Onassis Stegi in Ars Electronica Festival 2020: Stories of Athens

Following last year’s fulminant 40-year anniversary festival, which brought more artists, exhibitors and international experts to Linz than ever before, this September Ars Electronica is starting on a journey through “Kepler’s Gardens”. The name of this year’s festival is a metaphor for the organizational principle of the festival in times of global lockdown: a festival that will not dive into the Internet and disappear there, but will emerge from the Internet and manifest itself in many places around the world.

Hardly any other phrase has been used as often in recent months as this one: that the world will be a different place after this crisis. Often, prophetically, as a glimmer of hope, and more often as a threat. Is this true, and if so, what changes will there be? This question is the focus of this year’s Ars Electronica.

Departing from Linz, “real” and digital events will take place at many different locations, organized by numerous partners from Ars Electronica’s large international network that has grown over 40 years.

Inside the Ars Electronica Garden Athens, Onassis Stegi presents Data Garden, a multimedia installation, and the results of HackAthens 2020, a series of five works in the form of film, digital games, sound drama and mobile apps. While having a very different point of departure, both projects explore the local vs. the global, the endemic vs. the permanent, algorithms and rituals, data, ecologies and bodies.

Data Garden raises the issue of connecting personal data with the protection of the natural and cultural environment, linking digital rights with climate justice. What are the data ecologies of tomorrow? Can we develop models of symbiosis between humans-plants and data? What are the data-secrets hidden in the DNA of a plant secretly grown on the slopes of the Acropolis? What is the future of our connected bodies in post-pandemic ATHENS? Can we reinvent our human relationships, bodily contacts, emotions, jobs, sex-life, and dreams in a world heavily mediated by technologies and constantly regulated by psycho-political constellations? In contrast with the conception of romantic gardens, Data Garden becomes a symbiotic locus of humans, data and non-humans, memory and resistance. Cities are reconceived as assemblages of actors equally seeking the right to our memories.

HackAthens is an annual arts marathon on issues concerning the city of ATHENS organized by the ONASSIS FOUNDATION, and in 2020 it dealt with ATHENS in the wake of the pandemic. HackAthens 2020 sought to explore post-Covid-19 pandemic ATHENS: how are bodies reconfigured in an era where digital communications mediate all forms of activity, where we struggle to connect with our touch, and where the boundaries between personal and professional spaces are blurred? What kind of cities will we experience when our realities are both expanded and reduced through technology? Are our daily micro-routines a form of resistance, or the ultimate moment of compliance?