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Festival

Santa France. The Rupture I. Interactive 3D web collage. 2020 – 2021

PostSensorium, RIXC Art Science Festival, took place from September 23-25, 2021, exploring the immensity of our virtual and real life challenges that demand a renewed focus on sensory perception and embodied experiences. 

PostSensorium festival aims to provide a platform for artistic interventions and critical discussions on the 21st-century's virtual sensing technologies, science and aesthetics, reconsidering the relations between the actual and virtual, organic and artificial, natural and techno-social, human and “more-than-human”...

The PostSensorium Festival Program featured the Opening of the PostSensorium Exhibition (the main physical event of this year's festival) showing the works by internationally recognized artists who are at the forefront interrogating novel sensing tools, immersive technologies, and experiential art practices.


The PostSensorium Virtual Program consisted of the annual Open Fields Conference, online WebVR exhibition and Screening Program by young and emerging artists, Live Concert and Performances from RIXC Greenhouse, Artist Talks and outstanding Keynote Lectures discussing the contemporary mediums, artistic practices and novel tools for exploring human and “more-than-human” sensoriums, AI and aesthetics of the 21st century, and creating new immersive experiences.

 

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Christiane PAUL / professor of media studies at The New School / Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum in New York City / well known as the author of the book “Digital Art” (Thames & Hudson. 2003/2008) / curator of “The Question of Intelligence: AI and The Future of Humanity” (2020) exhibition. 

Špela PETRIČ / Ljubljana and Amsterdam based new media artist / PhD in biology / a researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam / Petrič received several awards, such as the White Aphroid for outstanding artistic achievement (Slovenia), the Bioart and Design Award (Netherlands), and an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (Austria).

Douglas KAHN / historian of the arts, theorist and writer / Honorary Professor at Sydney College of the Arts at University of Sydney, Australia / author of “Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts” (MIT Press, 1999) and other books on sound art history and “energies in the arts”.

 

CONCEPT AND THEMES

“We like to imagine ourselves as rational beings who think and speak, yet to live means first and foremost to look, taste, feel, and smell the world around us.” (Coccia, 2016)

The human sensorium has always been mediated. “Without the 'medium' of air or water, the anthropoid ear finds it impossible to hear” (Caroline A Jones, 2006). But with more recent enhancement of virtual and sensing technologies, and intensification of its daily use, our 'sensoriums' have become more mediated than ever before. Recent conditions of navigating our lives between the virtual and the real, demand a renewed focus on sensory perception and embodied experience.  

Earlier cyberfiction referred to the body as a “meat machine”, the only function of which is to facilitate the activity of the brain, so – to think; while our thinking separated from the body was considered to be a purely transcendental act. Even if contemporary neuroscience increasingly confirms that our “will'' is an effect of basic autonomic neurons (hence, 'sensing'') we keep designing our machines, including the intelligent ones, “to foster the fantasy that bodies are separate from the minds that 'control' them”. Moreover, as an art historian, curator and author Caroline A Jones puts it that “embodied experience through senses (and their necessary and unnecessary mediations) is how we think”. (Caroline A Jones, 2006)

According to contemporary philosopher Emanuele Coccia “our existence – whether sleeping or awake – is a relentless stream of the sensible…”, yet the communication of two – body and mind, imaginative and physical, natural and artificial – needs a medium, as “the things are not the sensible themselves, they need [a media] to become visible, tangible, audible”. (Emanuele Coccia, 2016)

PostSensorium festival tooon the earlier RIXC studies on “techno-ecological perspective” aiming to open it up towards broader discussion on “post-sensorium conditions”; whereby asking which mediums, technologies or practices are better than others served to reveal our sensorium – mediated being and extended reality.

The festival gathered together artists, theorists, and researchers who are in a forefront of exploring the “post-sensorium conditions”, critically interrogating transformative potential of arts, and using virtual sensing tools to create new embodied and immersive experiences in which sensible and actual, embodied and imaginative, natural and artificially intelligent are in a continuous interaction.

