THEME

“New media art is, broadly, art that is made using electronic media technology and that displays any or all of the three behaviors of interactivity, connectivity, and computability in any combination.”
— Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating. Art after New Media (2010).

The Art of Immersion is dedicated to the transforming experience of reality through immersive digital visualization systems. Stemming from principles of video game design, Cyberia aims to lay a foundation for experimentation through play using key principles like interactivity, fictional storytelling, fictional worlds, narratives, characters, style, etc. The idea of play can transform real-world references, meanings, and ideologies, and can hence function as political and social entities in media – in a positive, enlightening way or in the sense of seductive propaganda.

As Marcel Duchamp stated in 1957, “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”
 

The festival also poses questions about the basic conditions of digital perception today and how we construct our own conception of their reality of them. Technological systems are connecting people, data, and processes more and more closely together. Immersive technologies will increasingly replace analog surroundings with virtual data rooms, therefore radically changing the way that we interact socially, work, play, and how organize our free time.

With our power of imagination and future dreaming the possibilities will be in- finite. It focuses on perception and interpretation as human qualities. This functions as a thought experiment for the audience raising questions about the intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic implications of artificial visual worlds changing our lived experiences hence opening up endless possibilities for experimentation and playfulness through interdisciplinary approaches. This development brings us an up-close-and-personal encounter with fundamental questions of our own identity and existence.