Navigating Through eXistenZ
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | HOPE. Who will Turn the Tide (Ars Electronica 2024, Festival for Art, Technology & Society |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | Sborník příspěvků účastníků festivalu Ars Electronica 2024./ Collection of contributions from participants of the Ars Electronica 2024 festival. |
| Keywords | Existence; digital culture; digital identity; nomadism |
| Description | Curator's text: How to navigate within the parallel and intertwined spaces we inhabit? How to connect to the flow of being, to collective memories, to planetary and individual consciousness? How to navigate our existence? In a largely ethnographic way, the exhibition explores the connection between art, technology and society and how these elements influence and interact in the various spaces and contexts we inhabit and create. It focuses on exploring the POV experience of existence mediated by our bodies and senses, as well as their technological simulations and prostheses. The naming of the exhibition is an appropriation of the title of the sci-fi film eXistenZ (Cronenberg, 1999) with the aim of promoting a dialog between the film and the exhibition. The plot of the film follows a game designer playing a game she created herself. We are just like her, designers and players of the games we call our lives, trying to get beyond the surfaces of the visible and audible, trying to discern the patterns behind them, trying to reach beyond the boundaries defined by the rules of the game we play to find direction and hope in the mazes and traps of all these realities. To play these games, we traverse physical worlds (landscapes, cities, bodies, identities) and simulated digital worlds (digital games, social networks and datasets of quantified selves). The exhibits are traces and records of games played not by conquerors but by ethnographers (wanderers, flaneurs and nomads). |