Program

You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating

Speaker / Artist

Ezra Šimek/DE

Multimedial installation
Ezra Šimek (DE)
Opening

An irregular, bit eccentric, slightly disorienting, weird, one might even say: queer journey takes place in between these three pillars. A journey from an old abandoned mining town of the olden days, the rough days, of the now so romanticised Wild West, leading to a rave club, or was it the other way around? The lighting is the sunset on testosterone. The setting is uncertainly bizarre – be it a lab or a barn. A story of various characters meeting in one body. Your daily news anchor. Your gender inclusion and sex education teacher. Your gentle genderless traveller. Your old time miner. Your cowboi. And somewhere in the distance, your witch. All yours, yet none in reach, and even if so, you don’t have any right to them. You can only listen. Learn, Unlearn. Dismiss. Critique. Leave be. Sing along. Join the fight.

The show “You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating” brings together a newly formed narrative line through the work of Ezra Šimek. The educational character of their older works focusing on trans* knowledge 101 meets poetic abstraction and research into marginalized communities in the latest film trilogy exploring and appropriating archetypes from popular culture, namely figures of the Cowboy and the Witch. The soft tissue binding the works slides over various societal, learned, and encoded norms around the gender binary and internalized trans* hate and violence, not even mentioning the homophobia so ingrained in local culture and politics.

Ezra Šimek (*1997) graduated in Photography (Studio of New Aesthetic) from Prague’s Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and now continues with their MA in TransArts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, diploma studies at the Digital Media and Moving Image Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as well as an MA in contemporary art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia. In their work, Ezra primarily deals with queer identity politics and sensitivity around language, presented through various time-based media (film, performative lecture, computer game) or site-responsive installations, sound works and writing. They explore gender as a societal construct comparable to mythology that attempts to create more fictional narratives and to boost synergy between different shattered realities of our times and fantasy and thus create a new inclusive and speculative reality.

Their work has been presented within the Czech art scene at the National Gallery in Prague (2022), Prague City Gallery (2022), or Svetova 1 (2022) and abroad, for example at the Museum for Contemporary Art Zagreb (2022), Kunsthalle Wien (2022) and Haus Wien, Vienna (2021). They are the holder of the Jindřich Chalupecký Art Award 2022.

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

UNLEARNING – 20 years of art for social change in V4 region

Is art a tool for inspiring social activities and creating institutional change? What role has art played in the integration of the Eastern Europe over the past 20 years? How have artistic practices aimed at initiating changes in economy, education and climate protection have changed in recent years? 

American writer and futurist Alvin Toffler said: “The illiterates of the 21st century is not those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and learn anew”.  

This year’s discussion at Art & Tech Days will offer us to learn about experiences of artistic activities for social change in Eastern Europe in the last 20 years, and to understand how to utilize art as an instrument to stimulate innovative solutions, to inspire people to act and to facilitate change in the today’s communities. 

Through the discussion we want to emphasize the role of art as an instrument of social change that can prevent radicalization and stimulate innovative solutions to contemporary problems and inspire people to act.   

Dora Kenderová, director of the East Slovak Gallery, Ján Šimko, theater director and pedagogue at VŠMU, Oto Hudec, artist and activist, and Juliana Berberich Sokolová, writer and philosopher will come to discuss.

The Unlearning discussion is co-financed by the Governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe. was supported by Vysehard Fund. 

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

City to City Exhibition – Opening

City to City is a joint endeavour of the cities-members of the Media Arts Cluster of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, to mark their commitment with the importance of cooperation and support to art and creativity as a major force for the sustainable development. 

The project was designed in 2020, to provide artists from those cities a platform for collaborative work in pairs, online, to the co-create new digital art. 

The main idea is to promote the excellence of practice in media arts, share knowledge and skills, encourage the public and other professionals to engage in creative practices, foster sector development, and raise the profile of the work of the UNESCO Creative Cities. 

Altogether, 14 cities are participating in the collaboration: Austin (USA), Braga (Portugal), Calí (Colombia), Changsha (China), Dakar (Senegal), Enghien-les-Bains (France), Guadalajara (Mexico), Gwangju (South Korea), Karlsruhe (Germany), Kosice (Slovakia), Sapporo (Japan), Toronto (Canada), Viborg (Denmark), York (United Kingdom) 

The exhibition at this year’s Art & Tech Days will focus on the artworks done by Slovak artists who took part in collaborative co-creation productions of artworks. 

Reminiscence path, 2020 

Artists: Beáta Kolbašovská (Košice), Junichi Oguro (Saporro) 

Topic: Human Responsibility 

Artwork is based on data tracking of experiences from people during the pandemic. The main idea was to create an audio-visual installation using data which reflect the lives of people during the COVID-19 pandemic. In times when travelling was not possible, the online cooperation of artists across continents enabled them to overcome the geographical distance of two cities, at least in a virtual form. 

Artists were gathering information on pedestrian and cyclist paths in both cities using GPS data obtained from various applications and topographic maps. With digital technology, they got direct access to our memory. The word “path” carries the meaning of life and route. What will we think when we look back on this work in a few years? Where did we go during the lockdown? Where did we feel safe? Where could our minds breathe? 

PlaceHolder, 2021 

Artists: Ivana Durkáčová (Košice), Lucian Rodriguez Arredondo (Guadalajara) 

Topic: Play! 

 PlaceHolder is a web-based experimental experience that uses terrain data and sounds from downtown of the cities of Guadalajara and Kosice to generate a multilevel maze, explore the concepts of globalization and simulated reality. It invites the user to explore the open-world environment in a playful manner with different outcomes depending on the decisions made while wandering. The PlaceHolder is a virtual space you get into once you press PLAY.  PlaceHolder represents a city that does not really offer any essential information and therefore needs to be filled by the real ones. The visitors of the virtual space are the source of that information. 

Born & Raised, 2022

Artists: Mišo Hudák (Košice), Faiza Kracheni (Austin) 

Topic: Behavioural Change 

 Two artists through their artwork reflect on what changes does technology bring to our understanding of moral, social, and political actions? How does it affect the body of action itself, the perception of activity, the horizon of perceived possibilities – what is possible, what is moral, what is desirable, and how are we expected to act, interact, and engage in our lives and lives of our communities, because of technology and by technology? 

Their work focus on the memory of people and places, and the gaps and limitations, that are now created by arising power of technology. 

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative. The festival was supported from public funds by the Slovak Art Council.

The collaboration of these artists was realized within the framework of the Virtual International Collaboration project at the CCI, which was supported by the Slovak Arts Council from public sources. The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project.

You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating Exhibition

Multimedial installation
Ezra Šimek (DE)
Opening

An irregular, bit eccentric, slightly disorienting, weird, one might even say: queer journey takes place in between these three pillars. A journey from an old abandoned mining town of the olden days, the rough days, of the now so romanticised Wild West, leading to a rave club, or was it the other way around? The lighting is the sunset on testosterone. The setting is uncertainly bizarre – be it a lab or a barn. A story of various characters meeting in one body. Your daily news anchor. Your gender inclusion and sex education teacher. Your gentle genderless traveller. Your old time miner. Your cowboi. And somewhere in the distance, your witch. All yours, yet none in reach, and even if so, you don’t have any right to them. You can only listen. Learn, Unlearn. Dismiss. Critique. Leave be. Sing along. Join the fight.

