Barcelona has become one of the de-localised venues of the Ars Electronica Festival, the most important event in the world dedicated to the interconnections between art, technology and society. The 41st edition will take place in Linz (Austria) and 120 other cities around the world from 9 to 13 September.
Barcelona’s participation will take the form of a programme that highlights the diversity, richness and dynamism of the creative scene in Barcelona and Catalonia, born from the convergence between art and technology.
The initiative has been promoted by the Institut Ramon Llull, NewArtFoundation / BEEP Collection, Hangar (Barcelona Centre of Visual Arts Production and Research), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC / ISEA Barcelona) and OFF Barcelona with collaboration from Sónar + D, Arts Santa Mònica and the Catalan Institute of Cultural Companies (ICEC).
Following two years of participation in Ars Electronica through the BEEP Collection, the internationally renowned Catalan collection dedicated to electronic and digital art, in this edition, Barcelona is taking part with a proposal that exposes and highlights the multi-faceted, heterogeneous, interconnected nature of its community.
The proposal for the Ars Electronica Garden Barcelona revolves around the Garden Barcelona Show, an exhibition at Arts Santa Mònica, which will bring together the latest productions by and additions to the BEEP Collection and pieces produced at Hangar, thanks to grants awarded to Mónica Rikić for New Home of Mind, Roc Parés for Doble Consciència and Santi Vilanova for Forms – Screen Ensemble. All three projects were selected through a public application process for production and exhibition grants organised by the Institut Ramon Llull, NewArtFoundation and Hangar, in collaboration with the BEEP Collection.
The Garden Barcelona Show will be extended until 20 September, so that it can also be part of the special Sónar +D CCCB event, which will take place at the Barcelona Centre of Contemporary Culture on 18 and 19 September.
There will also be a series of free round tables at the DHUB and a workshop and an Algorave (computer music concert with real-time programming) at Hangar. The finishing touch on the programme is provided by Taxis, a set of audiovisual capsules that, as their name suggests, take the audience on a virtual tour of the studios of some of the most relevant artists on Barcelona’s electronic and digital scene.
All the activities will be in person and broadcast via streaming on the Ars Electronica website (https://ars.electronica.art/keplersgardens/en). After the festival is over, they will remain available online, along with the Taxis.
This Ars Electronica Garden Barcelona programme is part of the 41st edition of the Ars Electronica Festival, which, under the title In Kepler’s Gardens. A global journey mapping the ‘new’ world, hopes to dodge the difficulties caused by the current health crisis with a new format, reminiscent of German astronomer Johannes Kepler’s cosmogonic revolution relating to the planets’ movements in their orbit around the Sun.
After 40 years of being the epicentre of the creative scene based on new communication technologies and digital creativity, for its 41st edition, the Ars Electronica is opening itself up to a conceptual revolution that enables it to navigate the inevitable issues arising from the organisation of a festival of this size during a pandemic. Faced with the inability to put together an event like the 2019 edition, which brought 1,449 artists and scientists and 110,000 visitors from 45 countries to
Linz for 5 days, the Ars Electronica festival has instead designed a new cosmogony, with Linz as the epicentre of a de-localised, multi-location festival. Orbiting around it will be 120 cities that, like Barcelona, will broadcast their programme via streaming on the festival website.
All the invited cities will be gardens, distal gardens of a festival that in Linz takes place in the gardens of the Johannes Kepler University, Kepler's Gardens, although a large part of the proposals will have a virtual presence and conferences, debates and concerts will be broadcast in real time through the festival website.
More information and Art Electronica Garden Barcelona’s programme:
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