Since 2023, our Creative Masterclasses have pulled artists out of their laptops and into real rooms — a projection-wrapped club, a 19-meter dome, a century-old power station turned art museum. Weeks of online studio work build toward one real showcase on location, in front of the venue’s own crew and a room full of strangers who become collaborators. This page documents every edition so far: where it happened, when, and who showed up.
We are currently working on bringing the next batch of Creative Masterclasses on the way.
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What people say about the Masterclasses
“Before the Creative Masterclass, I was producing a lot of visuals but couldn’t get them out of my laptop. The course gave me the knowledge and tools to master the requirements of a lot of situations, and connect with diverse creatives.”
MechBullRodeo
Multi-Disciplinary Creative Technologist, Italy
“I took a leap of faith and flew from Mexico City to Berlin, stepping into a cutting-edge venue for real-time visuals. Afterwards, my confidence and creative voice grew, helping me make a name for myself in the immersive scene.”
Javier Martínez
Immersive Artist, Mexico
“The NODE Institute offered a great mix of professional input, hands-on practice, and community. What stood out was how supportive the teachers were, always taking time for questions.”
Christina Gerg
Multimedia Artist, Germany
“There was a time before and after the NODE Institute. The Masterclass helped me connect creative thinking with the technical side, expand my toolkit, and land exciting new projects.”
Nicolas Landrieux
Creative Director and Media Artist, Germany
Summer 2026
Immersive Room – Kunstkraftwerk
May 11 – Jul 8, 2026 · The NODE Institute Berlin + Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig, Germany
Facilitated by Stefan Kraus (MXZEHN)
The most structured edition to date, deliberately split in two: an open, beginner-friendly three-lesson Foundations chapter for anyone curious about immersive-room production, and a separate, deliberately small 16-participant Case Study — built to move people out of endless experimentation and into a real, deadline-driven production workflow.
The Case Study ran on studio time in Berlin before returning to Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig for good — a preview session on July 6, then the final screening on July 8, 2026, from 12:00 to 16:00, followed by dinner in Leipzig and a closing hangout back in Berlin that evening.
By the way: The Foundations are available as a standalone course: Foundations Immersive Room
Participants: Gungor Kocak, Jerome Li-thiao-Te, Sindi Shkodrani, Stuart Alexander, Raquel Fernandez Caamano, Mechbull, Seth E. Scoville, Hong Nguyen Kim, Leonid Krykhtin, Rainer-Markus Schmitt
Winter 2026
Masterclass Full Dome
Feb 5 – 11, 2026 · The Sixth Sense festival (TouchDesigner Sessions India), Bengaluru, India
Facilitated by Simon Rydén (Supermarket Sallad)
Simon Rydén’s dome practice, transplanted to Bengaluru: the same seven-day intensive rhythm as the Immersive Gallery track, run in parallel at the same festival, but built around dome geometry instead of flat walls — 2D and 3D pipelines, real-time optimization, and the pre-visualization tricks needed before a piece ever gets to a hemispherical screen.
Part of TouchDesigner Sessions India’s first edition — three week-long workshops inside a converted glass factory, alongside two days of artist talks and panels streamed live to the wider community.
Participants: Arunav Rajesh, Ayush Patil, Gowtham Jayaram, Samriddhi Arora, Upadhyaya Athreya
Winter 2026
Masterclass Immersive Gallery
Feb 5 – 11, 2026 · The Sixth Sense festival (TouchDesigner Sessions India), Bengaluru, India
Facilitated by Stefan Kraus (MXZEHN)
The format’s first trip outside Germany: a partnership with Echoes of Earth to bring TouchDesigner Sessions India to life inside a five-decade-old glass factory at The Sixth Sense festival in Bengaluru. Stefan Kraus ran an intensive, 12-chapter in-person week on building immersive audiovisual content for gallery and festival spaces — moving between real-time and pre-rendered pipelines, and using 3D simulations of the actual gallery to adapt work before it ever touched the walls.
Not for beginners: this track assumed working TouchDesigner fluency going in, and used every one of its seven days — from first concept to a final showcase and feedback session inside the festival itself.