The show “You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating” brings together a newly formed narrative line through the work of Ezra Šimek. The educational character of their older works focusing on trans* knowledge 101 meets poetic abstraction and research into marginalized communities in the latest film trilogy exploring and appropriating archetypes from popular culture, namely figures of the Cowboy and the Witch. The soft tissue binding the works slides over various societal, learned, and encoded norms around the gender binary and internalized trans* hate and violence, not even mentioning the homophobia so ingrained in local culture and politics.

Ezra Šimek (*1997) graduated in Photography (Studio of New Aesthetic) from Prague’s Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and now continues with their MA in TransArts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, diploma studies at the Digital Media and Moving Image Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as well as an MA in contemporary art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia. In their work, Ezra primarily deals with queer identity politics and sensitivity around language, presented through various time-based media (film, performative lecture, computer game) or site-responsive installations, sound works and writing. They explore gender as a societal construct comparable to mythology that attempts to create more fictional narratives and to boost synergy between different shattered realities of our times and fantasy and thus create a new inclusive and speculative reality.

Their work has been presented within the Czech art scene at the National Gallery in Prague (2022), Prague City Gallery (2022), or Svetova 1 (2022) and abroad, for example at the Museum for Contemporary Art Zagreb (2022), Kunsthalle Wien (2022) and Haus Wien, Vienna (2021). They are the holder of the Jindřich Chalupecký Art Award 2022.

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

Košice 2.0 x Vik Maraj – Workshop

For cultural and creative professionals, an exclusive workshop by Vik Maraj, leading Canadian neuro-linguist and group behavior expert, will be organized to debate how change can be facilitated by art and culture. Invitation only attendance.

Košice 2.0 x UNESCO: Meetup

The UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) was created in 2004 to promote cooperation with and among cities that have identified creativity as a strategic factor for sustainable urban development. The cities which currently make up this network work together towards a common objective: placing creativity and cultural industries at the heart of their development plans at the local level and cooperating actively at the international level.
By joining the Network, cities commit to sharing their best practices and developing partnerships involving the public and private sectors as well as civil society in order to:

• strengthen the creation, production, distribution and dissemination of cultural activities, goods and services;
• develop hubs of creativity and innovation and broaden opportunities for creators and professionals in the cultural sector;
• improve access to and participation in cultural life, in particular for marginalized or vulnerable groups and individuals;
• fully integrate culture and creativity into sustainable development plans.

The Creative Cities Network is a privileged partner of UNESCO, not only as a platform for reflection on the role of creativity as a lever for sustainable development but also as a breeding ground of action and innovation, notably for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The Network covers seven creative fields: Crafts and Folk Arts, Media Arts, Film, Design, Gastronomy, Literature and Music.

City of Kosice is part of the Network from 2017 and Creative Industry Kosice is a focal point for all activities within the network. Collaborations with other cities from the network include City2City virtual residency project, as well as many bilateral projects within various international projects.

During Art & Techs Days representatives of 22 cities members of Cities of Media Arts cluster will have their meetup.

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

Košice 2.0 x Martin Honzik Masterclass

Martin Honzik, chief curator of Ars Electronica festival in Linz, will have a masterclass discussing how can data feed the artistic work and how can they shape artistic thought and help us discover invisible aspects of our realities? 

Martin Honzik is an artist, CCO and Managing Director of the Ars Electronica Festival, Prix and Exhibitions. After studying visual experimental design at Linz Art University and earning a master’s degree from the University of Linz and ICCM Salzburg, he joined the production team of the OK Offenes Kulturhaus in the OÖ Kulturquartier in Linz.  

Register here for free.

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

Košice 2.0 x Art & Tech Days 2022: Opening Act

Rozi Mákó, Nano vjs, sedemminut
Live AV act

Budapest musician Rozi Mákó and experimenter of electronic music in connection with visuals from Nano vjs and light design from sedemminut will create a joint live audiovisual act within the Art & Tech days festival. A unique site-specific project will be created in the premises of the Košice Kunsthalle, which will connect real-time generated visuals, light design and vjing with a tailor-made electronic ambience. The unique space with epic visuals will provide space for an immersive audiovisual experience, where the sound data and outputs of the musician are transformed into new worlds of digital utopia. 

Rozi Mákó/HU
Structured improvisation, experimental music and the unrepeatable eternity of the present moment. 
In addition to her studies in classical and jazz piano, Rozi Mákó was constantly open to various trends in electronic music, which she later studied in the sonology department of the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in the Netherlands. 
Her live performances are slowly unfolding musical experiences that are both gently harmonious and embarrassingly noisy. The sounds appearing in the musical structure created by Mákó invite the listener to travel; meditative immersion in continuous renewal. In recent years, she has presented her audiovisual performance NEST with great success at several festivals. She is also active in many other music projects, be it an audiovisual dance performance (URFORM), an analogue-industrial techno (Committee, Tsering) or a contemporary theater performance (Self Drive).     

Nano vjs/SK
Visual media art collective founded in 2010 by Beáta Kolbašovská and Jakub Pišek in Košice. They specialize in video mapping, light installations, live visuals, VJing, interactive installations and multimedia performances in Slovakia and abroad. They cooperate with musicians, bands, DJs, independent theaters, contemporary dancers and performers. Through creative and experimental artistic production with an interdisciplinary approach, they create site-specific projects, directly tailor-made. Recently, their works, multimedia performances and live visuals could be seen from Ľuboreč to Tokyo, Boston, Rzeszow, Považská Bystrica, and all the way to Košice. 

 
sedemminut/SK
The author of many lighting designs and installations, he went through his journey of light through photography, VJ-ing, concert lighting, theatrical light design and all the way to roxor. He understands light and uses it from the point of view of various professions. He understands its physicality, its purpose, but also its aesthetic value. For his works, light is a “key material” that can shape and bend the intentions of his statement. 

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative. The festival was supported from public funds by the Slovak Art Council.

City to City Exhibition

City to City is a joint endeavour of the cities-members of the Media Arts Cluster of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, to mark their commitment with the importance of cooperation and support to art and creativity as a major force for the sustainable development. 

The project was designed in 2020, to provide artists from those cities a platform for collaborative work in pairs, online, to the co-create new digital art. 

The main idea is to promote the excellence of practice in media arts, share knowledge and skills, encourage the public and other professionals to engage in creative practices, foster sector development, and raise the profile of the work of the UNESCO Creative Cities. 

Altogether, 14 cities are participating in the collaboration: Austin (USA), Braga (Portugal), Calí (Colombia), Changsha (China), Dakar (Senegal), Enghien-les-Bains (France), Guadalajara (Mexico), Gwangju (South Korea), Karlsruhe (Germany), Kosice (Slovakia), Sapporo (Japan), Toronto (Canada), Viborg (Denmark), York (United Kingdom) 

The exhibition at this year’s Art & Tech Days will focus on the artworks done by Slovak artists who took part in collaborative co-creation productions of artworks. 

