LAT Press Support Contact

News

RIXC Art Science Festival 2022 exhibition: SPLINTERED REALITIES. RIXC publicity photo.

This year's RIXC Art Science festival. SPLINTERED REALITIES will take place in Riga from August 25 until October 16, 2022. The key event of the RIXC Festival program is the opening of the SPLINTERED REALITIES exhibition at the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Sporta 2 quarter on Thursday, August 25, 2022 at 18:00. The opening program will feature an introduction by the festival curators Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits who will talk about the creative practices that deal with “splintered realities” from the “naturecultures” perspective, examining the transformative potential of art and 'living technologies' in extending our realities and opening up our sensing towards each other and our environments, as well as the presentation by Raitis Smits who will introduce his new book titled “New Media Art. Preservation and Representation” (published in Latvian), a unique research project studying the history of new media art in Latvia, as well as the RIXC contribution in the contemporary art scene in Latvia and RIXC Art Science Festival’s growth into an internationally relevant new media art event which gathers professional artists, art, science and technology experts and researchers in Riga.

This year, the festival will explore the challenges of our contemporary condition: media ubiquity, pandemic concerns, and social divisions, which, affected moreover by an ongoing war, have landed us in a world of splintered realities. What can art do? What can science offer? What kind of virtual and augmented reality technologies can help us become more empathetic – towards each other and our planet? The aim of the RIXC Art Science Festival: SPLINTERED REALITIES is not to provide answers but to be a forum for revising the “splinters” of our contemporary condition and envisioning what it would take to build a world in which wars like the current Russian onslaught on Ukraine would become impossible. 

The festival exhibition will take place from August 25 until October 16 and it will feature artworks by 13 international and Latvian artists who view the current world processes from a techno-ecological perspective, studying the acoustics of the spaces in Chornobyl’s exclusion zone, virtually immersing in the depths of the memories of soldiers, visualizing our readiness for all kinds of cataclysms – from earthquakes, hurricanes and war laws until the zombie apocalypse. Furthermore, artists will employ and train artificial intelligence, in order to delete images of people captured in photos and, using artificial neuron networks, create completely new and unusual aesthetics of portraits based on restored, old photos. Visitors will also have an opportunity to interact with “extraplanetary systems'' created by artificial intelligence and create temporary and constantly changing selfies from virtual flies.

The exhibition is an intent to play with the “splinters'' of our contemporary condition, affected moreover by an ongoing war, post pandemics, media ubiquity and social division. It features the artworks by international artists who explore the transformative potential of art and extended reality, and ground their 'realism' position in the perspective of 'naturecultures' – in the spirit of Guattari's ecosophy, Latour's 'terrestrial coexistence', and Haraway's 'arts of living on a damaged planet'…


Memo Akten. All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace / Deeper Meditations #1-#6,  2021.

Taking its title from the late American poet Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace / Deeper Meditations #1-#6 by the Turkish artist and the leading AI art pioneer Memo Akten is a short experimental film about our obsession, fetishization, and deification of technology. As the boundaries between ‘nature’ and ‘artificial’, between ‘human’ and ‘technology’ are imaginary and non-existent, our efforts to tame nature and subdue her to our will, are in fact an endeavor to tame and imprison ourselves.

Mario Klingemann. Neural Decay, 2017.

Neural Decay is a series of unique prints generated by custom-trained generative adversarial networks (GANs) created by the AI art, neuron network and machine learning pioneer, German artist Mario Klingemann.  Reminiscent of miniatures or early studio photographs, these machine-generated portraits have an otherworldly quality. Neural Decay is an example of what Klingemann refers to as “Neuralism,” art created using artificial neural networks.

Jurģis Peters. Alternative Realities, 2022.

Seeing the Russian military invasion in Ukraine, it is clear that the inaccessibility of objective information and outright misinformation has caused a large part of Russian citizens and their supporters elsewhere in the world to live in an alternative reality, where, referring to Orvel, 2 +2 = 5, and Russian army troops are liberators. Alternative Realities by the young Latvian artist Jurģis Peters is an installation that consists of found images of fallen Russian army soldiers. Referring to the usage of various algorithms in disseminating misinformation, the artist has used machine learning tools to delete the soldiers from these images.

SPLINTERED REALITIES exhibition artists: Debbie DING / DBBD.SG (SG), Jacob KIRKEGAARD (DK), Mario KLINGEMANN (DE), Hayoun KWON (KR), Memo Akten (TR), Laurent MIGNONNEAU & Christa SOMMERER (FR/AT), Alvis MISJUNS (LV), Jurģis PETERS (LV), Sahej RAHAL (IN), Allison STEWART (US), Sabīne ŠNĒ (LV), Theo TRIANTAFYLLIDIS (GR/US).

Exhibition curators: Raitis Smits and Rasa Smite, producer: Agnese Baranova / RIXC

 

Further information
https://festival2022.rixc.org/ 

 

Contact us:
Festival curators Rasa Smite (rasa@rixc.org), T. 26546776 Raitis Smits (raitis@rixc.org)

Festival producer: Agnese Baranova (agnese@rixc.org), T. 29635167

PR and information coordinator: Līva Siliņa (rixc@rixc.org), tālr. 25358541

E-mail: rixc@rixc.org  

 

Support: Riga City Council, State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Goethe-Institut Riga, LG Electronics.

Partners: Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Liepaja University Art Research Laboratory MPLab, NAIA – Naturally Artificial Intelligence Art Association (Karlsruhe, Germany), FeLT – Futures of Living Technologies project / Oslo MET.

Informative support: Arterritory, Echo Gone Wrong, Satori, We Make Money Not Art, Diena.

CONTACTS

rixc@rixc.org

+371 67228478 (office)

+371 26546776 (Rasa Smite)