ONASSIS STEGI IN ARS ELECTRONICA: STORIES OF ATHENS

Following last year’s fulminant 40-year anniversary festival, which brought more artists, exhibitors and international experts to Linz, Austria, than ever before, this September Ars Electronica is starting on a journey through “Kepler’s Gardens”. The name of this year’s festival is a metaphor for the organizational principle of the festival in times of global lockdown: a festival that will not dive into the Internet and disappear there, but will emerge from the Internet and manifest itself in many places around the world.

Hardly any other phrase has been used as often in recent months as this one: that the world will be a different place after this crisis. Often, prophetically, as a glimmer of hope, and more often as a threat. Is this true, and if so, what changes will there be? This question is the focus of this year’s Ars Electronica. Different communities will think about the current problems, and work on concrete ideas, actions and solutions. Places, initiatives and institutions, where artists and scientists work together, will challenge society and live new alliances and forms of cooperation, creating “online gardens” across the planet: from Barcelona to Tokyo, from Brussels to Buenos Aires, from Boston to Seoul, from Johannesburg to Silicon Valley, and from Los Angeles to Athens and Onassis Stegi.

Inside the Ars Electronica Garden Athens, Onassis Stegi is working once more with the most important digital media festival in Europe, creating its own online garden in two parts under the overarching title Stories of Athens: Data Garden, a multimedia installation by Kyriaki Goni, and the results of HackAthens 2020, a series of five works in the form of film, digital games, sound drama and mobile apps. While having a very different point of departure, both projects explore the local vs. the global, the endemic vs. the permanent, algorithms and rituals, data, ecologies and bodies.

Data Garden by artist Kyriaki Goni raises the issue of connecting personal data with the protection of the natural and cultural environment, linking digital rights with climate justice. What are the data ecologies of tomorrow? Can we develop models of symbiosis between humans-plants and data? What are the data-secrets hidden in the DNA of a plant secretly grown on the slopes of the Acropolis? What is the future of our connected bodies in post-pandemic Athens? Can we reinvent our human relationships, bodily contacts, emotions, jobs, sex-life, and dreams in a world heavily mediated by technologies and constantly regulated by psycho-political constellations? In contrast with the conception of romantic gardens, Data Garden becomes a symbiotic locus of humans, data and non-humans, memory and resistance. Cities are reconceived as assemblages of actors equally seeking the right to our memories.

HackAthens is an annual arts marathon on issues concerning the city of Athens organized by the Onassis Foundation, and in 2020 it dealt with Athens in the wake of the pandemic. HackAthens 2020 sought to explore post-Covid-19 pandemic Athens: how are bodies reconfigured in an era where digital communications mediate all forms of activity, where we struggle to connect with our touch, and where the boundaries between personal and professional spaces are blurred? What kind of cities will we experience when our realities are both expanded and reduced through technology? Are our daily micro-routines a form of resistance, or the ultimate moment of compliance? Five new digital works are to be presented, by the artists Christina Chrysanthopoulou and Olga Chatzifoti, Vasileia Dereli and Marialena Vyzaki, Lotus Eaters, Paris Selinas, and Evita Skourleti, all of whom took part in the “HackAthens 2020: What Comes After” project. The works were selected following an open call by the Onassis STEGI and were collectively developed through the close collaboration of the selected creators both with the project curators and with each other. Videos, digital apps, binaural recording techniques, 3D stereo sound, VR games, and poetry awaken the imagination, stimulate the senses, and invite us to reflect upon our lives in a city, i.e. ATHENS, that changes perhaps faster and more unexpectedly than ever.

In parallel with the “Stories of Athens” exhibition, and to coincide with the official start of the international arts residency program of the European STUDIOTOPIA project, Onassis Stegi is also contributing to the Ars Electronica Festival with two discussions involving the artists and scientists supported by this project. Collaboration between researchers, scientists and artists lies at the heart of the STARTS (Science, Technology and Arts) series that now forms a core part of Onassis Stegi’s programming. Through these collaborations and discussions, Onassis Stegi aims to raise awareness and foster creative and critical re-evaluations of the technological, ethical and environmental challenges facing society today. The first discussion, titled “STUDIOTOPIA – Creative Question Challenge 1”, is being led by arts company “Hypecomf” and marine biologist Markos Digenis, while the second, titled “STUDIOTOPIA – Creative Question Challenge 2”, is being headed by artist-run space “3 137” alongside physicist and chemist Dr. Audrey-Flore Ngomsik.

Departing from Linz, Austria, “real” and digital events will take place at many different locations, organized by numerous partners from Ars Electronica’s large international network that has grown over 40 years. With this simultaneity and duality of locally physical and globally connected events, Ars Electronica will once again become an exciting experimental laboratory and prototype for a next-level network that will focus on new forms and possibilities of fusion and coexistence of analogue and digital, real and virtual, physical and telematic proximity. Onassis Stegi is once more stepping up and making its presence felt.

Program Curation: Christos Carras, Prodromos Tsiavos

Production Coordination: Heracles Papatheodorou

STUDIOTOPIA activities initiative: Dora Vougiouka

Production: Ioanna Margariti, Katerina Varda

Participating Artists: Vasileia Dereli and Marialena Vyzaki, Kyriaki Goni, Lotus Eaters, Paris Selinas, Evita Skourleti, Christina Chrysanthopoulou, Olga Chatzifoti

Produced by: Onassis Stegi

DIGITAL EVENT PROGRAM

Data Garden | A virtual tour of the exhibition and a discussion with Kyriaki Goni

Wednesday, September 9 2020 | 18:00 (EEST)

Watch it on Onassis YouTube Channel: https://youtu.be/1T8UaQnOVtI

The tour will be available online until 27th September

HackAthens 2020: What comes after | Online showcase

From September 9, 2020

Find the works on onassis.org

HackAthens 2020 | A discussion with participating artists

Friday, September 11, 2020 | 18:00 (EEST)

Watch the discussion on Onassis YouTube Channel: https://youtu.be/9H1gqDdzNZg

STUDIOTOPIA – Creative Question Challenge 1

Saturday, September 12, 2020 | 15:30 - 16:00 (ΕEST)

Discussion with the arts company “Hypecomf”, and the marine biologist Markos Digenis.

STUDIOTOPIA – Creative Question Challenge 2

Sunday, September 13, 2020 | 18:30 - 19:00 (ΕEST)

Discussion with the artist-run space “3 137”, and the physicist and chemist Dr. Audrey-Flore Ngomsik.

The discussion will be made available on the Ars Electronica Festival website.

The STUDIOTOPIA – Creative Question Challenge discussions are being held as part of the STUDIOTOPIA program, co-funded by the EU’s Creative Europe program in collaboration with the following cultural institutions:Center for Fine Arts (BOZAR) and GLUON in Brussels, Ars Electronica in Linz, Cluj Cultural Centre in Cluj, Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdansk, Onassis Stegi in Athens, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Laboral in Gijon.