Participants: Aditya Taneja, Ankush Mahesh Patidar, Anshul Patria, Fabrice Maillot, Falguni Vyas, Hardik Dhingra, Harman Bhatia, Hitanshi Thakkar, Meghu Sn, Navya Gehlot, Ninad Palandurkar, Prasanta Barman, Ryan Acharya, Sanjay J, Shraddha Patel, Sumana Mahesh, Vinayek Saravanan, Vishal Sadanand
Learn more about this exciting partnership in this talk by Kunal Singh;
Summer 2025
Immersive VJ Performance
Jul 2 – Aug 6, 2025 · Studio1111 (270° panorama club), Berlin, Germany
Facilitated by Stefan Kraus (MXZEHN)
Studio1111’s third homecoming: five weekly three-hour sessions sharpening the same unforgiving skill as before — visuals that survive a live, improvised set against a real DJ, on a 270° panorama that leaves nowhere to hide a dropped frame.
The cohort took the stage from 19:00 on August 6, 2025, straight into the club’s Summer Season Closing Night: their own VJ sets from 20:30, a live AV collaboration between Simon David Rydén and electronic producer Anna Z at 22:00, then more Masterclass VJ sets running until 2am alongside DJ Kiti Arsa.
Participants: Alejandra de Jesus Montoya Ruedas, Allison Wilens, ARGEL EREVAN AIROLA, Daniel Kass, Helen Banner, Mark Wolcott, Odette Miller-Hard, Alp Nisan Baskin
Summer 2025
Full Dome Production
Jul 2 – Aug 6, 2025 · B-Dome (19m geodesic dome), Berlin, Germany
Facilitated by Simon Rydén (Supermarket Sallad)
Simon Rydén took an international cohort somewhere most TouchDesigner artists never get to work: a real fulldome. Five weeks of idea, storyboard, sound design and iteration led to a rendered two-minute audiovisual piece built specifically for B-Dome’s 19-meter geodesic shell — six 21K projectors and 5.1 surround, on RAW-Gelände, a few steps from the East Side Gallery.
The dome went dark for the cohort’s premiere on August 6, 2025, from 12:30 to 16:30 — screened for peers, dome staff and the wider creative-tech community — before the whole day rolled on into a shared dinner and a joint closing party with the VJ Performance cohort at Studio1111.
Participants: Ana Sofia Calixto, Wing Sze Doris Luke, Guille Isa, Hernan Roperto, Jae-Eun Suh, Leah Calucag, Liang Chen Lin, Marc Simon, Arianna Rattazzi, Nina Velimirovic, Raquel Fernandez Caamano, Robin Wong, Colin Fearing, Aleh Patseyeu, Valentina Herrera Gentile, Francesco Della Toffola, 舒洋 于
Summer 2025
Creative Robotics
May 7 – Jun 25, 2025 · Zönoteka, Neukölln (with Creative Robotics, Uni. of Art Linz), Berlin, Germany
Facilitated by Amir Bastan
The strangest and most physical edition so far: robots as creative collaborators, not tools. Amir Bastan, doctoral researcher at Creative Robotics (University of Art Linz), introduced participants to “quasi-interaction” and “parallel interaction” — ways of thinking about human-robot relationships beyond simple automation — before putting everyone behind the controls of a shared, online, real-time simulation of a KUKA robotic arm.
Theory met steel in the final session: an in-person day at Zönoteka working hands-on with Spot, Boston Dynamics’ quadruped robot, turning weeks of interaction-design thinking into a live improvisation with a machine that walks.
Participants: Christoph Kirmaier, Filipe Teixeira, Kellyn Dassler, MARIO GUZMAN, Nils Weger, Olaf Hirschberg, Raghad Salman, Vladimir Katasonov, Wolf Moritz Cramer, Yinglian Liu, Yulia Popova
Summer 2025
New Media Dramaturgy
Apr 30 – Jun 27, 2025 · Zönoteka, Neukölln (with Kanapé Collective), Berlin, Germany
Facilitated by Helin Ulas + Belçim Yavuz
The most conceptually ambitious edition yet — and the first to put dramaturgy, not just software, at the center. Helin Ulas (HfG Karlsruhe) and Belçim Yavuz, working with Kanapé Collective, pushed small groups through a single “creative brief” for eight weeks: from mood boards and narrative structure, to translating that structure into TouchDesigner as trigger-based and time-based timelines for real-time media control.
