ABOUT
PLANETARY SKINS. The Future of Demonstration Season 3 applies the virtual as a node to connect physical spaces. As an artistic format, it facilitates creative participation and debate that reaches out into local places and at the same time collects and shares their conditions and perspectives.
We think of PLANETARY SKINS as a common and multi-layered osmotic skin that interweaves virtual and physical space to expand and multiply our abilities to come, think and act together. For us, bringing people together that join in from their own places, cultures and traditions is more productive than creating a metaverse as a platform of pure virtual representation.
The Covid-19 crisis has exposed the fragility of the political, economic and ecological frameworks onto which our societies are built. At the same time, the pandemic has shown how closely connected we are with one another, both within and beyond the human species. PLANETARY SKINS addresses this issue by demonstrating the entangled interweaving of ecological and political, biological and scientific, cultural and artistic skins – life on earth is not only nested in but co-depends on and thrives through myriad forms that exist within a vast array of interconnected micro- and macrocosmic matter.
The technosphere strikes and gets under the skin differently in different places. The aim of PLANETARY SKINS is therefore to move from critical reflection on the rise of global extractive dataism and its hybridisation of presence to a diffractive exploration of the potentials, ambivalences, risks and conflicts that arise from (co-)presence.
Intertwining Lucretius’ poem De Rerum Natura and quantum physics, soils and atmospheres, virtual images and socio-cultural patterns, microorganisms and cosmology, biofeedback and poetic fiction, digital and corporeal presences, PLANETARY SKINS evokes the deep entanglement of myriad realisations of matter in flux. As such, PLANETARY SKINS exists as a postdisciplinary laboratory to imagine ‘radical matter’ as co-corporeality and co-presence beyond-human collectivity.
How we imagine our world(s), and the planet on which they exist, depends as much on our individual desires and needs as on larger conditions and perspectives. Without response-ability to embrace difference, and dissonance, however, we might not be able to stimulate the contingent commonalities that allow us to engage in much needed planetary forms of solidarity and alliance.
The street as the public space for political action remains indispensable. But we feel that it is equally indispensable to create new osmotic online spaces and tools for participation if we do not want to cede the design of our communicative media and creative means to proprietary or authoritarian interests. Planetary forms of sociality – as for instance manifesting in the climate and the LGBTQ+ movements – require artistic formats to discuss, experiment, demonstrate, and experience together.
Multi-user systems provide a yet underutilised potential when it comes to bringing people together in open contexts and enabling participation for art, activism, and discourse. For our performative-discursive art project we curate existing technologies (open source as much as possible) and integrate them into a meaningful framework. The multi-user environment is based on the UNITY 3D real-time engine and integrates AR, AI, Lidar Scanning, Kinect motion sensing, video mapping, Point Cloud, 3D objects and streaming, amongst others.
Our aim is to offer inclusive forms of access to performative-discursive practices that also involve the audience. At once art project and tool, PLANETARY SKINS is developed and realised in collaboration with practitioners from art, architecture, philosophy, technology and science, amongst other fields.
FoD METHOD
The Future of Demonstration art series is based on postdisciplinary practice: artists, activists, architects, philosophers, scientists and contributors from other fields of knowledge jointly explore new forms, intensities and consequences of collective practice within a performative-discursive context.
We do not treat art, activism, theory, science and technology as separate fields but as vital contributions. The experience of their entanglement leads our speculative approach towards demonstration as method to reimagine, weave and share narratives, techniques and affiliations of resistance.
By intertwining social, technological, and biological materials, epistemes, phenomena and cultures, we aim to offer an immersive artistic experience in which the audience takes part in experiments on technopolitical resolution: how can we achieve the vital shift towards an inclusive socio-ecological paradigm?
What is at stake today is the urgent, but also beautiful, task for collective imagination to engage in redefining terms and conditions, revaluing technological, organic and inorganic resources and transforming processes and participation.
FoD FORMAT
Borrowing from the format of TV-series, we speak of seasons and episodes. Based on thematic clusters derived from leitmotifs – VERMÖGEN in 2017, PASSION in 2018, PLANETARY SKINS in 2023/24 – the episodes are jointly developed and realised with our participants and partners.
The Future of Demonstration resolves the conventional and increasingly unproductive separation between art (exhibition), discourse (symposium) and archive (documentation). Instead, the episodes interweave digital and physical space, performance, talks, conversation, installation, soundscape and film within specific choreographies.
Each episode is streamed live on our website and other channels. Together, they constitute the archive of The Future of Demonstration as a web series.