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?

Keynote Lecture: Tree Conservation, Genomics, and Change
Victoria Sork: UCLA Dean of Life Sciences, Director of Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Gardens

Victoria Louise Sork is an American scientist who is a professor, the Dean of Life Sciences at University of California, Los Angeles, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In her keynote lecture that will open the five day long festival, she will discuss her research studying tree populations in California and the Eastern United States using genomics, evolutionary biology and conservation biology.

Infected
Gerhard Funk (AT)

In this simulation game for approx. 20 people, the visitors have to cooperate with each other and develop a common strategy in order to continue to live and stay healthy in an infectious world.

Acquired Immunity. Beyond Cultivamos Cultura

Virtual tours of the natural and social landscape around Cultivamos Cultura.

Future Humanity Journey

A day in 2040: what would our day look like in 20 years? Future Humanity Journey is an experimental workshop. Four innovators created a scenario of future humanity to better understand how humanity will develop and evolve.

DARV_ Abandoned Land
Lee Jung In (KR/AT) Mihaela Kavdanska (BG/RO/AT) Violeta Ivanova (BG/AT) Florian Weinrich (AT)

DARV_ Abandoned Land is an intermedia dance performance which sprouts connections between analog and digital. The performers interact with large-scale objects and video projections, resembling the endless migration from one world to another in search for the better. The DARV team and eight dancers perform in various locations in Austria, South Korea and Bulgaria, guiding the audience through dystopian realities and abandoned sites. Drained-off utopias, failed social mechanisms and ideologies are embodied, explored and ultimately abandoned.

Virtual Anatomy – Preview of the JKU MedSPACE
Interactive multisensory environment, 2020

The Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU) is currently constructing a modern, future-oriented multi-purpose learning space at the JKU Faculty of Medicine’s new medical education and research building. Scheduled to open in 2021, the space will not only be used as a virtual lecture hall for anatomy courses, but will also provide live surgery broadcasts from operating rooms to improve student education and post-graduate educational courses.

Mirage – An Interactive Experience
Carolina Bischof (AT), Andreas Dorner (AT), Lena Kalleitner (AT), Adam Lamine (AT), Thomas Tippold, Matthias Husinsky (AT), Clemens Scharfen (AT)

In Mirage – An Interactive Experience, Deep Space 8K visitors find themselves in an alien world, where they collectively partake in a story appealing to multiple senses. Up to 16 persons can actively participate in this encounter. In this abstract-looking world, visitors must find hidden pathways to a portal through teamwork, solve puzzles cooperatively and avoid manifold hazards.

2020 - Finally Digital?!
Christina Steinbrecher-Pfandt (US), Renger van Den Heuvel (NL), Sabine Himmelsbach (DE/CH), Nanne Dekking (US/DE), Alain Servais (BE), Paul Frey (AT), Alfred Weidinger (AT), Casey Reas (US), Kate Hollenbach (US), JiaJia Fei (US), Raina Mehler (US), Magda Sawon (US), Sharon De Mattia (US) and Thomas Kohler (DE)

2020 started with a bang that made the art industry pivot away from its established codes of conduct almost overnight for sheer survival. From the exchange of courtesies to remote work structures, old customs required immediate redesign in response to the crisis. As a result, the online space gained even more significance as the only platform for business and commercial transactions, affecting even the art industry and its age-old reliance on in-person interaction.

Breaking up the gameplay – a talk about feminism and experiencing the abolished private
Rebecca Merlic (HR)

Artist Talk about the feminist aspects of The City as a House, an interactive visual novel, an experiment of a white European 30-year-old heterosexual human, living in Tokyo without inhabiting a private apartment over a period of time.

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.

Business Models for Online Contents
Brendon Ciecko (US), Ulvi Kasimov (UK) and Aleksandra Artamonovskaja (CZ/UK), Sabine Seymour (AT) Moderators: Nathalie Pichard (CH), Thierry Baujard (FR)

The panel Business Models for Online Contents will investigate various entrepreneurial endeavors of platform-based access to online content, and how they are monetized. Crowdfunding, licenses or subscription models are only a few of the strategies institutions have to generate revenues in cultural & creative industries, and to secure revenue for artists and content developers.

The New Real: Experiental AI and the AI Lab
Jake Elwes (UK), Drew Hemment (UK), Caroline Sinders (US), Anna Ridler (UK), Mahir Yavuz (TR)

The New Real explores the boundary between the real and the artificial as we attempt to emerge into and understand the so-called New Normal. Individual and collective resilience is predicated on the wider use of networked, online tools and environments by the majority of the population in a huge diversity of professional, domestic and leisure settings. At the same time, the crisis is unfolding in a context in which trust in data-driven online content and interaction are being challenged like never before.

An Atlas of Absence - Online meeting performance
Summer Mei Ling Lee and Laura Boles Faw

Technology was supposed to connect us. The dominant modality for communication and connection during this pandemic era is the digital screen. In this work, collaborators Laura Boles Faw and Summer Mei Ling Lee continue their ongoing series addressing distance and longing that increasingly figures into this heightened moment.

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”.

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.

The Civil Society of the Future
Unabhängiges LandesFreiwilligen Zentrum (AT)

When, if not now, should we talk about the future of civil society? As with the refugee conflict in 2015, the corona crisis of 2020 highlighted the role of civil social engagement. Once again, it became clear how much the initiatives, associations, NGOs, NPOs and individuals we consider as “civil society” can do.

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.

Tour: If You Hold the Stone Hold it in Your Hand - COVID19 Data Sculptures
Clarissa Ribeiro

LIVE: Data-Driven Algorithmic Design and 4-axes CNC Carving After a short talk sharing a few aspects of the poetics focusing on algorithmic design, we invite the online audience for a lab visit and we will set up a 4-axis CNC to carve one of the data-sculptures live.

Workshop: Follow the Fibers: Weaving as a Method of Inquiry
Monica LoCascio, Artist and Member of ArtSci Collective

Fascia and Mycelium through the lens of Anni Albers and weaving