ECAL Students Showing Work Inside an Underground Water Tank

For the third year running, ECAL — Switzerland's École cantonale d'art de Lausanne — has taken over a disused underground cistern at Geneva's Jardin des Nations for the Mapping Festival. The ECAL 360 LAB fills the cylindrical chamber called Syllepse with immersive 360-degree projections created by Bachelor Media & Interaction Design students. The festival runs through May 17.

Eight projects rotate through the space in 30-minute sequences. Titles like "Memory Pieces," "Memory Arc," and "Dream Landscapes" hint at the register — this is work about perception, time, and the relationship between a viewer and a projected environment. The cistern itself does half the work. Underground, circular, windowless — it strips away every visual cue except what the students put there. No white walls, no track lighting, no gallery conventions. The architecture forces a kind of attention that most exhibition spaces have to fight for.

The instinct here is worth watching. Design schools are increasingly choosing found infrastructure over purpose-built venues — underground tanks, decommissioned factories, geological formations. Maybe the most telling thing about this generation of interaction designers is which spaces they're drawn to. What does it mean when the students building tomorrow's interfaces would rather show them in a cistern than a gallery?