Patricia Domínguez, Matrix Vegetal, 2021–2022. Video still.

Registration for the RIXC Art Science Festival “Climate Imagination” Symposium is open!

The RIXC Art Science Festival symposium will take place on 22–23 October at the National Library of Latvia in Riga, featuring three thematic sessions, workshops, presentations, showcases, and discussions. Participation is free of charge, and those interested are encouraged to register in advance.

This year’s RIXC Art Science Festival explores climate imagination as a cultural and scientific field where art, technology, and environmental research intersect. It brings together artists, researchers, and practitioners to explore imagination as a critical capacity for sensing and rethinking our relationships with the Earth at a time when climate change is reshaping ecosystems, infrastructures, and everyday life. The festival offers multisensory encounters with environmental change through artistic practices – from immersive media and extended reality (XR) to data visualisation and environmental sensing – deepening our understanding of how climate processes are perceived and imagined.

The festival programme includes two exhibitions, an opening keynote, and a symposium with three thematic sessions that interweave artist presentations, workshops, showcases, and discussions.

On the first day of the symposium, Thursday, 22 October, at 13:00 in the Conference Center of the National Library of Latvia, sociologist Philippe Sormani, this year’s festival keynote speaker, will lead a thematic session on experimentation as an artistic and scientific practice, introducing “Genealogies of Experimentation”. Drawing on Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s experimental systems and Harold Garfinkel’s situated praxeology, participants will be invited to explore the question: “Where does an experiment begin in artistic practice?” In the first part of the session, festival artists, international participants, and young researchers from Latvia and the Baltics will present the experimental dimension of their artistic practice by sharing their works, processes, and experiments, while engaging in dialogue with Sormani and reflecting on them in the context of this year’s festival theme, “Climate Imagination”. With Sormani as one of the key figures in Swiss STS (Science and Technology Studies), the session’s discussion and workshop will also aim to lay the groundwork for the development of Art STS in Latvia and the Baltic region.

Later that day, on 22 October at 16:00 in the Conference Center of the National Library of Latvia, Philippe Sormani will deliver the festival’s opening keynote, “Rewilding the Lab”. Sormani is a Senior Researcher at the STS Lab at the University of Lausanne and the Immersive Arts Space at Zurich University of the Arts. His research and publications address experimentation in and across different fields of activity, ranging from experimental physics to artistic experiments and technology demonstrations, including artificial intelligence and extended reality. In his keynote, Sormani will revisit a series of experiments, making explicit the circumstances and multiple contingencies that shape their seemingly independent results, and will explore alternative aesthetics of experimentation and other kinds of sociotechnical arrangement.

The keynote respondent will be Ainārs Kamoliņš, a philosopher, curator, and doctoral researcher at the Latvian Academy of Culture, whose work bridges philosophy with the natural sciences, biotechnology, and media art. As a long-time collaborator of RIXC, he focuses on the intersection of biological processes and technoscientific practices. Kamoliņš will complement Sormani’s perspective with a Latvian and Baltic viewpoint, examining how the relationship between nature, technology, and scientific experimentation changed during the 20th century – from hydropower and ecological thought to environmental movements.

In their discussion, both researchers will consider scientific inquiry not as sterile, isolated laboratory work, but as a practice that is ecologically embedded, environmentally consequential, and interestingly contingent, raising the question of what expertise is adequate in times of polycrisis.

On the second day of the symposium, Friday, 23 October, at 12:00, artist and researcher Maija Demitere will lead the second thematic session, “On Sustainable Digital Productions”, held within the framework of the European Media Art Platform (EMAP) and dedicated to questions of sustainability in digital art production. Festival exhibition artists will present case studies of their work, while Demitere will host a workshop based on her research into deep sustainability and her artistic practice, which centres on ecological everyday life and the sustainable use of resources.

The third and final thematic session, “On Extending Climate Realities”, at 14:30, will be led by Rasa Smite together with Canadian artist, curator, and York University Associate Professor Jane Tingley. Both artists will present the different methods used by artists of the international SensUs network to create extended reality artworks – from environmental data visualisations and slow travel as artistic research to residency-based environmental research. During the session, the SensUs platform will feature experiments by emerging Canadian artists and the Baltic–Nordic collaboration network, as well as augmented reality (AR) artworks by Taiwanese RIXC residency artists and works created within the Karlsruhe UNESCO collaboration project.

