Max Čelar

Biography

Max Čelar is an artist, designer and technologist based in London, working at the intersection of immersive technology, participatory art and the spatial conditions of contemporary urban life. Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, he began his artistic training at the High School of Fine Arts before moving to London in 2013 to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. His research there focused on decentralised decision-making in architecture and urban planning, and on the role of immersive and AI technologies in reshaping the city.

After graduating, Max worked as an XR Designer and Developer at ScanLAB Projects, where he contributed to a number of Innovate UK-funded projects, including the acclaimed Framerate. He has held visiting lecturer positions at the Royal College of Art and Royal Holloway, University of London, teaching Immersive Environment Design and Virtual Reality Development, and continues to contribute to academic discourse on spatial computing, participatory media and the ethics of emerging technologies.

In 2021, Max co-founded Untold Garden, an internationally exhibited art and design studio creating participatory works that reposition the audience as co-author rather than spectator. Untold Garden's projects - spanning physical installations, virtual sculptures, interactive performances and experimental social networks - have been presented at the Nobel Prize Museum, BFI London Film Festival, CPH:DOX, Screen City Biennial, STRP Festival, the British Art Fair and Språkmuseet, among others. The studio's practice draws on machine learning, networked infrastructures and speculative ecologies to ask how technology might catalyse, rather than mediate away, our relationships with one another and with our environments.

Alongside Untold Garden, Max co-founded Meadow, a platform for publishing and distributing augmented reality experiences in public space, supported by UCL and used by institutions including the British Film Institute, the Natural History Museum and the British Art Fair. He is currently leading the development of Meadow Studio, a new agentic worldbuilding engine launching in summer 2026, which extends Meadow's tools toward AI-assisted authorship of immersive worlds.

Max's work moves fluidly between gallery, public space and software, treating each as a site for rethinking how we inhabit hybrid physical-digital environments. Through his practice, teaching and platform-building, he continues to argue for a spatial computing shaped by artists, researchers and the communities who live with it.