tolerate? For some artists, the visibility of the mistakes is how the audience knows that there is a much deeper reliance on technology whereas for others if there is any imperfection or indication that it’s a simulation, they won’t do it. My job is to know how to ask the right questions in that exploration phase. That’s where you can have the most mismatch of expectations.
This has begun to be a more prominent question since AI tools have become more widespread. For example, what is the spectrum between truly allowing some autonomous process to have creative agency versus a guarantee that the aesthetic output of a system is going to be good? For something like image generation, like Dall-E or Stable Diffusion, there is so much hand-wringing and discussion in the media, but the reality is that 999 out of 1000 outputs are probably not going to be anywhere near the calibre of work for the specific situations that have come up in actual projects I have been involved with. So the appeal is the act of allowing a machine to make a creative decision, but the pitfall is that without any guardrails the machine will likely make a “bad” decision that does not align with the idea of the project. Is that an acceptable outcome in the mind of the artist?
Those early parameters become the R&D: to answer those questions within a given budget and given time. Ideally there is a prototype at the end of the R&D phase such as a proof of concept or vertical slice that proves the idea. I make a distinction between the R&D phase and production phase because we have to know we’re going to end up with… something. It’s very rare that I will say, “we can’t do this at all”. My job is usually to soften the fact that we live in a world with constraints. I have to balance what the artist wishes was possible with what is possible. There’s a very high risk otherwise that the artist would have to compromise on their vision. The R&D phase helps to define a common set of expectations so the artist and any other stakeholders can be reasonably confident that at the end of production we can produce something worthwhile. 
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, The Deep Listener, 2019. Courtesy the artist.
I work with an artist as a translator between what they need and an understanding of how something might get done. I try to teach a bit of literacy around the technology that we’re using so that the artist feels they have agency in the decisions. The other approach, which goes hand in hand, is to show the bad results as well as the good during development. It’s extra work to present multiple things, but it’s necessary so that the process can be iterative and collaborative.
I’m not an expert in every technology but I’m a curious person and often I’ll do smaller projects in parallel to big projects simply because it pushes me into a new domain. My desire as a parent has been to make sure that my kid knows that she can learn something. The phrase I want her to have in mind is: “I don’t know, but I can find out”. If you can catch that bug, you’re set up for whatever you want to do.
Can you reflect on the research and development phase for the recent collaboration with Ryan Gander on Ryan Waiting? What was the starting point for you? What were some of the most complex things to resolve in developing the technical architecture for this project?
I remember as soon as Ryan said he wanted the work to last 100 years my brain went into a tailspin. What does that even mean? Is it going to be actually turned on somewhere for 100 years? What happens when it’s off? What happens when it hasn’t been shown in 50 years? His desire for the century duration gave rise to a set of questions which ultimately led me to propose the idea of decoupling the decision-making consciousness – the “soul” of Ryan as avatar – with the rendering of its behaviour. The next question was, how do we allow that consciousness to have agency within a controlled set of parameters and systematise the behaviour?
It was imperative that the avatar was recognisably Ryan. The emotional connection comes from the fact you’re seeing a representation of a real person. I think animators are incredible, almost superhuman, observers of gesture. But to create a cohesive library of behaviours from scratch in just a few months seemed daunting. It became clear we had to use motion capture to create the initial structure because there was no other way we could guarantee that the proxy would feel like Ryan and not just look like Ryan.
Ryan Gander, Ryan Waiting, 2024. Courtesy of the artist, Esther Schipper and VIVE Arts. © Ryan Gander.
The artist Wu Tsang reflected on her experience of working within the parameters of the game engine Unity when making Of Whales as “world enclosing” rather than “world building”. How do you think about the constraints and parameters of technology during the production of artistic works?
Artists have an instinct for creating a limited playground within which to work. Most artists understand that some constraints lead to stronger work, but a major challenge is that the constraints of technology are often quite abstract or not visible. So often during an R&D phase it’s very difficult to get an artist to commit to a direction because they can’t weigh the value of the possible limitations. Which render pipeline should we use? What AI model should we use? It’s not possible to follow an infinite number of roads and so there must be constraints. World building is about creating extreme detail in a few very focused parts so that the audience will extrapolate and assume that there is that much detail in the rest of the world. Constraints have always been the genesis of the best art.
Artificial intelligence has gained significant attention recently partly as a result of more widespread accessibility of generative AI tools, including large-language models and text-to-image generators. You have been collaborating with artists using AI in their practice over a long period of time, such as on Ian Cheng’s BOB and Pierre Huyghe’s UUmwelt at Serpentine in 2018 and 2019 respectively. What role do you think artists play in shaping the future direction of how we use and think about new technologies?
