Digital AiR

15february–15september

gallery

Digital AiR (DA) is an online residency established by CCI Fabrika in 2021 with the objective of bringing together digital professionals and technology experts, alongside artists, curators, and contemporary theorists. This creates a more connected and open space for digital art enthusiasts. With the increasing interest in digital art and its potential to reach wider audiences both online and in public spaces, the residence team has established a platform for artists to explore technology and create their initial VR and immersive artworks.

Education remains a vital component of the residence whereby every season DA invites skilled creators, artists, and mentors to design a course covering technological, theoretical, and cultural aspects of working in the digital domain. One of the most recent mentors to join DA are Anan Fries (they/them), the interdisciplinary artist, performer, and theorist who have recently been awarded the VR Art Prize.

DA has been up and running for 5 seasons, and the NFT collection presented on Ioginality consists of the works of the DA fellows from the most recent two: Season 4 “Life-Size Model” and Season 5 “Phygital Bodies in Speculative Landscapes”.

Acknowledgements

Artists

Sasha Kochetkova

@sasha_koch

Daniel Vollmond

@daniel

Lynne Kouassi

@lynne

Alfiya Shamsutdinova

@alfiya

Ruth Baettig

@ruth

Nanda Raemansky

@raemansky

Sonata Raiymkulova

@sonata

Polina Ostapchuk

@enuvesta

Ksenia Markelova

@xmarkelova

Vladislav Dovgopyaty

@vdovgopyaty

Alexander Mrohs

@alexandermrohs

Digital AiR, Season 5. Phygital Bodies in Speculative Landscapes

Mentored by Anan Fries

October 2023 – February 2024

The artists of the current residency have had a chance to learn from and work with the mentor and digital artist Anan Fries who took a lead and let the artists dive into the world of phygitality, techno spirituality and biodiverse thinking. This time, the starting point for the artistic works was the body. Its performativity, its fluctuations in different environments, its senses and sensuality as well as its ability to speak. The artists play and wonder – what happens to a body once it enters the world beneath its reach?

Can it reach digital immortality? Can we trust its touch and sight? Is there a way to feel the collectivity in the distance? They invite us to think about the spiritual expressions, distortions and omissions that emerge once we talk about our (digital) bodies. Let us be and transform.

The artists of the season: Sasha Kochetkova, Ksenia Markelova, Hugo Avigo, Alfiya Shamsutdinova, Nanda Raemansky.

The Artist's Head

created: Alfiya Shamsutdinova

"The Artist's Head" is an artifact from the "The Artist's Head" Instagram stories exhibition. "The Artist's Head" is a digitized head of the Russian artist Ivan Novikov. The exhibition took place on May 14, 2022, in Alfiya Shamsutdinova Instagram stories and continues to exist as highlights exhibition via the link: https://instagram.com/alfiya_shams In this exhibition, the artist appropriates not the style, not the method, but the very body of other artists and creates a work from it. Simultaneously with this absorbing gesture, there is an attempt to grasp the "busts of the greats" that have loomed over us since childhood in school and cultural places, to make them closer, to place them next to oneself, horizontally, to converse, to be side by side.

The empathic trail object: photo from childhood against the backdrop of the “Molodezhny” cinema

created: Ksenia Markelova

A photograph of the artist in her hometown became the basis for a real object, and then for an NFT. Here the substance of the Empathic Trail pulsates and inflates, preserving the density of memory in the bodily embodiment of the contradictory nature of nostalgia.

Beach view - Terneuzen, a post-coffeeshop city

created: Nanda Raemansky

Themes of Nanda’s work often point back to the artistic, musical and largely anacho-communist environment of her childhood. Her practice is a careful methodology of medium manipulation, and she often starts with capturing her subject in photographs. She holds a degree in experimental painting from De Academie voor Beeldende Kunst in Ghent (Belgium).

A Tree standing among the waters of the River Styx, rooted in landscapes of human bodies, is the final point of the project “It would be different if you were plastic.” A project about man's desire for immortality. The sacred, living body of the Tree, fenced off from the outside world, absorbs the sign of the pizzeria. This memory of the human world materializes and turns into a thorn in the ghost's body.