Reminiscence path, 2020 

Artists: Beáta Kolbašovská (Košice), Junichi Oguro (Saporro)

Topic: Human Responsibility 

Artwork is based on data tracking of experiences from people during the pandemic. The main idea was to create an audio-visual installation using data which reflect the lives of people during the COVID-19 pandemic. In times when travelling was not possible, the online cooperation of artists across continents enabled them to overcome the geographical distance of two cities, at least in a virtual form. 

Artists were gathering information on pedestrian and cyclist paths in both cities using GPS data obtained from various applications and topographic maps. With digital technology, they got direct access to our memory. The word “path” carries the meaning of life and route. What will we think when we look back on this work in a few years? Where did we go during the lockdown? Where did we feel safe? Where could our minds breathe? 

PlaceHolder, 2021 

Artists: Ivana Durkáčová (Košice), Lucian Rodriguez Arredondo (Guadalajara)

Topic: Play! 

 PlaceHolder is a web-based experimental experience that uses terrain data and sounds from downtown of the cities of Guadalajara and Kosice to generate a multilevel maze, explore the concepts of globalization and simulated reality. It invites the user to explore the open-world environment in a playful manner with different outcomes depending on the decisions made while wandering. The PlaceHolder is a virtual space you get into once you press PLAY.  PlaceHolder represents a city that does not really offer any essential information and therefore needs to be filled by the real ones. The visitors of the virtual space are the source of that information. 

Born & Raised, 2022

Artists: Mišo Hudák (Košice), Faiza Kracheni (Austin)

Topic: Behavioural Change 

 Two artists through their artwork reflect on what changes does technology bring to our understanding of moral, social, and political actions? How does it affect the body of action itself, the perception of activity, the horizon of perceived possibilities – what is possible, what is moral, what is desirable, and how are we expected to act, interact, and engage in our lives and lives of our communities, because of technology and by technology? 

Their work focus on the memory of people and places, and the gaps and limitations, that are now created by arising power of technology. 

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative. The festival was supported from public funds by the Slovak Art Council.

The collaboration of these artists was realized within the framework of the Virtual International Collaboration project at the CCI, which was supported by the Slovak Arts Council from public sources. The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project.

You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating Exhibition

Multimedial installation
Ezra Šimek (DE)
Opening

An irregular, bit eccentric, slightly disorienting, weird, one might even say: queer journey takes place in between these three pillars. A journey from an old abandoned mining town of the olden days, the rough days, of the now so romanticised Wild West, leading to a rave club, or was it the other way around? The lighting is the sunset on testosterone. The setting is uncertainly bizarre – be it a lab or a barn. A story of various characters meeting in one body. Your daily news anchor. Your gender inclusion and sex education teacher. Your gentle genderless traveller. Your old time miner. Your cowboi. And somewhere in the distance, your witch. All yours, yet none in reach, and even if so, you don’t have any right to them. You can only listen. Learn, Unlearn. Dismiss. Critique. Leave be. Sing along. Join the fight.

The show “You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating” brings together a newly formed narrative line through the work of Ezra Šimek. The educational character of their older works focusing on trans* knowledge 101 meets poetic abstraction and research into marginalized communities in the latest film trilogy exploring and appropriating archetypes from popular culture, namely figures of the Cowboy and the Witch. The soft tissue binding the works slides over various societal, learned, and encoded norms around the gender binary and internalized trans* hate and violence, not even mentioning the homophobia so ingrained in local culture and politics.

Ezra Šimek (*1997) graduated in Photography (Studio of New Aesthetic) from Prague’s Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and now continues with their MA in TransArts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, diploma studies at the Digital Media and Moving Image Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as well as an MA in contemporary art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia. In their work, Ezra primarily deals with queer identity politics and sensitivity around language, presented through various time-based media (film, performative lecture, computer game) or site-responsive installations, sound works and writing. They explore gender as a societal construct comparable to mythology that attempts to create more fictional narratives and to boost synergy between different shattered realities of our times and fantasy and thus create a new inclusive and speculative reality.

Their work has been presented within the Czech art scene at the National Gallery in Prague (2022), Prague City Gallery (2022), or Svetova 1 (2022) and abroad, for example at the Museum for Contemporary Art Zagreb (2022), Kunsthalle Wien (2022) and Haus Wien, Vienna (2021). They are the holder of the Jindřich Chalupecký Art Award 2022.

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

Art & Tech Conference 2022

Speaker / Artist

Ambra Trotto/SE

Martin Honzik/AT

Vik Maraj/CA

Lisa Lang/DE

Maurice Benayoun/FR

Lucia Pašková/SK

As the main event of a week-long festival, Art & Tech Conference has invited 7 top international and national speakers to present their insights on the topic of Change triggered by art, technology and design. 

The shortlist of speakers promises more than inspirational debates.

Understanding drivers of change and their interplay means to be able to anticipate attitudes, engage with current and future technologies, and build sustainable futures. 

Welcome to Art & Tech Days 2022! 

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative. The festival was supported from public funds by the Slovak Art Council.

PROGRAM CHANGE: Košice 2.0 x Ars Electronica x Art & Tech Days – Winds of Košice: AI data painting, Refik Anadol – Opening

PROGRAM CHANGE
Due to technical reasons, the planned opening of the exhibition Winds of Košice: AI data painting, Refik Anadol on Thursday (November 24) will not take place. We will inform you about the new date as soon as possible.

Wind of Košice. Data Paintings is a site-specific work that turns the invisible patterns of wind in and around Košice into a series of poetic data paintings within a digital canvas. By using a one-year data set collected from Košice, Refik Anadol Studios developed a series of custom software to read, analyze and visualize wind speed, direction, and gust patterns along with time and temperature at 20-second intervals throughout the year.

Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is a media artist, director and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. His body of work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. In taking the data that flows around us as the primary material and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol paints with a thinking brush, offering us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expanding the possibilities of architecture, narrative, and the body in motion. Anadol’s site-specific AI data sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, its temporal and spatial dimensions, and the creative potential of machines. More on
refikanadol.com

Košice 2.0 project, funded by the EU under the UIA program, aims to increase the wellbeing of citizens by improving the quality of the services provided by the city of Košice, Slovakia. Media art installations representing various data describing different phenomenon of the city environment are interpreted in an artistic way and used within the project as awareness raising and communication channels to engage citizens in topics such as climate change, resilience, communities, wellbeing, and others. In this framework Ars Electronica will present Refik Anadol’s media art installation Winds of Košice which will be shown within Kosice 2.0 as program of the Art &Tech Days festival and will be available to audience for one year in the East Slovak Gallery in Kosice.

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

City to City Exhibition

City to City is a joint endeavour of the cities-members of the Media Arts Cluster of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, to mark their commitment with the importance of cooperation and support to art and creativity as a major force for the sustainable development. 

