Stories of Athens

​Inside the Ars Electronica Garden Athens, Onassis Stegi presents Data Garden, a multimedia installation, and HackAthens 2020, a series of five works in the form of film, digital games, sound drama and mobile apps. Despite having very different points of departure, both projects explore the local vs. global, the endemic vs. the permanent, algorithms and rituals, data, ecologies and bodies.

What are the data ecologies of tomorrow? Can we develop models of symbiosis between humans-plants and data? What are the data secrets hidden in the DNA of a plant secretly grown in the slopes of the Acropolis Hill? What is the future of our connected bodies in post-COVID Athens? Can we reinvent our human relationships, bodily contacts, emotions jobs, sex lives and dreams in a world heavily mediated by technologies and constantly regulated by psycho-political constellations?

In contrast to the conception of Romantic gardens, Data Garden becomes a symbiotic locus of humans, data and non-humans, memory and resistance. Cities are reimagined as assemblages of actors equally seeking the right to our memories.

​Similarly, HackAthens 2020 aims to explore post-COVID-19 Athens: how are bodies reconfigured in an era where digital communications mediate all forms of activity, where haptic encounters have become rare and where professional and personal spaces are blurred? What kind of cities are we going to experience when our realities are both expanded and reduced through technology? Are our daily micro-routines a form of resistance or the ultimate instance of compliance?