Ars Electronica Technological Art Festival

Description

Ars Electronica, one of the greatest events in tech art will take place all around the world on September 9-13. For this occasion, ITMO’s art residency, the new AIR creative space on Vasilyevsky Island, will open its doors for the first time. 

The concept of Ars Electronica 2020 is Kepler’s gardens – garden as a metaphor for the new way of network interaction and exchange of ideas in the changing world. In St. Petersburg, the project is represented by Pangardenia, an exhibition with works from over 40 Russian and international artists. In their works, they muse on the so-called hybrid Pangardenia gardens – conceptual links between reality and virtuality. 

All Ars Electronica projects exist in virtual reality. Some projects, however, can be seen offline in St. Petersburg at the AIR residence on September 10-13, 11 am to 9 pm. Each day, the festival’s curators will host a tour of the exhibition. A limited number of visitors can take part in the tour: you have to sign up via this link. 

The exhibition will feature six projects, including those created by the graduates of ITMO’s Master’s program in Art & Science. 

1. Natalia Fedorova’s project, To be the wind for the tree, is based upon the idea of the Internet of Trees. The artist teaches the trees to talk to people using the language of poetry to tell about their feelings: how a tree perceives the light and the wind, how the water rises down the trunk – sensors detect these processes, and a poetic generator turns them into words.  
2. The BIOROBOTY 019 art group of ITMO University graduates will create Wonder meadow 2.0, an interactive space where people will interact with rare plants that grow on the real Wonder Meadow in Gatchina. 
3. The Plants project by Anna Martynenko delves into the idea of the self-sustainability of information, the possibility for it to grow, flourish and fade with an algorithm that takes the data from the dead fragments of plants and grows it into a digital garden. 
4. Flower, Natalia Tikhonova’s performance takes the audience through the path of love that blooms and decays, and each stage is conveyed through videos broadcasted from screens of different sizes – from a projector to a smartphone. 
5. The UnderGarden project is a haptic-sonic installation and performance. By dropping the usual, visual, way of perceiving the world, the audience will use their hearing and touch to dive deep into the world of soil and find a way to the unhuman zone.
6. Natalia Balabanova will present the project Petunias Are a Girl's Best Friend, where the gallery’s space is consumed by mitosis of growing plant cells. On the one hand, it is about exceeding one’s physical limits, and on the other – petunias are taking up the whole physical space. In this piece, the artist muses on the fragile equilibrium of nature, the limited resources, the order of time and the fear of constant reproduction. 

The main event of the Festival is Wandering Gardens, a three-hour boat trip of artists, curators and scientists on the festival boat Pangardenia. In the early morning of September 11, the team will set off on a journey around St. Petersburg's canals with a special load – a collection of 240 petunia’s grown by Natalia Balabanova during her artistic search in self-isolation. A special unmanned boat will accompany the team and test the quality of water. In this journey, the participants are hoping to find new forms of interaction for these two agents and the water ecosystem forming our city.   

Ars Electronica curators have compiled a program for art connoisseurs of St. Petersburg: workshops, lectures and performance readings by artists and scientists will take place online on Pangardenia’s YouTube channel. The participants will get the chance to study the rhythms of non-human agents by transforming amino acids into a soundwave, learn to create plant-inspired popular masks on Instagram and much more. 

You can read more here. 

Participants

Organizers