Ars Electronica Garden

Uncertainty and Ecology

Hangar (ES), NewArtFoundation (ES), .BEEP { collection;} (ES), UOC - ISEA Barcelona (ES) Institut Ramon Llull (ES), OFFF Barcelona (ES)

Uncertainty and ecology are two of the keywords in this year's edition that pose two big questions that haunt us at this time of the global pandemic. Ars Electronica Barcelona Garden aims to account for the diversity of ways in which the arts, sciences, technologies and thought are facing the endless possibilities that fly over our times. Within this will to interconnect politics with technology and nature Barcelona is here presented through a network of heterogeneous agents made of individuals, nodes, clusters or hubs connecting between each other and to the world.

Hybrid Forms

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL)

The Hybrid Forms Lab at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is a horizontal research platform where scientists and artists/designers collaborate to explore environmental science, automation, laser and optics based art, living systems and biophysics. The lab is coordinated by Dr. Raoul Frese with the assistance of Dr. Sandrine D’Haene, and seeks to seek to blur the lines between disciplines and to connect the sciences and the humanities through art.

Shifting Proximities

Nxt Museum (NL)

The Shifting Proximities garden at Ars Electronica hosted by Nxt Musem captures elements of its inaugural exhibition that explores how new global events and social and technological change continually shifts the proximities between us. Perception of space, and our place within it, is called into question in the collected collaborations of artists, designers, technologists, scientists and musicians.

Kepler's Expedition to the Garden of Planet B. A Nocturnal Roundtable

Waag – Technology & Society (NL)

When humanity’s disruptive power over the environment was momentarily silenced due to Covid-19, our understanding of the garden began to shift in terms of how we have compartmentalized human activity around gardening, and our relationship to the companion species found therein. How will we perceive the garden and gardening once we take a closer look at what we may have overlooked about them, yet urgently need to consider?

Claudia Hart’s The Ruins

bitforms gallery, New York (US)

The Ruins is an exhibition that implements still lifes to contemplate the canons of a patriarchal Western civilization: modernist paintings and manifestos of political utopias. Join Hart in an intimate video profile as she discusses the works as meditations on a world in crisis, speaking to an unstable present experienced through the possibility of simulation-technologies that use data to model the crystallization of past, future, and present into a perpetual now.

Thoma Foundation’s pioneering Digital & Electronic Art collection

Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, Santa Fe, New Mexico (US)

The Thoma Foundation’s Curator of Digital Art, Jason Foumberg, leads a behind-the-scenes video tour through the Foundation’s Digital & Electronic Art collection, offering personal anecdotes about the artworks that excite him, how the Foundation decides which artworks to collect, and a peek into our public exhibition space and private art storage vault. Foumberg’s lushly illustrated talk is organized around the Ars Electronica 2020 festival theme of Autonomy, especially spotlighting digital artists who use technology to automate creative labor and increase viewer interaction.

Galerie Charlot: 10 Year Anniversary Exhibition

Galerie Charlot (FR / IS)

The Paris and Tel Aviv-based Galerie Charlot celebrates its tenth year with an anniversary exhibition in Paris. The curated show features currently represented artists, showing a diversity of approaches to media over several generations.

Markus Hofer “Visuelle Hypothese” – an exhibition @ AAA project space of MAM Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art Vienna

MAM Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art Vienna (AT)

The focus of Markus Hofer’s exhibition “Visuelle Hypothese” is the process of visual perception, in which our brain is supplied with information about objects visible in space through the retinal and optic nerve, and compares them objects to remembered and memorized objects. It is only by matching our memory to what we have seen that we can recognize an object and determine its function.

Fulldome / VR & AR Lab

Martin Kusch, Director ǀ Fulldome / VR & AR Lab, Ruth Schnell, Head Department of Digital Arts, University of Applied Arts Vienna (AT)

Das Fulldome/VR & AR Lab an der Abteilung für Digitale Kunst der Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien ist eine Plattform für neue kreative Prozesse mit einem Schwerpunkt auf digitalen Anwendungen für Fulldome-, VR- und AR-Umgebungen. Experimentelle Forschungsprojekte werden im interdisziplinären Austausch zwischen Studierenden, Lehrenden und Forschern durchgeführt, die an der Entwicklung neuer künstlerischer Grammatiken arbeiten und dabei den Einfluss immersiver Geräte hinterfragen. Der ‘Dome’ der Ars Electronica ist Teil der Infrastruktur des Labors.