This year’s edition of IDFA DocLab questioned the twofold power of technology. On the one hand, VR, AR, AI and other technologies can produce virtual life-like creatures, immaterial wealth and absorbing software constructs. On the other hand, those same technologies can bring about physical experiences and authentic feelings. And none of those experiences are simulated
Category Archive: installation
From the art of photoprompting to the fact that many of the “godfathers” of the VR industry were in fact women
The installation parodies our anthropocentric worldview, whereby everything revolves around us and we deploy the most sophisticated technologies to satisfy an absurd desire to find our own image in tiny grains of sand
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The installation uses ordinary objects to bring together the history of the museum, Tabet’s personal memories and the quick succession in Lebanon of a revolution, a pandemic, a massive explosion, a seemingly endless recession and increased tensions with Israel
Interest for shamanism is expanding faster than for any other spiritual practices in the Western world. The art world is taking notes…
Can AI bring a fresh perspective on our fraught relationships with other species? Can it revive ancient systems of somatic divination? And if, one day, we do have love affairs with artificial beings, will our connection with them be able to avoid the usual traps of toxic love relationships?
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The participating artists used scientific marine data to shape thought-provoking scenarios that make us consider with new eyes life conditions in polluted marine environments
The artists developed documented and fictional material of the Cyprus buffer zone, Varosha, and British military bases, as well as areas of bicommunal activity and farming. These spaces can appear extremely defined and frozen, in part through military and surveillance architecture…
The exhibition presents artistic responses that rethink and reject the constant drive towards exploitative productivity
NPCs are digital Sisyphus machines that have no perspective of breaking out of their activity loops. In the moments when the algorithm shows inconsistencies, the NPCs break out of the logic of total normality, and appear touchingly human
One would expect artists, designers, activists and thinkers who engage with issues related to pollution, global heating and loss of biodiversity to live a life that reflects their values. Few do. Hence my desire to exchange with Aljaž
The exhibition presents artists who, at different times throughout the 20th and early 21st century, have investigated dematerialisation or whose works have echoed epochal changes in the perception of the material dimension and in the material culture itself
Asking us to leave behind the darkness of daily news streams, the KIKK festival weaves “tales of togetherness” and spotlights the forces and fictions that bring us together as human beings
“With so many tears I started to wonder whether it is possible to cultivate some marine life in them,” the designer writes.
An investigation into the colonial logic at work in contemporary Russian warfare through the largely unknown history of Soviet military cybernetic research
The artworks explore the many challenges of our contemporary condition and reflect on a reality punctured from all sides. Not to commiserate on the state of the world but to stimulate discussions about how we can build a new reality
Using quantum computing as both medium and subject matter, Libbey Heaney explores parallel worlds, probing the futures of powerful new quantum computing systems
Can you buy your way out of major chaos and catastrophe? Is salvation a question of self-reliance? Or is it about joining forces and expertises to face together an uncertain and probably unpleasant future? Should we rely on technology or on good old survival skills?
Presenting lithium as the new gold, this exhibition explores its history and future, as well as the various myths surrounding electricity, energy and the exploitation of minerals
What is that nature we so desperately worship, seek to love, protect and save? Does it even exist?
The performative installation overcomes vast distances to facilitate moments of human encounter between people at opposite ends of supply chains, making visceral the extraordinary scale, and underlying humanity, of the globalised economy
Félix Blume’s sound pieces, videos, actions and installations make you see the fantastic in the mundane and the poetical in the every day
An exhibition packed with artworks that are bold, socially-engaged and smart. This review focuses on the pieces that look at labour conditions, migration and the ghosts of past conflicts
Angela Washko actively seeks out new ways to facilitate or enter into conversation with individuals and communities who have radically different ideas and opinions in an attempt to create spaces for discussion, productive dissent and complexity
An exhibition in Erlangen (DE) looks at the role that technology can play to ensure or threaten the future of our planet
The young Estonian artist is particularly active in the fields of sound art, installations and performances
The installation reveals the mechanisms of the blockchain as much as it challenges their promises and limits. It also raises questions about art funding, authorship, value systems, decentralised sharing economies, wealth distribution and many more issues
From quantum entanglement to the mysteries of the jellyfish, the exhibition provides an overview of the oeuvre of the artist and musician Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto)
An installation exposes the unpalatable consequences of an AI-driven management of the environment
The French artist challenges the architecture of our perceptions
A participative installation that imitates the functioning of machines and embraces human imperfections and errors started quietly enough but ended up causing controversy and censorship in Hungary
A street artist’s critique of the privatisation of public space and natural resources
People affected by the disorder believe that they or part of their body parts are dead, dying or don’t exist at all
Adam Basanta, an artist, composer and performer of experimental music, likes to submit sound technologies to kinetic and sculptural treatments. Some can be fairly hostile, others are ironic or even poetical
This year’s edition of the STRP festival in Eindhoven decided to look at the future with an open, critical and -dare i say- hopeful eye. Their take on the future is not about being naive and resolutely utopian though
The project revolves around the idea of sending humans to one of the points in space where gravity is absent. Frozen bodies would float until their weak gravities make them assemble into a blob: in this way, a new ‘human’ planet is extra-terraformed
Despite a theme anchored in digital media, the event doesn’t have the ambition to be a new media art exhibition but a contemporary art event that explores the many ways technology challenges society today
Artist Quentin Destieu attempted to reconquer the knowledge surrounding the first microprocessor by re-creating and magnifying the inner architecture of Intel’s 4004 processor
Enter The New Newsroom where journalists, technologists, artists and designers investigate innovative formats, analyse the news and present their findings in stimulating visuals and installations
Surveillance and censorship are mutually dependent; they cannot be viewed separately