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.
On April 27, ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 2 releases its fourth cluster, This Too Is a Territory—Navigating Digital Frontiers, premiering a newly commissioned work by Bahar Noorizadeh: Mundus Novus.
This Too Is a Territory—Navigating Digital Frontiers features artworks that explore uncharted algorithmic territories in a quest to critically uncover forms of agency, resistance, and resilience. They pose questions about whether Web 3.0 holds the promise of a decentralized and federated internet, yet also reveal its revitalization of online extractive fantasies and marketing schemes. They suggest that world-building may give rise to tactical algorithmic agency—the capacity for people to actively shape the outcome of corporations’ computation for their own benefit.
Drawing from past examples, the artworks of the fourth cluster take five paths. One work examines the possible repurposing of hegemonic technological infrastructures towards more equitable economic and social practices (Bassam El Baroni and Constantinos Miltiadis collaborating with Georgios Cherouvim and Gerriet K. Sharma, aka. Grupo Synco). Another offers a hallucinogenic 3D online platform built out of land-grab fantasies transferred to virtual property, collaging the “new worlds” of past colonial expansions with new metaverse territories of speculative real estate (Bahar Noorizadeh). A third speculates around the digital reappropriation of real-world territories affected by climate change acceleration, digitally reversing an economy deeply intertwined with and dependent upon oil and petroleum services in a vision mixing grief and hope (Caroline Sinders). The fourth uses algorithmic strategies to hack ARE YOU FOR REAL’s digital platform while revealing the complex structure of outsourced labor that is otherwise largely invisible behind an algorithmic veil, creating an imaginary “outsourcing paradise” where workers can voice their alienation and resist neoliberal economics (eeefff). The fifth work scrutinizes the use of blockchain to cross borders and extract resources—such as land, labor, data, and privacy—from those most in need (César Escudero Andaluz).
As Nelly Y. Pinkrah’s featured text A matter of time… and other things that cannot be determined, written for Phase 1 in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, aptly states: “What this collapse has laid bare we ought to never forget again: power (belongs) to the people, and it resides in their relationships. It resides in their modes, movements, and (im)materialities in solidarity.”
Still on view are the first three cosmo-clusters of artworks: There Is No Software, Regeneration, and Rituals of Nascent Worlds.
ARE YOU FOR REAL was initiated by ifa in 2020. Phase 2 is curated by Giulia Bini and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, with design and programming by Yehwan Song and sound design crafted by Enrico Boccioletti.
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