Technology is defined by its relationship to the present moment. It is just the newest tool to create and express. At one time, pigment was technology, the printing press was technology, canvas was technology. Who knew that when sail cloth was invented it would become the standard surface for painting? That’s the role of the artist: to discover the unintended use and show why something is interesting or meaningful rather than the mere fact it exists. Artists are only attracted to what we consider modern technology because of its potential to be integrated into their practice. The role of art is to poke at technology, and at the way we think we’re supposed to use technology, and to show a different perspective.
Historically technology, whatever that meant in any specific time period, was not mass produced so artists would go to specialists such as artisans and guilds, it was a very direct relationship. Now technological progress is often driven by profiting from mass consumption or availability. Research is driven by pushing into a need where a market can be exploited, and often this means that a technology becomes significantly more accessible, but has many layers of guardrails or abstractions built on top of its true capabilities. We’ve all adopted digital tools into our lives, but general technological literacy has not increased. A generation ago, when you wanted to run a program on a home PC, you had to put in a disc, you had to type a command into a text-only command line, and you probably had some insight into how to deal with it if it wasn’t working. There was a largely unprotected access and proximity to the workings of the technology, even if you didn’t understand them. Now, we all have a computer in our pocket that is ludicrously powerful but a lot of people don’t even know how to find the off button.
So I really feel that the role of an artist, or even the role of people like me working with artists, is to try to peel back those guardrails and see if there’s really something there that can be used as raw material. Almost by definition our role is to misuse technology.
Ryan Gander, THIS IS FEELING ALL OF IT, Esther Schipper, Berlin 2024. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin/ Paris/Seoul. Photo © Andrea Rossetti © The artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024
We often hear about what technology can do for arts and culture. What do you think the arts can do for technology?
I’m from a generation which grew up on sci-fi or fantasy fiction before the Internet existed. I grew up on stuff like Neuromancer (William Gibson) and Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson), or for a lot of people it might have been The Matrix – stories that were envisioning the near future. That same generation built various stages of the Internet in the image of the art that inspired them, for example, social spaces with avatars and other Matrix-like analogies. I think that’s a tangible example of how art has influenced recent technology.
Now technology evolves at a much more accelerated pace, we can simulate science fiction in real time. The ability to draw the line between speculative fiction and prototype is much shorter now. An example I like to bring up a lot is John Underkoffler, who was among science advisors hired to research and develop designs for the user interfaces in the movie Minority Report. He subsequently founded the company Oblong Industries which is fully dedicated to tactile computing and holodecks and basically tried to make something as close as possible to all that speculative research and design.
What are some key considerations for artists and institutions exhibiting work that uses advanced technologies to the public?
Accessibility – not just in terms of the venue, but the work itself. Technology can act as an entry point to art. It can attract a varied audience. It’s important to make it very clear in the work and the presentation of the work that anybody’s opinion is valid. There is a novelty that technology affords and an ability to surprise and delight in a way that maybe audiences haven’t developed an armour against yet. It’s easy to walk away from a painting or a movie or a work of video art because you’ve grown up your whole life forming opinions about those mediums and what they represent. But maybe you don’t know how you feel about a game or a VR work. You can catch people off guard. VR is more like theatre than film, it’s a matter of directing someone’s attention in a space. You’re collapsing the distance between the viewer and the work. Interactivity can be very powerful. You can create a personal, transcendent moment that gives agency or that makes people feel they’ve been shown something just for them.
What’s the future focus for your practice? Where are you headed?
We’ve been talking about how I’ve been working with artists to help them develop literacy. I find there is much more openness now than ever before in bringing that literacy into institutions. I’ve been working with a few institutions at an earlier stage in commissioning projects and in a more cross-organisational way. More projects also means that more people are stepping into this technical director role, and some artists are even bringing similar roles in-house as parts of their studios now. I feel honoured to be able to support and advise some of these efforts.
At the end of the day I can’t stay project-based forever, or else my attention gets split too thinly across too many projects and I can’t be as useful. I’ve been trying to step back and see how I can support and manage more teams or organisations rather than some of the individual projects themselves. Honestly the fact that I have been lucky enough to have consistent work or even a “career” at all is shocking to me. I’ve been feeling a bit like the dog that caught the car so I’m trying to take stock of the last decade or so to see if there’s any chance I can actually plan my next decade. We’ll see!