Navigating Through eXistenZ

This year, the Theory of Interactive Media (TIM) study program will be presented for the fourth time at the prestigious international festival for art, technology and society Ars Electronica, which has been held in Linz, Austria, since 1979. The TIM exhibition will once again be part of the Campus section, in which students from higher education institutions ""whose curricula use an innovative approach to teaching media arts and media culture"" are presented.

The TIM exhibition interprets the theme of the festival – HOPE – who will turn the tide – with the curatorial project Navigating Through eXistenZ.

The presented works focus on exploring the POV experience of existence mediated by our bodies and senses, as well as their technological simulations and prostheses. The title of the exhibition is an appropriation of the title of the sci-fi film eXistenZ (Cronenberg, 1999) with the aim of supporting the interpretation of the exhibited works in dialogue with the main theme of this cult film. The plot of the film follows a game designer playing a game she created herself, and the exhibited works evoke the same experience: We are just like her, designers and players of the games we call our lives. To play these games, we move across physical worlds (landscapes, cities, bodies) and simulated digital worlds (digital games, social networks, and datasets of quantified selves). The exhibited works are records of games played not by conquerors of new territories, but by wanderers, flâneurs and nomads.

The exhibition has five parts:

1. Navigating through Land-scape: Bibiana Hroncová (SK), sound and video.
2. Navigating through Urban-scape: Filip Johánek (CZ), Karolína Segéňová (SK) – sound; Tin Lai Man (HK) - AI video.
3. Navigating through Data-scape: VR gallery: Vojtěch Juránek (CZ), Adam Svoboda (CZ), Dan Klepáč (CZ), Deana Romana Kozubová (SK), Filip Kratochvíl (CZ), Matúš Nagy (SK), Erika Capová (SK), Karolína Sedláková (CZ). AV essays: Roman Jančík (CZ), Jan Lokvenc (CZ), Markéta Šmoldasová (CZ), Samuel Olejár (CZ), Oskar Ladislav Hubáček (CZ), Eva Klimendová (CZ), Nicolas B. Adamec (CZ).
4. Navigating through Body-scape: Aneta Chatzigeorgiu (CZ) – video; Polina Zaytseva (UA) - audio.
5. Navigating through Sublime-scape: Martina Komínková (CZ) – sound and image; Martin Flašar (CZ) and Luboš Malinovský (CZ) – sound and image.

Participating artists are students of the Theory of Interactive Media, and Sound Design and Multimedia Technology programs at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University.

Implementation team:

• Exhibition curator: Jana Horáková
• Guarantors of the exhibited works: teachers of the TIM program – Martin Flašar, Adam Franc, Jana Horáková, Tomáš Staudek, Monika Szücsová
• Visual and exhibition design: Alina Matějová
• Technical support: Michael Franěk

The exhibition was supported by a grant for excellent study programs of Masaryk University within the project ´Strengthening the excellence of the Theory of Interactive Media (MA) program (TIM_UP)´, MUNI/ESPRO/0821/2023.