Eric Joris

Eric Joris, born in 1955 in Belgium, is an artist, director, and founder of the transdisciplinary collective CREW. Since 2003 he has realized fully embodied performances using in-house developed Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) that is fully anchored in the physical body. It mediates perception through the tactile, the proprioceptive and the vestibular system.

CREW is the artistic vehicle for his experiments, composed of scientists and artists. It developed technology with the Universities of Hasselt and Antwerp, Inria, Heinrich Hertz/Frauenhofer Institute, and with partners of European research programmes: the FP7 EU programmes 2020_3D Media, Dreamspace, the Horizon 2020 programme with the PRESENT project that dealt with digital companions and A.I., MAX-R and EMIL meant to develop tools for making XR content in real time.

CREW’s live performances «Terra Nova», «Eux», «W_Double U», «C.A.P.E.», and its theatrical plays like «O_Rex», «Explorer» (with Urland), and «Absence» have been shown around the world at major art festivals, conferences and events and are the subject of many academic papers and articles. In 2020–22, CREW’s answer to the pandemic were three online performances, a therapeutic project, «Soul Hacker», and «Delirious Departures» that ran in The Royal Museum of Fine Arts (Brussels, Belgium) and SMAK (Ghent, Belgium).

Since 2019, Eric forms the artistic heart of CREW together with artist Isjtar Vandebroeck to plot and fill out CREW's artistic trajectory. The resulting creations are invariably under the signature of both Eric and Isjtar.

In the 2025/2026 season, CREW will present the project «Tremens».