Julijonas Urbonas

Julijonas Urbonas is an artist, designer, researcher, engineer and founder of Lithuanian Space Agency. He is a PhD student in Design Interactions at the Royal Collage of Art, London, associate professor at Vilnius Academy of Arts, Vilnius and former Pro-Rector at Vilnius Academy of Arts. Having worked in amusement park development as a designer and engineer, he became fascinated by what he calls »gravitational aesthetics«, a practice exploring how the manipulation of gravity offers possibilities for creating extreme experiences for body and imagination. Since then his artistic research has revolved around that topic, working between and combining such fields as critical design, speculative engineering, performative architecture, vehicular poetics, design choreography, social sci-fi, space medicine, particle physics and theatre and amusement park psychology. Urbonas’ work received many awards, including the Award of Distinction in Interactive Art, Prix Ars Electronica 2010 and has been exhibited worldwide.