October 6, 2023
ARE YOU FOR REAL expands international cultural exchange and contemporary co-creative exhibition practices through dialogue around digital world-making, aesthetic investigation, and performative political reflection. In arriving at Phase 2, the platform hosts artworks that explore how computation and the sciences relate to reality. Works commissioned for or otherwise featured on the platform converge into thematic clusters that in turn manifest as planetary systems—disclosing a new cosmology of interpretations of the digital sphere.
Alert! On October 6, ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 2 will release its second cluster, Regeneration, premiering a newly commissioned work by Miriam Simun: Contact Zone Level 1.
Regeneration speculates on the regenerative power of the virtual and its possible impacts on real-world scenarios, ecosystems, and non-human and interspecies alliances. Its artworks are digital remnants of real sites which have disappeared, testifying to irreversible climate processes, or they are collaborative human-machine experiments providing counternarratives around technology and artificial, and natural agency.
The artworks seek to understand what it’s like to be a bat (Zheng Mahler from Phase 1) or imagine a shift in the Earth’s magnetic field (Guillemette Legrand and Vincent Thornhill). They envisage the cohabitation of the planet with algorithmic agents (Lou Cantor) and with the fossils they generate (Ziyang Wu and Mark Ramos). They explore glacial deep time in an era of irreversible morphological and geological transformations (Jakob Steensen and Joel Kuennen) and scrutinize boundaries between the body and the external world (Saša Spačal). And, as in Miriam Simun’s new cluster-specific commission, Contact Zone Level 1, they enact rewilding processes in co-creation with AI, weaving together ecological and mythological stories, opening up hybrid interpretations of our surroundings and multispecies alliances.
Still on view is the first cosmo-cluster of artworks, There Is no Software, released on August 2: a commissioned participatory digital work by post-critical design collective The Rodina surrounded by thematically aligned artworks by GUO Cheng and Weihao Qiu, Theodoulos Polyviou with Loukis Menelaou, Wisrah Villefort, Nushin Yazdani and Can Karaalioglu (from Phase 1), and Tatyana Zambrano, via the online platform designed and coded by Yehwan Song.
ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 2 aspires to situate and question a multiplicity of cosmotechnics (following Yuk Hui’s eponymous theory) shaped by a diverse, decentralized community of artists through a sequence of cosmological propositions, shifting between planetary and terrestrial, ecological and technological, magical and decolonial, to grasp various aspects of digitalization and a reality irreducibly entangled with the online sphere.
ARE YOU FOR REAL was initiated by ifa in 2020. Phase 2 is curated by Giulia Bini and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás.
About ifa
Together with partners, ifa—Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen champions freedom in art, research and civil society worldwide, bringing together people who are committed to an open society. It creates analogue and digital spaces for encounter, exchange, negotiation and co-creation. ifa lends a voice to activists, artists, scholars and scientists, promotes cooperation and increasingly pursues its goals jointly with partners. Using its core competencies in art, research and civil society, ifa builds networks to achieve sustainable results.
It is supported by Germany’s Federal Foreign Office, the state of Baden-Württemberg and its capital Stuttgart.
Press contact: Miriam Kahrmann, presse@ifa.de
