Are you for real? It would be an odd question to ask if we didn’t have technologies at hand capable not only of representing but generating realities. Computation propels a shift in our understanding of what “real” is, and how it should be distinguished from the merely possible, the virtual, and the actual.
Realities can be constructed by calculating machines as much as by the scientific activity that shapes how we perceive our digital and analog life-worlds. The understanding that computation and scientific investigation are two main forces that define our realities lies at the core of ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 2.
In arriving at this second phase, areyouforreal.ifa.de becomes a platform for investigating how computation and the sciences relate to reality—the full potential of their roles in generating new worlds—through the work of artists.
Artworks commissioned for or otherwise featured on the platform converge into thematic cosmo-clusters, manifesting as planetary systems, to disclose a new cosmology of interpretations of the digital sphere. The intention is to show the irreducible entanglement of real and digital and to transpose fundamental questions present in our terrestrial life to the online sphere. The artists featured on ARE YOU FOR REAL use computers as tools, as collaborators, and as agents of world creation. They increasingly base their works on the results of scientific research, while also borrowing and transforming its methods in their investigations.
In recent decades computation has reached a planetary scale: its infrastructure now interconnects and forms the Earth. Because the ARE YOU FOR REAL artworks are held up by the stack of computation, the digital cosmos they create cannot be interpreted separately from the infrastructure it relies on.
The first cluster of artworks “There Is No Software” reflects on infrastructural issues. They engage with the manifold ways in which the virtual worlds generated by computation depend on the planet, but they also feed on its ecosystem’s imagery, relations, and data as they imagine alternatives for the world from which they emerge.
The second cluster “Regeneration” speculates on what never was but might have been; these artworks imagine the regenerative power of the virtual and its possible impacts on real-world scenarios, ecosystems, and non-human and interspecies alliances. They are collaborative human-machine explorations that provide counternarratives around technology and around artificial and natural agency.
The makers of the works in the third cluster “Rituals of Nascent Worlds” interlace reality’s warp and weft, reconstructing it through combinations of technology and magic, reformulating ancient traditions. As its foundations begin to crumble under the pressure of technology, we can see ever more clearly that reality is not an unchangeable given, but a weave in a state of constant becoming.
The fourth cluster, “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 extractive fantasies on the internet 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’ algorithmic computation for their own benefit.
ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 2 aspires to situate and question a multiplicity of cosmotechnics (following Yuk Hui’s term1) shaped by a diverse and decentralized community of artists through a sequence of cosmological propositions, alternating between planetary and terrestrial, ecological and technological, magical and decolonial. They enable us to grasp various aspects of digitalization, and to explore a reality now irreducibly entangled with the online sphere.
Visitors enter the website from a point of view experienced in real life only by astronauts. Navigating the platform, visitors may leap from planet to planet but also enter them, shifting between planetary and terrestrial perspectives. They surf among configurations of clustered planets, visiting commissioned and featured works as well as selected contributions from ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 1.
Through its digital platform, ARE YOU FOR REAL aims to expand international cultural exchange and contemporary co-creative exhibition practices through transnational dialogue around digital world-making experiments, aesthetic investigations, and performative and political reflections. It addresses the material and immaterial aspects of the digital and how they are perceived by various disciplines; artists, researchers, and coders are commissioned to create works that convey their understandings of reality. Content-wise, there is no intention of forming a linear narrative or following a fixed concept. The project itself is rather conceived like a game in which a message is created, passed on, and distorted between one player and another through whispering. In keeping with this approach, from time to time the curatorial conceptualization is handed over to another team. The outcome should always be unexpected and unpredictable.
The ongoing web-based project ARE YOU FOR REAL was launched by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen in 2020, and curated by Julia Grosse, Paula Nascimento, and Yvette Mutumba until 2023.
ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 2 is shaped curatorially by Giulia Bini and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás.
1 After Yuk Hui: “Technology is not anthropologically universal; it is enabled and constrained by particular cosmologies, which go beyond mere functionality or utility. Therefore, there is no one single technology, but rather multiple cosmotechnics” (Yuk Hui, Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics, e-flux Issue #86 November 2017).
