The international group exhibition of the festival of art, technology and science KIBLIX 2020– 2021: Virtual Worlds Now thus rounds off with a completed set of 18 works of art by internationally renowned artists.
The exhibition, which will be on view at KIBLA PORTAL, the largest independent exhibition centre in Slovenia, provides a critical overview of contemporary virtual spaces through a series of innovative art research projects in the field of the latest virtual (VR), augmented (AR) and mixed reality (MR) technologies.
The exhibition centres around the human experience of virtual reality – with all the material limitations and socio-political conditions that determine the body – while comprehending the virtual environments as spaces for speculative realities, variable identities, and ever more acute social transformations.
The KIBLIX2021 festival’s central question, posed by the curatorial team consisting of Živa Kleindienst, Tadej Vindiš, Aleksandra Kostič and Peter Tomaž Dobrila, is: which and what are the virtual worlds now?
Visitors of the exhibition can experience:
- Lu Yang‘s computer-generated video Delusional Mandala, which explores the influence of technology on the formation of social, cultural, political and biological identities with a genderless human-avatar;
- a virtual reality and a video installation RE-ANIMATED by Jakob Kudsk Steensen, a poetic experience that explores our relationship towards nature, extinction and immortality through an extinct Hawaiian bird and its distorted habitat;
- the digital-only fashion collection DEEP by Amber Jae Slooten and The Fabricant, questioning what the digital revolution could mean for the fashion industry and its environmental imprint;
- the artificially intelligent robot Amygdala, which learns “skin-cutting” on artificial skin, an animistic cleansing ritual, and a sculptural installation Calyx by Marco Donnarumma;
- a mixedreality installation HyperBody Portal: Stratholme.GoStop by Pete Jiadong Qiang, which transitions between the virtual and physical spaces of gaming and “fandom” in anime, visual novels, comics and video games;
- a short animated film How to Disappear by the Total Refusal collective, which, as an anti-war film in an online war game Battelfield, illustrates the history of deserters;
- a virtual reality world on the Sansar platform MetaGarden: Sphere5 by Tanja Vujinović, which enables the exploration of virtual reality as a social space of connectedness and speculative futures;
- a participatory project in augmented reality Skiljelinjer (Lines of Demarcation) by the art-design studio Untold Garden and Sebastian Dahlqvist, critically explores new tools and decision-making processes in public virtual-physical spaces;
- a spatial installation The World Was to Me a Secret Which I Desired to Divine by Emir Šehanović, focusing on new realities built from human and non-human entities;
- a video-performance by Daniel Hanzlík Default Setting, in which the artist shifts the basic principles of analogue and digital media translatability, physical and virtual reality, a two-dimensional image and a three-dimensional object;
- an interactive intermedia installation Time of Flight by the Compiler collective, which offers a different understanding of our experience with devices such as smartphones, computers, tablets and game consoles by visualizing machine vision;
- a virtual reality and first-person point of view 360° videos Seeing I – The Other by Mark Farid, dealing with privacy and control issues within digital systems;
- a generative audio-visual painting Self-portrait by Tadej Droljc, where the painter’s brush is led by pseudo-random algorithms while at the same time an endless game of perspectives unfolds;
- the online performance Nocturne in Black and Gold by the ATOM-r tandem in collaboration with 3 the artist Abraham Avnisan, who seek to subvert colonial narratives of American history by intertwining virtual-physical space, specific visual language, and cover songs;
- a virtual reality Nightsss by Weronika M. Lewandowska and Sandra Frydrysiak, which immerses the viewer in a sensual experience of poetry, dance and nature;
- a video game What Is Your Truth? by Dorijan Šiško and Sara Bezovšek, who research the ideas of modern internet society, meme culture and the formation of “truths”;
- a virtual reality space men r My friended by Tony Oursler, who explores a person’s mind and story;
- and the intermedia installation Third Landscape by Nika Erjavec, which focuses on sensory perception at the intersection of art and science and (in) visible transformations of the environment in the last two centuries.
With the international group exhibition at KIBLA PORTAL the festival KIBLIX 2020-2021 concludes its programs that took place in a hybrid form. In addition to artistic research projects, the festival program also included online events. From December 2020 until today, over 60 online events have been held, ranging from thematically focused conversations with international guests, AV performances, art presentations, webinars and workshops to the all-Slovenian GameJam.