It closed as a genuinely hybrid piece: a live collaborative performance staged at Zönoteka, Kanapé’s project space in Neukölln, with online participants controlling parts of the physical environment remotely and in-person participants performing inside it — then rolling into a 10-day exhibition of the results.
Participants: B VERSE, Betül Sarıkavak, CeCe Pizarelli, Daniel Piava de Miranda, Dario Jongerius, Jeff Sandeen, Liang Chen Lin, Milena Medvedeva, Taichi Kozaki, Luna M., Viacheslav Romanov
Summer 2024
Immersive Audiovisual Show
May 31 – Sep 5, 2024 · Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
Facilitated by Stefan Kraus (MXZEHN)
Back to the Maschinenhalle for a second pass — this time every participant’s five-wall, six-channel-audio piece had to survive a genuinely unglamorous production pipeline: exact codecs, exact pixel dimensions per wall, files named and folder-structured by hand so a single render network could batch-process the entire cohort’s work into one continuous reel.
That reel finally hit the real walls on September 5, 2024 — a full day of welcome, lunch, presentation, and an evening screening, folded into a TouchDesigner meetup so anyone in town for the day had a reason to make the trip to Leipzig.
Participants: Qinghan Liu, Andrés Moriel Alcaide, Christina Gerg, Christine Haupt, Danny Garcia, Edmund Brown, Emin Hakop, Hernan Roperto, Javier Martinez, Linda Nicolai, Mark Wolcott, Lucia Occhipinti, Raul Leal
Summer 2024
High Resolution VJ Performance
Apr 12 – May 22, 2024 · Studio1111 (270° panorama club), Berlin, Germany
Facilitated by Stefan Kraus (MXZEHN)
The format’s first move into club culture: Studio1111, a newly opened art-clubbing venue on Potsdamer Straße wrapped in a 270°, 16,568 × 1,200px laser-blended panorama and driven by a 39-speaker sound system. Six online sessions built toward one unforgiving constraint — visuals that hold a clean 30fps while improvising live against a DJ set, not just looping in a render queue.
The result went straight to the deep end: a live presentation on May 22, 2024, as the opening night of TD Event Berlin 2024’s Immersive VJ Night, judged in the room by Derivative’s own team and Studio1111’s resident VJ booking crew.
Participants: Diego NARVAEZ, Emin Hakop, Javier Martinez, Linda Nicolai, Arianna Rattazzi, Mohammed Alsanie, Nancy El Azzi, Nicola Carpeggiani, John Bisset, Raquel Fernandez Caamano, Raul Leal, Stella Speziali
Winter 2023
Content Creation
for Immersive Art Spaces
Sep 25 – Oct 12, 2023 · Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
Facilitated by Stefan Kraus (MXZEHN)
The edition that started it all. Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig — a decommissioned power station turned Germany’s first museum built entirely for multimedia and digital art — handed over its cavernous Maschinenhalle, cracked plaster, hanging chains and all, as a canvas. Working from a 3D scan of the room, participants spent four online sessions turning ideas into projection-ready sequences before ever setting foot inside.
Then came the real test: a full day on location, October 12, 2023, timed to Bright Festival Connect Leipzig, with the festival’s own programmers and Kunstkraftwerk’s staff watching the work land on the actual walls for the first time.
Participants: Adrian Jackowski, Ashely Worden, Valeriia Riazanova, Benjamin Sugar, Denisse Barrios, Elena D2D, Emin Hakop, Giulia Sirianni, Guillaume Milochau, Iñaki Gonzalez, James Samwell, Juliet Downey, Lorenzo Minneci, Nicola Carpeggiani, Nicolas Landrieux, Livia Ribichini, Rosendo Merel, Vince Picone, Francesco Della Toffola