Realities can be constructed by calculating machines as much as by the scientific activity that shapes how we perceive our digital and analog life-worlds. The understanding that computation and scientific investigation are two main forces that define our realities lies at the core of ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 2.
In arriving at this second phase, areyouforreal.ifa.de becomes a platform for investigating how computation and the sciences relate to reality—the full potential of their roles in generating new worlds—through the work of artists.
Artworks commissioned for or otherwise featured on the platform converge into thematic cosmo-clusters, manifesting as planetary systems, to disclose a new cosmology of interpretations of the digital sphere. The intention is to show the irreducible entanglement of real and digital and to transpose fundamental questions present in our terrestrial life to the online sphere. The artists featured on ARE YOU FOR REAL use computers as tools, as collaborators, and as agents of world creation. They increasingly base their works on the results of scientific research, while also borrowing and transforming its methods in their investigations.
In recent decades computation has reached a planetary scale: its infrastructure now interconnects and forms the Earth. Because the ARE YOU FOR REAL artworks are held up by the stack of computation, the digital cosmos they create cannot be interpreted separately from the infrastructure it relies on.
The first cluster of artworks “There Is No Software” reflects on infrastructural issues. They engage with the manifold ways in which the virtual worlds generated by computation depend on the planet, but they also feed on its ecosystem’s imagery, relations, and data as they imagine alternatives for the world from which they emerge.
The second cluster “Regeneration” speculates on what never was but might have been; these artworks imagine the regenerative power of the virtual and its possible impacts on real-world scenarios, ecosystems, and non-human and interspecies alliances. They are collaborative human-machine explorations that provide counternarratives around technology and around artificial and natural agency.
The makers of the works in the third cluster “Rituals of Nascent Worlds” interlace reality’s warp and weft, reconstructing it through combinations of technology and magic, reformulating ancient traditions. As its foundations begin to crumble under the pressure of technology, we can see ever more clearly that reality is not an unchangeable given, but a weave in a state of constant becoming.
The fourth cluster, “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 extractive fantasies on the internet 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’ algorithmic computation for their own benefit.
ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 2 aspires to situate and question a multiplicity of cosmotechnics (following Yuk Hui’s term1) shaped by a diverse and decentralized community of artists through a sequence of cosmological propositions, alternating between planetary and terrestrial, ecological and technological, magical and decolonial. They enable us to grasp various aspects of digitalization, and to explore a reality now irreducibly entangled with the online sphere.
Visitors enter the website from a point of view experienced in real life only by astronauts. Navigating the platform, visitors may leap from planet to planet but also enter them, shifting between planetary and terrestrial perspectives. They surf among configurations of clustered planets, visiting commissioned and featured works as well as selected contributions from ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 1.
Through its digital platform, ARE YOU FOR REAL aims to expand international cultural exchange and contemporary co-creative exhibition practices through transnational dialogue around digital world-making experiments, aesthetic investigations, and performative and political reflections. It addresses the material and immaterial aspects of the digital and how they are perceived by various disciplines; artists, researchers, and coders are commissioned to create works that convey their understandings of reality. Content-wise, there is no intention of forming a linear narrative or following a fixed concept. The project itself is rather conceived like a game in which a message is created, passed on, and distorted between one player and another through whispering. In keeping with this approach, from time to time the curatorial conceptualization is handed over to another team. The outcome should always be unexpected and unpredictable.
The ongoing web-based project ARE YOU FOR REAL was launched by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen in 2020, and curated by Julia Grosse, Paula Nascimento, and Yvette Mutumba until 2023.
ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 2 is shaped curatorially by Giulia Bini and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás.
1 After Yuk Hui: “Technology is not anthropologically universal; it is enabled and constrained by particular cosmologies, which go beyond mere functionality or utility. Therefore, there is no one single technology, but rather multiple cosmotechnics” (Yuk Hui, Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics, e-flux Issue #86 November 2017).
There is no software