The project was designed in 2020, to provide artists from those cities a platform for collaborative work in pairs, online, to the co-create new digital art. 

The main idea is to promote the excellence of practice in media arts, share knowledge and skills, encourage the public and other professionals to engage in creative practices, foster sector development, and raise the profile of the work of the UNESCO Creative Cities. 

Altogether, 14 cities are participating in the collaboration: Austin (USA), Braga (Portugal), Calí (Colombia), Changsha (China), Dakar (Senegal), Enghien-les-Bains (France), Guadalajara (Mexico), Gwangju (South Korea), Karlsruhe (Germany), Kosice (Slovakia), Sapporo (Japan), Toronto (Canada), Viborg (Denmark), York (United Kingdom) 

The exhibition at this year’s Art & Tech Days will focus on the artworks done by Slovak artists who took part in collaborative co-creation productions of artworks. 

Reminiscence path, 2020 

Artists: Beáta Kolbašovská (Košice), Junichi Oguro (Saporro)

Topic: Human Responsibility 

Artwork is based on data tracking of experiences from people during the pandemic. The main idea was to create an audio-visual installation using data which reflect the lives of people during the COVID-19 pandemic. In times when travelling was not possible, the online cooperation of artists across continents enabled them to overcome the geographical distance of two cities, at least in a virtual form. 

Artists were gathering information on pedestrian and cyclist paths in both cities using GPS data obtained from various applications and topographic maps. With digital technology, they got direct access to our memory. The word “path” carries the meaning of life and route. What will we think when we look back on this work in a few years? Where did we go during the lockdown? Where did we feel safe? Where could our minds breathe? 

PlaceHolder, 2021 

Artists: Ivana Durkáčová (Košice), Lucian Rodriguez Arredondo (Guadalajara)

Topic: Play! 

 PlaceHolder is a web-based experimental experience that uses terrain data and sounds from downtown of the cities of Guadalajara and Kosice to generate a multilevel maze, explore the concepts of globalization and simulated reality. It invites the user to explore the open-world environment in a playful manner with different outcomes depending on the decisions made while wandering. The PlaceHolder is a virtual space you get into once you press PLAY.  PlaceHolder represents a city that does not really offer any essential information and therefore needs to be filled by the real ones. The visitors of the virtual space are the source of that information. 

Born & Raised, 2022

Artists: Mišo Hudák (Košice), Faiza Kracheni (Austin)

Topic: Behavioural Change 

 Two artists through their artwork reflect on what changes does technology bring to our understanding of moral, social, and political actions? How does it affect the body of action itself, the perception of activity, the horizon of perceived possibilities – what is possible, what is moral, what is desirable, and how are we expected to act, interact, and engage in our lives and lives of our communities, because of technology and by technology? 

Their work focus on the memory of people and places, and the gaps and limitations, that are now created by arising power of technology. 

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative. The festival was supported from public funds by the Slovak Art Council.

The collaboration of these artists was realized within the framework of the Virtual International Collaboration project at the CCI, which was supported by the Slovak Arts Council from public sources. The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project.

You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating Exhibition

Multimedial installation
Ezra Šimek (DE)
Opening

An irregular, bit eccentric, slightly disorienting, weird, one might even say: queer journey takes place in between these three pillars. A journey from an old abandoned mining town of the olden days, the rough days, of the now so romanticised Wild West, leading to a rave club, or was it the other way around? The lighting is the sunset on testosterone. The setting is uncertainly bizarre – be it a lab or a barn. A story of various characters meeting in one body. Your daily news anchor. Your gender inclusion and sex education teacher. Your gentle genderless traveller. Your old time miner. Your cowboi. And somewhere in the distance, your witch. All yours, yet none in reach, and even if so, you don’t have any right to them. You can only listen. Learn, Unlearn. Dismiss. Critique. Leave be. Sing along. Join the fight.

The show “You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating” brings together a newly formed narrative line through the work of Ezra Šimek. The educational character of their older works focusing on trans* knowledge 101 meets poetic abstraction and research into marginalized communities in the latest film trilogy exploring and appropriating archetypes from popular culture, namely figures of the Cowboy and the Witch. The soft tissue binding the works slides over various societal, learned, and encoded norms around the gender binary and internalized trans* hate and violence, not even mentioning the homophobia so ingrained in local culture and politics.

Ezra Šimek (*1997) graduated in Photography (Studio of New Aesthetic) from Prague’s Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and now continues with their MA in TransArts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, diploma studies at the Digital Media and Moving Image Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as well as an MA in contemporary art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia. In their work, Ezra primarily deals with queer identity politics and sensitivity around language, presented through various time-based media (film, performative lecture, computer game) or site-responsive installations, sound works and writing. They explore gender as a societal construct comparable to mythology that attempts to create more fictional narratives and to boost synergy between different shattered realities of our times and fantasy and thus create a new inclusive and speculative reality.

Their work has been presented within the Czech art scene at the National Gallery in Prague (2022), Prague City Gallery (2022), or Svetova 1 (2022) and abroad, for example at the Museum for Contemporary Art Zagreb (2022), Kunsthalle Wien (2022) and Haus Wien, Vienna (2021). They are the holder of the Jindřich Chalupecký Art Award 2022.

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

Second Sun – opening

Exploring how modernity and technology have changed the understanding of nighttime. An artist and a scientist on a joint creative mission of producing artwork that denotes the 24/7 society, a current state of non-stop flow of information and data that blurs distinction between day and night. Understanding the impact of this phenomenon on our daily life, natural rhythms, environment systems and historical development.

Second Sun

A satellite with a giant mirror was launched into orbit, the purpose of which is to illuminate Košice at night using the reflection of the sun’s rays. This completely destroys the darkness of the night and creates permanent day. Behind the ambitious plan is a local scientist and entrepreneur who sees in the revolutionary project the possibility of energy savings, ecological responsibility and the possibility of attracting the attention of the whole world. The project aroused the interest of the local mayor, who announced a local referendum, which ended with close support. But not everyone agreed. The most vocal opponent is an environmental activist who criticizes the project for disrupting the biological rhythms of animals, humans and other adverse effects. Together with others, she created a civic initiative that tries to prevent Košice from being illuminated from space. There have also been cases of illness due to exposure to permanent light. Is the satellite a revolutionary innovation that saves money and nature or it is just a megalomaniac nonsense that brings, in addition to high costs, negative health consequences? The controversy continues under the light of the so called second sun.

Multimedial installation

Nikola Ivanov (CZ), Pau Saiz Soler (ES)

Nikola Ivanov (*1990) is an artist living in Prague. He mainly focuses on photography, video and graphic design. In his work, he deals with issues of temporality, historical memory, biopolitics and is very often inspired by the social sciences. He is currently studying in a doctoral program at the University of Applied Arts.

Pau Saiz Soler is a designer from Barcelona. He graduated from Eina Escola d’Art I Disseny UAB and worked as an industrial designer. After finishing his Master of Space and communication from HEAD Geneva, he has embodied an audiovisual practice that brought him to work on films and spaces.