 

Open Fields 2021 Conference (Riga/Virtual)

We welcomeed proposals for the PostSensorium conference by artists, Ph.D. students and researchers from different fields, who explore extended reality applications, virtual sensing tools and other immersive technologies, use data, AI and ML algorithms; collaborate with science, biology, ecology and other disciplines; create and critically engage with embodied experiences, immersive environments, and experiential practices with regards to the following topics:

* Embodied Experiences and Extended Reality 

* Virtual Sensing, Photogrammetry and Experiential Art Practices

* Sensory Perception and Sonic Immersions 

* Intelligent Ecosystems and More-Than-Human Conditions 

* Ecologies Beyond Green - Light, Energies and Fields

* Living Technologies - Artificial Intelligence & Biopolitics

EXHIBITION

The virtual program was connected to the exhibition, the main physical event of this year's festival that took place from September 24 until November 12, 2021 in the National Library of Latvia, featuring immersive and experiential artworks by fourteen international artists. The exhibition will be complemented by immersive excursions guided by curators and artists for virtual audiences, and interactive educational programs for the local public of Riga and Latvia.

 

CONTEXT: GREEN Revisited and Renewable Futures

Open Fields is the annual RIXC Art Science festival conference based in Riga and organized in collaboration with its academic partner – MPLab (Art Research Lab) of Liepaja University, Liepaja, Latvia. Open Fields is a leading Baltic Nordic platform for critical discussions on emerging discourses and novelty art forms in the field of artistic research, digital media, art and science, and techno-ecologies. 

Open Fields is a part of Renewable Futures, a larger international network and biannual traveling conference series in the Baltic Sea and North European region thataim to invent new avenues for more sustainable and imaginative future developments, shaping new contact zones between traditionally separated domains – art and science, academic research and independent creative practices, sustainable businesses and social engagement in the 21st century. The first Renewable Futures conference took place in Riga (2015), followed by two next editions in Eindhoven (2017) and Helsinki (2018). 

In 2021, the fourth Renewable Futures conference took place in Oslo, from November 4-6, 2021, exploring the topics related to “Futures of Living Technologies”.

More info: https://feltproject.no 

Open Fields 2021 “PostSensorium” (virtual) conference in Riga, and Renewable Futures 2021 “Living Technologies” (virtual) conference in Oslo, are manifesting a closing phase of “Green Revisited - Encountering Emerging Naturecultures (GREEN)” Creative Europe's cooperation project. The GREEN project aims to develop a European platform that shapes and promotes an emerging “naturecultures” paradigm via the arts and enhances criticality by investigating the pervasive greenness trope.

http://green.rixc.or

 

 

On site Exhibition in the Library and Gallery has a free entrance.
Guided Tours for school groups can be booked for no charge via e-mail rixc@rixc.org

 

Producers and Contact:

The Festival is Produced by The RIXC Centre for New Media Culture. 

Festival curators: Rasa Smite (rasa@rixc.org) and Raitis Smits (raitis@rixc.org)

Festival producer: Agnese Baranova (agnese@rixc.org)

PR and information coordinator: Liva Silina (rixc@rixc.org)

Contact e-mail: rixc@rixc.org  

Phones: +371 29635167 (Agnese Baranova), +371 26546776 (Rasa Smite)

Address: RIXC the Centre for New Media Culture, Lencu iela 2, Riga, LV-1010, Latvia

 

Support and Partners:

The PostSensiorum Festival and Conference program take place in the framework of “Green Revisited - Encountering Emerging Naturecultures (GREEN)” project co-funded by the EU program Creative Europe. GREEN project is led by RIXC in collaboration with the partners Baltan Laboratories (The Netherlands), Emmetrop (France), Zavod Projekt Atol (Slovenia), Oslo MET (Norway), Biofilia at Aalto University (Finland), MPLab / Art Research Lab at Liepaja University (Latvia).

The festival is supported by The State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia,  Riga City Council, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, Goethe Institute, Capital, Liepaja University, MPLab, The National Library of Latvia, Arterritory, Satori, Wemakemoneynotart, Echo Gone Wrong.

CONTACTS

rixc@rixc.org

+371 67228478 (office)

+371 26546776 (Rasa Smite)