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.
ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 2 now releases its third 2023 cluster, Rituals of Nascent Worlds, premiering a newly commissioned virtual space by Sahej Rahal: Azalabad.
Rituals of Nascent Worlds closes the first year of Phase 2 releases by weirding our understanding and experience of reality through magic, as an alternative system competing with technic and as a generative tool that weaves “the ineffable” (Federico Campagna) into reality, manifesting and actualizing in digital worlds. By claiming the critical and generative potential of magical thinking, the artists featured in this third cluster reimagine our alliances with technology, queer our belief systems, and engage in collaborative practices. They obstruct and restructure perception, representation, and narrative by infusing them with alternative thought in dynamic and evolving environments.
These artworks integrate AI with magic and alchemy (Crosslucid) and use virtual environments created with video-game engines for emotional connection and healing (Moritz Jekat). Cultivating the ineffable within a non-binary world order, they address the ongoing crises of representation by advocating for a technophile mysticism (Lucile Olympe Haute) or creating immersive shared hallucinations (Hollow). They encourage political and philosophical thinking through speculative video games in which users become shifting entities, human/non-human figures, city planners, or fungal macro-organisms (Jelena Viskovic and Federico Campagna). They use world-building to question mythmaking while underlining the importance of actual scientific facts by means of fiction (Sahej Rahal). They rearrange apparent common sense by encoding it with other thought systems, such as earth sciences, Black liberation theory, and the poetics of African decolonial systems (Nolan Oswald Dennis from Phase 1).
Still on view are the first two cosmo-clusters of artworks, There Is No Software and Regeneration, currently featured as part of The Wrong Biennale.
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