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative. 

PROGRAM CHANGE: Košice 2.0 x Ars Electronica x Art & Tech Days – Winds of Košice: AI data painting, Refik Anadol

PROGRAM CHANGE

Due to technical reasons, the planned opening of the exhibition Winds of Košice: AI data painting, Refik Anadol on Thursday (November 24) will not take place. We will inform you about the new date as soon as possible.

Exhibition opening – 24.11., 18:00

Wind of Košice. Data Paintings is a site-specific work that turns the invisible patterns of wind in and around Košice into a series of poetic data paintings within a digital canvas. By using a one-year data set collected from Košice, Refik Anadol Studios developed a series of custom software to read, analyze and visualize wind speed, direction, and gust patterns along with time and temperature at 20-second intervals throughout the year.

Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is a media artist, director and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. His body of work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. In taking the data that flows around us as the primary material and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol paints with a thinking brush, offering us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expanding the possibilities of architecture, narrative, and the body in motion. Anadol’s site-specific AI data sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, its temporal and spatial dimensions, and the creative potential of machines. More on refikanadol.com  

 Košice 2.0 project, funded by the EU under the UIA program, aims to increase the wellbeing of citizens by improving the quality of the services provided by the city of Košice, Slovakia. Media art installations representing various data describing different phenomenon of the city environment are interpreted in an artistic way and used within the project as awareness raising and communication channels to engage citizens in topics such as climate change, resilience, communities, wellbeing, and others.  In this framework Ars Electronica will present Refik Anadol’s media art installation Winds of Košice which will be shown within Kosice 2.0 as program of the Art &Tech Days festival and will be available to audience for one year in the East Slovak Gallery in Kosice. 

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

City to City Exhibition

City to City is a joint endeavour of the cities-members of the Media Arts Cluster of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, to mark their commitment with the importance of cooperation and support to art and creativity as a major force for the sustainable development. 

The project was designed in 2020, to provide artists from those cities a platform for collaborative work in pairs, online, to the co-create new digital art. 

The main idea is to promote the excellence of practice in media arts, share knowledge and skills, encourage the public and other professionals to engage in creative practices, foster sector development, and raise the profile of the work of the UNESCO Creative Cities. 

Altogether, 14 cities are participating in the collaboration: Austin (USA), Braga (Portugal), Calí (Colombia), Changsha (China), Dakar (Senegal), Enghien-les-Bains (France), Guadalajara (Mexico), Gwangju (South Korea), Karlsruhe (Germany), Kosice (Slovakia), Sapporo (Japan), Toronto (Canada), Viborg (Denmark), York (United Kingdom) 

The exhibition at this year’s Art & Tech Days will focus on the artworks done by Slovak artists who took part in collaborative co-creation productions of artworks. 

Reminiscence path, 2020 

Artists: Beáta Kolbašovská (Košice), Junichi Oguro (Saporro)

Topic: Human Responsibility 

Artwork is based on data tracking of experiences from people during the pandemic. The main idea was to create an audio-visual installation using data which reflect the lives of people during the COVID-19 pandemic. In times when travelling was not possible, the online cooperation of artists across continents enabled them to overcome the geographical distance of two cities, at least in a virtual form. 

Artists were gathering information on pedestrian and cyclist paths in both cities using GPS data obtained from various applications and topographic maps. With digital technology, they got direct access to our memory. The word “path” carries the meaning of life and route. What will we think when we look back on this work in a few years? Where did we go during the lockdown? Where did we feel safe? Where could our minds breathe? 

PlaceHolder, 2021 

Artists: Ivana Durkáčová (Košice), Lucian Rodriguez Arredondo (Guadalajara)

Topic: Play! 

 PlaceHolder is a web-based experimental experience that uses terrain data and sounds from downtown of the cities of Guadalajara and Kosice to generate a multilevel maze, explore the concepts of globalization and simulated reality. It invites the user to explore the open-world environment in a playful manner with different outcomes depending on the decisions made while wandering. The PlaceHolder is a virtual space you get into once you press PLAY.  PlaceHolder represents a city that does not really offer any essential information and therefore needs to be filled by the real ones. The visitors of the virtual space are the source of that information. 

Born & Raised, 2022

Artists: Mišo Hudák (Košice), Faiza Kracheni (Austin)

Topic: Behavioural Change 

 Two artists through their artwork reflect on what changes does technology bring to our understanding of moral, social, and political actions? How does it affect the body of action itself, the perception of activity, the horizon of perceived possibilities – what is possible, what is moral, what is desirable, and how are we expected to act, interact, and engage in our lives and lives of our communities, because of technology and by technology? 

Their work focus on the memory of people and places, and the gaps and limitations, that are now created by arising power of technology. 

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative. The festival was supported from public funds by the Slovak Art Council.

The collaboration of these artists was realized within the framework of the Virtual International Collaboration project at the CCI, which was supported by the Slovak Arts Council from public sources. The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project.

You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating Exhibition

Multimedial installation
Ezra Šimek (DE)
Opening

An irregular, bit eccentric, slightly disorienting, weird, one might even say: queer journey takes place in between these three pillars. A journey from an old abandoned mining town of the olden days, the rough days, of the now so romanticised Wild West, leading to a rave club, or was it the other way around? The lighting is the sunset on testosterone. The setting is uncertainly bizarre – be it a lab or a barn. A story of various characters meeting in one body. Your daily news anchor. Your gender inclusion and sex education teacher. Your gentle genderless traveller. Your old time miner. Your cowboi. And somewhere in the distance, your witch. All yours, yet none in reach, and even if so, you don’t have any right to them. You can only listen. Learn, Unlearn. Dismiss. Critique. Leave be. Sing along. Join the fight.

The show “You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating” brings together a newly formed narrative line through the work of Ezra Šimek. The educational character of their older works focusing on trans* knowledge 101 meets poetic abstraction and research into marginalized communities in the latest film trilogy exploring and appropriating archetypes from popular culture, namely figures of the Cowboy and the Witch. The soft tissue binding the works slides over various societal, learned, and encoded norms around the gender binary and internalized trans* hate and violence, not even mentioning the homophobia so ingrained in local culture and politics.

Ezra Šimek (*1997) graduated in Photography (Studio of New Aesthetic) from Prague’s Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and now continues with their MA in TransArts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, diploma studies at the Digital Media and Moving Image Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as well as an MA in contemporary art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia. In their work, Ezra primarily deals with queer identity politics and sensitivity around language, presented through various time-based media (film, performative lecture, computer game) or site-responsive installations, sound works and writing. They explore gender as a societal construct comparable to mythology that attempts to create more fictional narratives and to boost synergy between different shattered realities of our times and fantasy and thus create a new inclusive and speculative reality.

Their work has been presented within the Czech art scene at the National Gallery in Prague (2022), Prague City Gallery (2022), or Svetova 1 (2022) and abroad, for example at the Museum for Contemporary Art Zagreb (2022), Kunsthalle Wien (2022) and Haus Wien, Vienna (2021). They are the holder of the Jindřich Chalupecký Art Award 2022.