Together with the opening keynote, the symposium and its three thematic sessions will form the festival’s conceptual and theoretical framework for both exhibitions. The exhibition “Climate Imagination” will open on Thursday, 22 October, at 18:00 in the Exhibition Hall of the National Library of Latvia, and the following day, on Friday, 23 October, at 18:00, the latest exhibition by Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, “Prompted Evolution”, will open at the RIXC Gallery. Both exhibitions will be on view until 12 December. 

Exhibition artists: Maija DEMITERE (LV), Patricia DOMÍNGUEZ (CL), Anne Duk Hee JORDAN (KR/DE), Pauline DOUTRELUINGNE (BE/DE), Ryu FURUSAWA (JP), Marcus MAEDER (CH/IE), kennedy+swan (DE), knowbotiq in collaboration with Pablo TORRES (CH/AT/CO), Jurģis PETERS (LV) in collaboration with Laura BELOFF (FI), Mārtiņš RATNIKS (LV), Rasa SMITE (LV/CH), Raitis SMITS (LV), Benedikt TERWIEL in collaboration with ANOHNI (DE/US).

REGISTRATION FOR THE SYMPOSIUM IS OPEN!

Participation in all festival events is free of charge. Visitors are invited to register in advance for the symposium programme via Eventbrite, choosing to attend the entire symposium, Philippe Sormani’s keynote, or individual thematic sessions.

More information about the festival programme is available on the website:

https://festival2026.rixc.org/

 

Registration for the symposium via Eventbrite: HERE

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For press enquiries:

Lelde Gūtmane, Festival and Press Coordinator, +371 28365323

Agnese Baranova, Festival Producer, +371 29635167

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The festival is produced by the RIXC Center for New Media Culture:

Festival curators: Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits

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

Festival and press coordinator: Lelde Gūtmane (rixc@rixc.org)

Symposium coordinator: Daina Siliņa (daina@rixc.org)

PR strategy coordinator: Līva Siliņa (rixc@rixc.org)

Supporters and partners
State Culture Capital Foundation, Riga City Council, Pro Helvetia, the European Union’s Creative Europe programme within the project “EMAP Expanded”, Nordic Culture Point, LG Electronics, Liepāja 2027 Foundation, Reverie, Arts Council Tokyo.

Media partners
Arterritory, We Make Money Not Art, Satori, Echo Gone Wrong.

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Contacts
RIXC Center for New Media Culture / RIXC Gallery / Festival Information Center

Address: Lenču iela 2, Riga, LV-1010, Latvia

E-mail: rixc@rixc.org

Phone: +371 26546776 (office)

www.rixc.org | https://festival2026.rixc.org/

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FESTIVAL PROGRAMME
Thursday, 22 October // Opening Programme

10:00 Press Conference
National Library of Latvia, Exhibition Hall, Level 0

13:00 Session 1: Baltic Art STS – On Artistic Experimentation
Workshop with Philippe Sormani / Artist Interventions / Discussion
National Library of Latvia, Conference Center, Level -1

16:00 Keynote “Rewilding the Lab”
Philippe Sormani, respondent Ainārs Kamoliņš
National Library of Latvia, Conference Center, Level -1

18:00 Public Opening of the Festival Exhibition “Climate Imagination”
National Library of Latvia, Exhibition Hall, Level 0

Friday, 23 October // Symposium

12:00 Session 2: EMAP – On Sustainable Digital Productions
Artist Case Studies / Workshop with Maija Demitere
National Library of Latvia, Level 11

14:30 Session 3: SensUs – On Extending Climate Realities
Panel with Jane Tingley and Rasa Smite / SensUs XR Showcases
National Library of Latvia, Level 11

16:30 Outlook: Extending Realities – Liepāja 2027 / Baltic Art STS
With Rasa Smite and Philippe Sormani
National Library of Latvia, Level 11

18:00 Opening of the Exhibition “Prompted Evolution”
RIXC Gallery, Lenču iela 2

Exhibitions on view until 12 December