Saturday, September 12, at 20.00 (Latvian time) one of the world's largest art and technology festivals - Ars Electronica - will broadcast a unique concert from RIXC Forest Laboratory in the Latvian countryside.
The artists, that will take part in the Forest Garden Greenhouse performance programme, are: composer Platons Buravickis, sound artist Ivo Tauriņš, young musician Lauris Šmits, RIXC residency artist Daniel Hengst (EMARE / Germany), and the authors of this project - artists Rasa Šmite and Raitis Šmits together with VR artist Kristaps Biters. However, new media artists Andris Vētra and Artis Kuprišs will participate in the programme with their jointly developed concert robot - as a representative of urban culture, in the concert it will encounter nature for the first time; in the greenhouse where the concert will take place and which is home to both tomato seedlings and a young pine tree, it will reveal an artistic techno-ecological clash.

This year, the Ars Electronica festival, which takes place this week from 9 to 13 September, takes place mainly online and becomes a conceptual journey through the Kepler Gardens. In 2020, the festival is like a journey through the networked biotopes and ecosystems in which people around the world are working to develop and shape our future, which in these days means above all saving our future. Around 120 artists' communities and institutions from around the world take part in this online journey through the Kepler Gardens.
https://ars.electronica.art/

This year, RIXC participates in the Ars Electronica Garden programme with an ambitious programme called PLA(N)Tform, which includes a Forest Garden Greenhouse concert from RIXC Forest Laboratory - live streaming from the Latvian countryside, as well as a virtual exhibition in cooperation with BioDesign Lab at HfG University in Karlsruhe, Germany.

  

Forest Laboratory (2020). RIXC publicity photo

In the Forest Garden Greenhouse performance programme, composer Platons Buravickis will play his composition Red Wave, which reveals information as fluctuations. Fluctuations form various shapes that resonate. Tracing the fluctuations, how they resonate with each other, it turns out that the sound and colour are not much different, that a person is not much different from a tree - they are either alive or not. The composition does not study colour, but the meaning of waves (fluctuations), which would stimulate to be united with all living things.

Generated forest by sound artist Ivo Tauriņš is a composition and multi-channel sound installation created this summer at the RIXC Fields residence. The artwork deals with the relationship between nature and technology. In nature, everything happens cyclically - life on Earth is provided by continuous geological and biological energy exchange processes.Today's challenge could be how to maintain a balance between man, nature and technology, as man-made technologies could be the basis for fundamental changes in the normal course of order of things.

Rivers in the Sky by young musician Lauris Šmits explores the global water cycle, how water travels from trees into the atmosphere and then back down to Earth. Every tree in the forest is a fountain, sucking water out of the ground through its roots and releasing water vapour into the atmosphere through pores in its foliage. In their billions, they create giant rivers of water in the air - rivers that form clouds and create rainfall hundreds of kilometres away.

German artist Daniel Hengst, who is currently residing in Latvia at the RIXC artists' residence EMARE, will perform a multimedia performance, providing an insight into his upcoming Virtual Reality artwork - Blooming Love. The artwork leads the viewer into a seemingly strange and unfamiliar immersive VR environment. Here, unusually colored leaves and fantastic flowers intertwine with unusual plant shapes and sizes. Plant stems pierce the human body without injuring it. Initially, the slightly vague tension caused by the shape, colour and sound of the surroundings will intensify the intimate, original love affair between the viewer and the nature of these plants.

Daniel Hengst. Blooming Love (ongoing)

The Forest Laboratory, which is the venue for the concert, is a new art study on climate change, the greenhouse effect and human-plant interactions launched this summer by artists Rasa Šmite and Raitis Šmits; it is also a continuation of their artwork - Talk to Me. Human-plant communication. In addition to the new pine, which is equipped with environmental sensors that simulate future climate change in the greenhouse, The Forest Laboratory also has an online communication interface  - Talk to me. The artists invite those interested to go to https://talktome.rixc.lv/ this week, where you can talk to the plants of The Forest Laboratory. The messages recorded online are read through the loudspeakers for the tomatoes and pine growing in The Forest Laboratory greenhouse, where the concert will take place.

The Forest Garden Greenhouse concert will be available to the public on Saturday, September 12 at 20:00 live streaming from Ars Electronica channel,  here:
https://ars.electronica.art/keplersgardens/en/garden-greenhouse/

Video teaser for the performance program Forest Garden Greenhouse from RIXC Forest Laboratory and the virtual exhibition PLA(N)Tform: Virtual BioSensing:
https://vimeo.com/454722066

Further information at RIXC webpage: http://rixc.org

The event is supported by the State Culture Capital Fund,  EMAP / EMARE and the the cooperation project Green Revisited within the framework of the EU programme Creative Europe.