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

Creative music coding in Sonic Pi

Speaker / Artist

Fero Király/SK

This non-traditional workshop focused on the development of musical creativity for children of primary school age offers a more contemporary and engaging alternative to the current methods of teaching music in schools. Instead of a passive form of listening and memorizing songs, it gives children the opportunity to create and thus learn music through its creation. 

The main creative tool becomes Sonic Pi – which is freely available under an opensource license. Sonic Pi was created at the University of Cambridge in compliance to the new rules of education in Great Britain, where since 2014 coding has been a mandatory part of the school curriculum, a skill that all students must master at least in the basics. This process opened the door to innovative forms of combined teaching of coding and music. This approach allows kids to work with a tool that most of them handle quite naturally – the computer. With the help of SonicPi, it is possible in a short time to introduce children to the wide possibilities of working with sound in a playful way, which further stimulates their interest. 

The creative music programming workshop is suitable for complete beginners, but also for children who already have experience with music. Children can easily compose their first tunes within a few hours and learn the basic principles of music creation.  

At the end, there will be a presentation of works for parents and invited friends. 

• age limit: 10 to 15 years
• maximum number of children 15
• participants need their own laptop with the Sonic Pi software installed – installation link HERE
• please bring your own headphones

Fero Király (1979) is an artist and lecturer. He deals with artistic projects that extend into performance, sound art and sound installations, interpretation of contemporary music, development of his own audio-visual tools, as well as educational projects in the field of music, multimedia, and creative coding. In doing so, he creates his own digital tools and likes to collaborate on projects with other artists with a multidisciplinary focus. He is an assistant professor at VŠVU, and together with Eva Vozárová, leads the civic association ooo, which is the main platform for these activities. From 2019 the ooo association organizes the intermedia international event JAMA. 

The workshop is part of the ooo_2022 project, supported by its main partner Slovak Arts Council, from public sources.

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

Second Sun – exhibition

Speaker / Artist

Pau Saiz Soler/ES

Nikola Ivanov/CZ

Second Sun

A satellite with a giant mirror was launched into orbit, the purpose of which is to illuminate Košice at night using the reflection of the sun’s rays. This completely destroys the darkness of the night and creates permanent day. Behind the ambitious plan is a local scientist and entrepreneur who sees in the revolutionary project the possibility of energy savings, ecological responsibility and the possibility of attracting the attention of the whole world. The project aroused the interest of the local mayor, who announced a local referendum, which ended with close support. But not everyone agreed. The most vocal opponent is an environmental activist who criticizes the project for disrupting the biological rhythms of animals, humans and other adverse effects. Together with others, she created a civic initiative that tries to prevent Košice from being illuminated from space. There have also been cases of illness due to exposure to permanent light. Is the satellite a revolutionary innovation that saves money and nature or it is just a megalomaniac nonsense that brings, in addition to high costs, negative health consequences? The controversy continues under the light of the so called second sun.

Multimedial installation

Nikola Ivanov (CZ), Pau Saiz Soler (ES)

Nikola Ivanov (*1990) is an artist living in Prague. He mainly focuses on photography, video and graphic design. In his work, he deals with issues of temporality, historical memory, biopolitics and is very often inspired by the social sciences. He is currently studying in a doctoral program at the University of Applied Arts.

Pau Saiz Soler is a designer from Barcelona. He graduated from Eina Escola d’Art I Disseny UAB and worked as an industrial designer. After finishing his Master of Space and communication from HEAD Geneva, he has embodied an audiovisual practice that brought him to work on films and spaces.

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

PROGRAM CHANGE: Košice 2.0 x Ars Electronica x Art & Tech Days – Winds of Košice: AI data painting, Refik Anadol

PROGRAM CHANGE

Due to technical reasons, the planned opening of the exhibition Winds of Košice: AI data painting, Refik Anadol on Thursday (November 24) will not take place. We will inform you about the new date as soon as possible.

Exhibition opening – 24.11., 18:00

Wind of Košice. Data Paintings is a site-specific work that turns the invisible patterns of wind in and around Košice into a series of poetic data paintings within a digital canvas. By using a one-year data set collected from Košice, Refik Anadol Studios developed a series of custom software to read, analyze and visualize wind speed, direction, and gust patterns along with time and temperature at 20-second intervals throughout the year.

Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is a media artist, director and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. His body of work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. In taking the data that flows around us as the primary material and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol paints with a thinking brush, offering us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expanding the possibilities of architecture, narrative, and the body in motion. Anadol’s site-specific AI data sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, its temporal and spatial dimensions, and the creative potential of machines. More on refikanadol.com  

 Košice 2.0 project, funded by the EU under the UIA program, aims to increase the wellbeing of citizens by improving the quality of the services provided by the city of Košice, Slovakia. Media art installations representing various data describing different phenomenon of the city environment are interpreted in an artistic way and used within the project as awareness raising and communication channels to engage citizens in topics such as climate change, resilience, communities, wellbeing, and others.  In this framework Ars Electronica will present Refik Anadol’s media art installation Winds of Košice which will be shown within Kosice 2.0 as program of the Art &Tech Days festival and will be available to audience for one year in the East Slovak Gallery in Kosice. 

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

City to City Exhibition

City to City is a joint endeavour of the cities-members of the Media Arts Cluster of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, to mark their commitment with the importance of cooperation and support to art and creativity as a major force for the sustainable development. 

The project was designed in 2020, to provide artists from those cities a platform for collaborative work in pairs, online, to the co-create new digital art. 

The main idea is to promote the excellence of practice in media arts, share knowledge and skills, encourage the public and other professionals to engage in creative practices, foster sector development, and raise the profile of the work of the UNESCO Creative Cities. 

Altogether, 14 cities are participating in the collaboration: Austin (USA), Braga (Portugal), Calí (Colombia), Changsha (China), Dakar (Senegal), Enghien-les-Bains (France), Guadalajara (Mexico), Gwangju (South Korea), Karlsruhe (Germany), Kosice (Slovakia), Sapporo (Japan), Toronto (Canada), Viborg (Denmark), York (United Kingdom) 

The exhibition at this year’s Art & Tech Days will focus on the artworks done by Slovak artists who took part in collaborative co-creation productions of artworks. 

Reminiscence path, 2020 

Artists: Beáta Kolbašovská (Košice), Junichi Oguro (Saporro)

Topic: Human Responsibility 

Artwork is based on data tracking of experiences from people during the pandemic. The main idea was to create an audio-visual installation using data which reflect the lives of people during the COVID-19 pandemic. In times when travelling was not possible, the online cooperation of artists across continents enabled them to overcome the geographical distance of two cities, at least in a virtual form. 

Artists were gathering information on pedestrian and cyclist paths in both cities using GPS data obtained from various applications and topographic maps. With digital technology, they got direct access to our memory. The word “path” carries the meaning of life and route. What will we think when we look back on this work in a few years? Where did we go during the lockdown? Where did we feel safe? Where could our minds breathe? 

