Three of our body>data>space collective members are taking part in this year’s KIBLIX 2020, the 19th edition of the international festival of art, science and technology, and a flagship annual event by our long-term body>data>space partner KIBLA in Maribor, Slovenia. Tadej Vindis, Lead Producer of body>data>space, is co-curating the festival together with the KIBLA Team, our Creative Director Ghislaine Boddington is chairing a panel on ‘Digital Intimacy in Virtual Worlds Now’, and artist Mark Farid is showing his latest developments of the Seeing I project, which he developed as part of this year’s EMAP (European Media Art Platform) residency.
The festival will run from December 2020 – February 2021.
Ghislaine’s panel on ‘Digital Intimacy in Virtual Worlds Now’ will take place online on:
8 December 2020, 17.00 (GMT) at www.kiblix.org/streaming
Digital Intimacy in Virtual Worlds Now
Chair: Ghislaine Boddinton (Creative Director of body>data>space and Digital Intimacy Expert)
Speakers: Sly Lee, Mark Joseph Jeffery, Judd Morrissey, Abraham Avnisan, Valerie Wolf Gang
In this unprecedented time of a near universal shift to virtual presence, we talk to a range of creatives/groups exploring cutting edge ideas around the evolution of community, connectivity and intimacy in virtual worlds. We will hear about their conceptual directions and the outputs they have enabled to reflect on our human need for intimacy and belonging, the virtual opposite to our ‘social distancing”. This panel aims to examine the potentials of virtual physical hybrid environments, where commentary on and action with digital intimacy, belonging and bonding is made the priority.
KIBLIX 2020: Virtual Worlds Now
With the new long term focus of KIBLA on XR technologies, and considering that 2020 is the most virtual immersed year we have lived in so far, the key question for this year’s KIBLIX is what are virtual worlds now?
This is not the question of technology as magic, but the critical evaluation of the intersections and interactions between the virtual and the physical. On one side, we are faced with a persistent ambition of industry towards persuasive technologies, designing the virtual to fully assume, control, and subsume the physical. While on the other, we constantly need to mitigate technological incompatibility with the physical as such. The KIBLIX 2020 programme will place the experience of the human at the centre for debate – with our material limitations and the socio-political experience of our bodies – while understanding the virtual environments as spaces for speculative realities, variable identities, and ever more acute social transformations.
KIBLIX 2020 will take on a new hybrid form with pre-events from 24 November onwards, and with a programme focus in December 2020 and February 2021. The programme will start in December with an online showcase of artistic research projects, a series of topical panel discussions, and the KIBLIX Quarantine GameJam, which will prototype solutions to enhance social closeness in time of physical distancing. The festival programme will continue until February 2020, when it will close with a physical international exhibition at Kibla Portal exhibition space.
More info: www.kiblix.org