ins nirgendwie - digitale utopien

„INS NIRGENDWIE - DIGITALE UTOPIEN“

Call for Exhibition | Accepted: AR-Art, Conceptual Art, Digital Graphic, Digital Painting, Installation, Photography, Performance, (Post-) Internet Art, Sculpture/Plastic Arts, Video, VR-Art

„The gestalt of all artistic utopia today is: to make things of which we do not know what they are.“ Theodor W. Adorno, Vers uns musique informelle

„The network is our contemporary intuition of infinity.“ Alan Liu

Within the modern idea of progress, fuelled by technology, there always shimmers the hope of a better tomorrow, whenever and however that may be achieved. The contemporary expression of this vision is the Californian utopia, manifested in the transhumanist Singularity movement, which speculates on a technical superintelligence that will help solve all of humanity's problems - both hope and horror.

But it is striking that in many places today utopian thinking has been replaced by hard realism. The current fear of the dystopia threatened by climatic, technological and hygienic changes forces us to take a sober look at the few options that seem to remain to prevent brutal social changes.

Today, technical solutions give many people hope that global climatic and pandemic events can be brought under control: Where would we be if we could not use genetic engineering to develop vaccines and medicines? And aren't wind turbines, smart electricity technologies, hydrogen and e-drives - enabled, controlled, accelerated by IT technologies - also technical answers to the problems of man-made climate change?

For many people, however, it is disturbing that the technology utopians of the 21st century like Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg and others have become unimaginably rich and thus unimaginably powerful with their IT companies. And even more disturbing is the fact that IT technologies are capable of massively restricting our individual freedom through total control, see the Social Credit System in China. Here too: Digitalization offers hope and terror at the same time.

So if we look at the current scenario of digital utopia in our culture, we see that it is complicated. That is precisely what interests us. For the unmanageable, the obscured and the only in the making offers art a fantastic playground. Moreover, art itself contains a utopian moment, it refers through the now of its material to the idea of the possible, the yet to come, reflected in the imagination of the viewer. Perhaps this is why many digital artists deal with utopian perspectives. So how does digital art approach the theme of "utopia"? What view do the artists have of the future? What dangers do they warn about? What utopian dreams do they give space to - virtually or in real life?

>>> You are a digital artist? Then take part with your work in the big group exhibition at the Weltkunstzimmer, Düsseldorf, Germany, 7 - 23 October 2022

Deadline for this call: 15 June 2022