PlaceHolder, 2021 

Artists: Ivana Durkáčová (Košice), Lucian Rodriguez Arredondo (Guadalajara)

Topic: Play! 

 PlaceHolder is a web-based experimental experience that uses terrain data and sounds from downtown of the cities of Guadalajara and Kosice to generate a multilevel maze, explore the concepts of globalization and simulated reality. It invites the user to explore the open-world environment in a playful manner with different outcomes depending on the decisions made while wandering. The PlaceHolder is a virtual space you get into once you press PLAY.  PlaceHolder represents a city that does not really offer any essential information and therefore needs to be filled by the real ones. The visitors of the virtual space are the source of that information. 

Born & Raised, 2022

Artists: Mišo Hudák (Košice), Faiza Kracheni (Austin)

Topic: Behavioural Change 

 Two artists through their artwork reflect on what changes does technology bring to our understanding of moral, social, and political actions? How does it affect the body of action itself, the perception of activity, the horizon of perceived possibilities – what is possible, what is moral, what is desirable, and how are we expected to act, interact, and engage in our lives and lives of our communities, because of technology and by technology? 

Their work focus on the memory of people and places, and the gaps and limitations, that are now created by arising power of technology. 

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative. The festival was supported from public funds by the Slovak Art Council.

The collaboration of these artists was realized within the framework of the Virtual International Collaboration project at the CCI, which was supported by the Slovak Arts Council from public sources. The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project.

You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating Exhibition

Multimedial installation
Ezra Šimek (DE)
Opening

An irregular, bit eccentric, slightly disorienting, weird, one might even say: queer journey takes place in between these three pillars. A journey from an old abandoned mining town of the olden days, the rough days, of the now so romanticised Wild West, leading to a rave club, or was it the other way around? The lighting is the sunset on testosterone. The setting is uncertainly bizarre – be it a lab or a barn. A story of various characters meeting in one body. Your daily news anchor. Your gender inclusion and sex education teacher. Your gentle genderless traveller. Your old time miner. Your cowboi. And somewhere in the distance, your witch. All yours, yet none in reach, and even if so, you don’t have any right to them. You can only listen. Learn, Unlearn. Dismiss. Critique. Leave be. Sing along. Join the fight.

The show “You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating” brings together a newly formed narrative line through the work of Ezra Šimek. The educational character of their older works focusing on trans* knowledge 101 meets poetic abstraction and research into marginalized communities in the latest film trilogy exploring and appropriating archetypes from popular culture, namely figures of the Cowboy and the Witch. The soft tissue binding the works slides over various societal, learned, and encoded norms around the gender binary and internalized trans* hate and violence, not even mentioning the homophobia so ingrained in local culture and politics.

Ezra Šimek (*1997) graduated in Photography (Studio of New Aesthetic) from Prague’s Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and now continues with their MA in TransArts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, diploma studies at the Digital Media and Moving Image Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as well as an MA in contemporary art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia. In their work, Ezra primarily deals with queer identity politics and sensitivity around language, presented through various time-based media (film, performative lecture, computer game) or site-responsive installations, sound works and writing. They explore gender as a societal construct comparable to mythology that attempts to create more fictional narratives and to boost synergy between different shattered realities of our times and fantasy and thus create a new inclusive and speculative reality.

Their work has been presented within the Czech art scene at the National Gallery in Prague (2022), Prague City Gallery (2022), or Svetova 1 (2022) and abroad, for example at the Museum for Contemporary Art Zagreb (2022), Kunsthalle Wien (2022) and Haus Wien, Vienna (2021). They are the holder of the Jindřich Chalupecký Art Award 2022.

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

Creative music coding in Sonic Pi

Speaker / Artist

Fero Király/SK

This non-traditional workshop focused on the development of musical creativity for children of primary school age offers a more contemporary and engaging alternative to the current methods of teaching music in schools. Instead of a passive form of listening and memorizing songs, it gives children the opportunity to create and thus learn music through its creation. 

The main creative tool becomes Sonic Pi – which is freely available under an opensource license. Sonic Pi was created at the University of Cambridge in compliance to the new rules of education in Great Britain, where since 2014 coding has been a mandatory part of the school curriculum, a skill that all students must master at least in the basics. This process opened the door to innovative forms of combined teaching of coding and music. This approach allows kids to work with a tool that most of them handle quite naturally – the computer. With the help of SonicPi, it is possible in a short time to introduce children to the wide possibilities of working with sound in a playful way, which further stimulates their interest. 

The creative music programming workshop is suitable for complete beginners, but also for children who already have experience with music. Children can easily compose their first tunes within a few hours and learn the basic principles of music creation.  

At the end, there will be a presentation of works for parents and invited friends. 

• age limit: 10 to 15 years
• maximum number of children 15
• participants need their own laptop with the Sonic Pi software installed – installation link HERE
• please bring your own headphones

Fero Király (1979) is an artist and lecturer. He deals with artistic projects that extend into performance, sound art and sound installations, interpretation of contemporary music, development of his own audio-visual tools, as well as educational projects in the field of music, multimedia, and creative coding. In doing so, he creates his own digital tools and likes to collaborate on projects with other artists with a multidisciplinary focus. He is an assistant professor at VŠVU, and together with Eva Vozárová, leads the civic association ooo, which is the main platform for these activities. From 2019 the ooo association organizes the intermedia international event JAMA. 

The workshop is part of the ooo_2022 project, supported by its main partner Slovak Arts Council, from public sources.

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

Second Sun – exhibition

Speaker / Artist

Pau Saiz Soler/ES

Nikola Ivanov/CZ

Second Sun

A satellite with a giant mirror was launched into orbit, the purpose of which is to illuminate Košice at night using the reflection of the sun’s rays. This completely destroys the darkness of the night and creates permanent day. Behind the ambitious plan is a local scientist and entrepreneur who sees in the revolutionary project the possibility of energy savings, ecological responsibility and the possibility of attracting the attention of the whole world. The project aroused the interest of the local mayor, who announced a local referendum, which ended with close support. But not everyone agreed. The most vocal opponent is an environmental activist who criticizes the project for disrupting the biological rhythms of animals, humans and other adverse effects. Together with others, she created a civic initiative that tries to prevent Košice from being illuminated from space. There have also been cases of illness due to exposure to permanent light. Is the satellite a revolutionary innovation that saves money and nature or it is just a megalomaniac nonsense that brings, in addition to high costs, negative health consequences? The controversy continues under the light of the so called second sun.

Multimedial installation

Nikola Ivanov (CZ), Pau Saiz Soler (ES)

Nikola Ivanov (*1990) is an artist living in Prague. He mainly focuses on photography, video and graphic design. In his work, he deals with issues of temporality, historical memory, biopolitics and is very often inspired by the social sciences. He is currently studying in a doctoral program at the University of Applied Arts.

Pau Saiz Soler is a designer from Barcelona. He graduated from Eina Escola d’Art I Disseny UAB and worked as an industrial designer. After finishing his Master of Space and communication from HEAD Geneva, he has embodied an audiovisual practice that brought him to work on films and spaces.