Drink me! №1

created: Alexander Mrohs

"Drink me!" transports visitors into a surreal and dreamlike-virtual world in which they can interact via hand tracking. On the architectural façade, familiar elements from the physical world appear again and again in the stream of images, offering the opportunity to intervene in the collective visual worlds. In a flood of images of virtuality, fragments of historical artifacts settle in the play of colors of virtual nature in the niches and edges of the architectural façade until they are picked up by the visitors and fall back into the depth of the image. Exhibited as an interactive façade projection for the Fürther Glanzlichter, 11.2023

Drink me! №2

created: Alexander Mrohs

Drink me! №3

created: Alexander Mrohs

superflows №1

created: Alexander Mrohs

In the interactive installation "über-flüssig", viewers explore cultural artifacts in a virtual archive and confront a resident consciousness in the form of virtual gold. In this exercise, the aim is to deal with the question of value and changeability, to break away from prevailing conditions and thus achieve a state of superfluousness. Exhibited as an interactive installation for Ortung 13 Schwabach, 8.2023

superflows №2

created: Alexander Mrohs

superflows №3

created: Alexander Mrohs

Digital AiR, Season 4. Life-Size Model

space / architecture / common ground in the time of uncertainty

October 2022 – April 2023

Pandemic, self-isolation, several lockdowns, travel bans transformed our common experience, changed our relationships with people, the territory around us and ourselves. In a situation of vacuum, we created our own reality, in which something familiar would receive a time-appropriate entity.

What is this space today – an independent environment or a replica created to compensate? How can we work with the theme of memory in the mediated digital world? And what do the memory and the architectural monument of Fabrika (CCI Fabrika) occur – an abstraction from the past or a myth that we do not get tired of reproducing?

The artists of the season: Ruth Baettig (Basel), Vladislav Dovgopyaty (Moscow), Polina Enuvesta (Cyprus), Lynne Kouassi & Daniel Vallmond (Basel), Sonata Raiymkulova (Bishkek).

47°34'32.3N , 07°35'10.4E , 30-11-23 , 11h18m

created: Daniel Vollmond, Lynne Kouassi

47°34'32.3N , 07°35'10.4E , 30-11-23 , 11h18m

47°34'32.3N , 07°35'10.4E , 01-12-23 , 18h33m

created: Daniel Vollmond, Lynne Kouassi

47°34'32.3N , 07°35'10.4E , 01-12-23 , 18h33m

47°34'32.3N , 07°35'10.4E , 02-12-23 , 10h49m

created: Daniel Vollmond, Lynne Kouassi

GIF: 3/3 - DURATION: 30sec - PLACE: Basel, Switzerland - TITLE: 47°34'32.3N , 07°35'10.4E , 02-12-23 , 10h49m

Amorphous

created: Sonata Raiymkulova

This biomorphic figure illustrates the complexity of human relationships. In this tangle of bodies, you can feel how much we are intertwined with each other, sometimes revealing our weaknesses and fears, and sometimes even becoming one. This work is an attempt to illustrate all the unknowns and incomprehensibility of human relationships.

Light rays bend, surreal shift. From Dimensional Quatrain series

created: Polina Ostapchuk

Dimensional Quatrain is a poetic experiment of mixing real world dimensions with virtual environments, replacing the Author with AI, and his_her_their language – with digital tools of a modern age. The poem consists of four lines generated by ChatGPT to represent the absence of a boundary between the real world and virtual spaces. It is composed in a looping manner and its consistent hovering structure is there to be captured by the reader in any order. The paired interiors are actual corners in ''Dimensional quatrain'' – a poetry room in the virtual space of Fabrika. Each line of the quatrain focuses on some aspect of poetic sense or 3D manipulation.

Node labyrinth into reality leans. From Dimensional Quatrain series

created: Polina Ostapchuk

The meshes warp and normals drift. From Dimensional Quatrain series

created: Polina Ostapchuk

The textures twist repeating scenes. From Dimensional Quatrain series

created: Polina Ostapchuk

Placet experiri No.1 | meditation

created: Ruth Baettig

Daydreaming, or dreaming with eyes wide open – it is often related to cinema, also because it is a territory where imagination and memory meet, intertwine, even melt together. Can we imagine our memories? Can we remember our imagination? These are borderline situations, which I like to experience – placet experiri.

Placet experiri No.2 | colored lights at night (AI)

created: Ruth Baettig

Placet experiri No.3 | dark dream (AI)

created: Ruth Baettig

Placet experiri No.4 | alone among stars (AI)

created: Ruth Baettig

fragment_001

created: Vladislav Dovgopyaty

…like this anger allows him to escape, he takes his arms and legs and goes out) I don't think it's worth showing this second part like that I'd rather have the viewer go through it himself, i.e. it should be in the room…

Thank you for visiting

All the works from this exhibition you can look and buy at the marketplace

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