Join our VR guided tours to Leonardo da Vinci's studio

Explore Leonardo da Vinci’s studio, see artefacts from his time that capture some of the doubts we assume he had about his life and work, and learn about the concept of "doubt" during the renaissance.

VirtualPolitik
Neo Christopher Chung

The world is at a critical junction where polarizing forces are working hard to keep us divided and troubled. We are witnessing the rise of exclusionary laws and policies, fueled by the dark side of the Internet and algorithms. Across Europe and beyond, the challenges of civil unrest and human rights are negatively affecting marginalized populations and creating intractable divisions. How can we use public platforms and new media to create inclusive outlooks and to create new political spheres?

Bio-ID Hyperobject
The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UK)

The main concept of the film is the creation of a design platform in form of a Hyperobject – a collection of things that overlap and intersect. It creates a system to visualise the systemic complexity of Bio-ID design research in an aesthetic and visually appealing way. The film project speculates with the idea of how data can become a visual object, a visual representation shaped into a navigational object.

The City as a House – A speculative exploration of the possibilities of abolishing known forms of habitation
Rebecca Merlic (HR)

Vast amounts of pictures, sounds, videos and 3D scans are organized as environments in Rebecca Merlic’s The City as a House, in form of an interactive visual novel. A work about the experiment of a white European 30-year-old heterosexual human living in Tokyo without inhabiting a private apartment over a period of time. A speculative exploration of the possibilities of abolishing known forms of habitation.

If once we ever were by Jaime Carrejo (USA)
Black Cube Nomadic Museum (USA)

Black Cube Nomadic Museums’ executive director and chief curator Cortney Lane Stell presents If once we ever were, a virtual recreation of a public sculpture and temporary monument by artist Jaime Carrejo that recognizes immigrants and their contributions to our communities. The monument is a triumphal arch composed of chain-link fencing that originally appeared in Denver, Colorado and acts as a metaphor for boundaries—the delineation of private and public space, the division of geographical borders, and the separation of rights.

Augmented Idolatry (AI) - inaugural project of the Desert Valley Art Ranch (VAR), San Luis Valley, Colorado
LAST/RESORT Club

Augmented Idolatry (AI) is a collective AR artwork composed of seven distinct AR idols, designed in direct response to the landscape, history and spirituality of the San Luis Valley, home to the artist residency “Desert Valley Art Ranch.” An actual mud plinth built on-site is shared among the seven AR idols and connects them to the land. The AR idols refer to memento mori, indigenous histories, natural resources and sacred geometries.

Rio Verde
Cherish Marquez (US)

Rio Verde is a socially conscious video game by Cherish Marquez that explores the healing powers of the desert, as well as themes such as Latinx iconography and mental wellness.

Crosser & LaMigra
Rafael Fajardo (US)

Crosser & La Migra are two video games that represent opposite perspectives on the dynamics at the US-Mexico border, rendered as early arcade graphics and presented as a diptych. Artist and designer Rafael Fajardo is the founding director of SWEAT, a loose collaborative that makes socially conscious video games in order to explore the poetics of interactivity, critique and deploy electronic media, and comment on cultural realities.

Frontera!
John Jota Leaños

Leaños directed and produced the animated documentary, Frontera!, retelling the history of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico. The film has been supported by a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and Video and a National Association for Latino Arts and Culture Grant, among others. Collaborators: Conroy Chino (Acoma Pueblo), Warren Montoya (Santa Ana Pueblo, Tamaya and Santa Clara Pueblo, Khapo Owinge’), Lee Moquino (Santa Clara Pueblo, Zia Pueblo, Apache/Yaqui), Aimee Villarreal, and Cristóbal Martinez (Alcalde).

Emilie Trice & LAST/RESORT present Garden del Rio Grande
LAST/RESORT (US)

Garden del Rio Grande pays homage to the geographic region around the Rio Grande River, which runs from central Colorado along the U.S./Mexico border to the Gulf of Mexico. Our garden contemplates how technology can reconnect us to the land and amplify indigenous voices, while questioning to what extent can art and design fortify sustainable ecologies. Through emerging technology we seek to reverse-engineer the past in order to reimagine the future.