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

PROGRAM CHANGE: Košice 2.0 x Ars Electronica x Art & Tech Days – Winds of Košice: AI data painting, Refik Anadol

PROGRAM CHANGE

Due to technical reasons, the planned opening of the exhibition Winds of Košice: AI data painting, Refik Anadol on Thursday (November 24) will not take place. We will inform you about the new date as soon as possible.

Exhibition opening – 24.11., 18:00

Wind of Košice. Data Paintings is a site-specific work that turns the invisible patterns of wind in and around Košice into a series of poetic data paintings within a digital canvas. By using a one-year data set collected from Košice, Refik Anadol Studios developed a series of custom software to read, analyze and visualize wind speed, direction, and gust patterns along with time and temperature at 20-second intervals throughout the year.

Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is a media artist, director and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. His body of work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. In taking the data that flows around us as the primary material and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol paints with a thinking brush, offering us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expanding the possibilities of architecture, narrative, and the body in motion. Anadol’s site-specific AI data sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, its temporal and spatial dimensions, and the creative potential of machines. More on refikanadol.com  

 Košice 2.0 project, funded by the EU under the UIA program, aims to increase the wellbeing of citizens by improving the quality of the services provided by the city of Košice, Slovakia. Media art installations representing various data describing different phenomenon of the city environment are interpreted in an artistic way and used within the project as awareness raising and communication channels to engage citizens in topics such as climate change, resilience, communities, wellbeing, and others.  In this framework Ars Electronica will present Refik Anadol’s media art installation Winds of Košice which will be shown within Kosice 2.0 as program of the Art &Tech Days festival and will be available to audience for one year in the East Slovak Gallery in Kosice. 

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.

City to City Exhibition

City to City is a joint endeavour of the cities-members of the Media Arts Cluster of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, to mark their commitment with the importance of cooperation and support to art and creativity as a major force for the sustainable development. 

The project was designed in 2020, to provide artists from those cities a platform for collaborative work in pairs, online, to the co-create new digital art. 

The main idea is to promote the excellence of practice in media arts, share knowledge and skills, encourage the public and other professionals to engage in creative practices, foster sector development, and raise the profile of the work of the UNESCO Creative Cities. 

Altogether, 14 cities are participating in the collaboration: Austin (USA), Braga (Portugal), Calí (Colombia), Changsha (China), Dakar (Senegal), Enghien-les-Bains (France), Guadalajara (Mexico), Gwangju (South Korea), Karlsruhe (Germany), Kosice (Slovakia), Sapporo (Japan), Toronto (Canada), Viborg (Denmark), York (United Kingdom) 

The exhibition at this year’s Art & Tech Days will focus on the artworks done by Slovak artists who took part in collaborative co-creation productions of artworks. 

Reminiscence path, 2020 

Artists: Beáta Kolbašovská (Košice), Junichi Oguro (Saporro)

Topic: Human Responsibility 

Artwork is based on data tracking of experiences from people during the pandemic. The main idea was to create an audio-visual installation using data which reflect the lives of people during the COVID-19 pandemic. In times when travelling was not possible, the online cooperation of artists across continents enabled them to overcome the geographical distance of two cities, at least in a virtual form. 

Artists were gathering information on pedestrian and cyclist paths in both cities using GPS data obtained from various applications and topographic maps. With digital technology, they got direct access to our memory. The word “path” carries the meaning of life and route. What will we think when we look back on this work in a few years? Where did we go during the lockdown? Where did we feel safe? Where could our minds breathe? 

PlaceHolder, 2021 

Artists: Ivana Durkáčová (Košice), Lucian Rodriguez Arredondo (Guadalajara)

Topic: Play! 

 PlaceHolder is a web-based experimental experience that uses terrain data and sounds from downtown of the cities of Guadalajara and Kosice to generate a multilevel maze, explore the concepts of globalization and simulated reality. It invites the user to explore the open-world environment in a playful manner with different outcomes depending on the decisions made while wandering. The PlaceHolder is a virtual space you get into once you press PLAY.  PlaceHolder represents a city that does not really offer any essential information and therefore needs to be filled by the real ones. The visitors of the virtual space are the source of that information. 

Born & Raised, 2022

Artists: Mišo Hudák (Košice), Faiza Kracheni (Austin)

Topic: Behavioural Change 

 Two artists through their artwork reflect on what changes does technology bring to our understanding of moral, social, and political actions? How does it affect the body of action itself, the perception of activity, the horizon of perceived possibilities – what is possible, what is moral, what is desirable, and how are we expected to act, interact, and engage in our lives and lives of our communities, because of technology and by technology? 

Their work focus on the memory of people and places, and the gaps and limitations, that are now created by arising power of technology. 

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative. The festival was supported from public funds by the Slovak Art Council.

The collaboration of these artists was realized within the framework of the Virtual International Collaboration project at the CCI, which was supported by the Slovak Arts Council from public sources. The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project.

You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating Exhibition

Multimedial installation
Ezra Šimek (DE)
Opening

An irregular, bit eccentric, slightly disorienting, weird, one might even say: queer journey takes place in between these three pillars. A journey from an old abandoned mining town of the olden days, the rough days, of the now so romanticised Wild West, leading to a rave club, or was it the other way around? The lighting is the sunset on testosterone. The setting is uncertainly bizarre – be it a lab or a barn. A story of various characters meeting in one body. Your daily news anchor. Your gender inclusion and sex education teacher. Your gentle genderless traveller. Your old time miner. Your cowboi. And somewhere in the distance, your witch. All yours, yet none in reach, and even if so, you don’t have any right to them. You can only listen. Learn, Unlearn. Dismiss. Critique. Leave be. Sing along. Join the fight.

The show “You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating” brings together a newly formed narrative line through the work of Ezra Šimek. The educational character of their older works focusing on trans* knowledge 101 meets poetic abstraction and research into marginalized communities in the latest film trilogy exploring and appropriating archetypes from popular culture, namely figures of the Cowboy and the Witch. The soft tissue binding the works slides over various societal, learned, and encoded norms around the gender binary and internalized trans* hate and violence, not even mentioning the homophobia so ingrained in local culture and politics.

Ezra Šimek (*1997) graduated in Photography (Studio of New Aesthetic) from Prague’s Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and now continues with their MA in TransArts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, diploma studies at the Digital Media and Moving Image Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as well as an MA in contemporary art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia. In their work, Ezra primarily deals with queer identity politics and sensitivity around language, presented through various time-based media (film, performative lecture, computer game) or site-responsive installations, sound works and writing. They explore gender as a societal construct comparable to mythology that attempts to create more fictional narratives and to boost synergy between different shattered realities of our times and fantasy and thus create a new inclusive and speculative reality.

Their work has been presented within the Czech art scene at the National Gallery in Prague (2022), Prague City Gallery (2022), or Svetova 1 (2022) and abroad, for example at the Museum for Contemporary Art Zagreb (2022), Kunsthalle Wien (2022) and Haus Wien, Vienna (2021). They are the holder of the Jindřich Chalupecký Art Award 2022.

The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.