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 September 28, ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 2 releases its fifth cluster, Agents of Fluid Predictions, with a newly co-commissioned online version of Sybil Montet’s project Geomancy.
Agents of Fluid Predictions forms an inquiry into the ever-changing landscape of foresight. Prediction is shown to be ephemeral, certainty dissolves into speculation, truth shifts like sand, past and future are fluid.
The artworks featured in this fifth cluster challenge real-time applications of multiple forms of AI. Sybil Montet’s Geomancy is an advanced form of digital cinematography in which augmented beings morph with syncretic nature in a constantly evolving stream of elemental poetry, driven by live data such as weather patterns, lightning frequency, and solar radiation. Sara Bezovšek’s interactive website SND guides visitors through potential futures for our planet, capturing a pervasive sense of unease about its future and depicting various apocalyptic scenarios. Juan Covelli’s generative video The State of Things, co-authored by the artist and various AIs, explores how memory is constructed through artificial images and questions the role of media representations in a post-truth era, highlighting the risks posed by storing our data with corporations and the homogenization of visual memory. Delving into the contradictions of machine intelligence, Dmstfctn’s interactive audiovisual performance Waluigi’s Purgatory, adapted as four excerpts explorable through an interactive interface, follows the journey of a memory-laden and doubt-burdened AI trapped in a purgatory for AIs that cheated during training. HUNITI GOLDOX’s Rising up from Halite engages with mutant narratives and historical fabrication to project us into the year 2250, when the Mediterranean has dried up due to anthropogenic climate change, water molecules now transformed into salt crystals. Its underwater inhabitants, survivors of the European border genocide, evolve as they surface into the light: their respiratory systems can live on liquid oxygen and their bodies neutralize salt. Unmake Lab’s The Sisyphean Variables revisits and challenges the Sisyphean myth with an algorithmic narrative twist, using a large language model (LLM) to deconstruct its anthropocentric narrative.
Still on view are the first four cosmo-clusters of artworks: This Too Is a Territory, 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