Falling Up Exhibition
re.riddle, California, San Francisco (US)

Amidst riots and racial tensions, divisive political rhetoric and a global pandemic, the past half year has been a time of turbulent uncertainty. These acute ruptures and moments of pain, conflict and unknowingness have inadvertently led to a mode of seeing our former and current realities anew, which may more or less best be described as “surreal”.

‘site inspection’ – Virtual cocktail party & FM4 Radio Show in VR
sound:frame / Eva Fischer (AT), Marijn Bril (NL), Angie Pohl (AT)

For this year’s Ars Electronica, sound:frame and Pausanio invite the audience to join an exclusive virtual cocktail party in the Area for Virtual Art’s mozilla hub space. Together we will teleport from one artist’s space to another and have a virtual toast.

'site inspection' - Virtual exhibition tour
sound:frame / Eva Fischer (AT), Marijn Bril (NL), Angie Pohl (AT)

The sound:frame curators Eva Fischer and Marijn Bril will guide through the Area for Virtual Art and talk with the exhibiting artists and some of the Area’s team members, about their approaches to virtuality and digitality.

sound:frame & Pausanio virtual – Area for Virtual Art
sound:frame / Eva Fischer (AT), Marijn Bril (NL), Angie Pohl (AT)

sound:frame together with Pausanio presents the Area for Virtual Art – an online platform for digital art and virtual formats. Discover current artistic approaches in virtual exhibitions and meet people in discussion programs and live events to exchange thoughts and create new ideas and concepts. The Area for Virtual Art develops into an international hub, giving a platform to current digital art forms and connecting people all over the world.

Virtual students’ exhibition “Hopes & Slopes”
VDA PhAMA (Department of Photography and Media Art at Vilnius Academy of Arts)

Made during the most intensive quarantine period works by artists from the youngest generation rethink isolation, solitude, remoteness, trauma and translate them into visual and aural vibes. All these artists are studying Animation or Photography and Media Art (PhAMA) at Vilnius Academy of Arts. - An exhibition by a group of young artists titled Hopes & Slopes is a place for a safe walk among what has fallen out a few months back.

Open Studios of LTMKS/Letmekoo.lt artists
Akvilė Anglickaitė, Tomas Daukša, Saulius Leonavičius, Tomas Martišauskis, Emilija Škarnulytė and others

Artists of Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association open up their working studios and invite to explore contexts of heterotopias, technological mythologies, structured commonism, hybridised beings.

Online Exhibition NEW CONNECTIONS
HKU University Of The Arts Utrecht (NL)

The opening night will feature several live performances all related to the theme “new connections”. This for example by revisiting and passing on music traditions through electronic means, new tactile electronic instruments and an AV show performed by live coding artists.

Postmasters presents Nicola Verlato, Donato Piccolo and Kristin Lucas
Paulina Bebecka - Postmasters Gallery, PostmastersROMA, Rome (IT)

​In the current uncertain climate of physical disconnection, hyper digital connection and distortion of life as we know it, I wanted to express that humanity is still at the very core of our increasingly technological experience on earth. The chosen artists bring about an examination of reality and the need to cherish our humanity through various digital media, such as artificial intelligence, 3D scanning, 3D gaming software, generative 360 WebXR animation, drones, and techno.

Garage Digital: Worlds beyond Worlds
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art / Nikita Nechaev, Moscow (RU)

Works and practices of several artists and collectives, that participate in Garage Digital program, reflect on the different types of networks, infrastructures, ecologies and algorithms, and pose questions of the possible tactics and strategies to reassemble these systems with new types of communities, modes of rationality and production in mind —cunning, poetic, speculative and emergent.

Heterotopias
The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UK)

Roundtable + Q&A - As we collectively detangle our own perceived ‘normal’, how might this shape speculative design and the worlds that come with it? Is Heterotopia an alternative to the utopia/dystopia narrative?