ARIA 2024 / Worlds' End Symposium & Hackathon
17–23 August, Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana and Creative Center Krušče
With: Áron Birtalan, Alice Bucknell, Carina Erdmann, Cécile B. Evans, Ida Hiršenfelder, Emma Waltraud Howes, Tom K Kemp, Klara Kofen, Lucia Pietroiusti, Lukáš Likavčan, Omsk Social Club, Špela Petrič.
The second edition of ARIA is dedicated to spectrality and the ends of worlds, exploring rituals for mourning, and ways of interfacing with the specters of the (deep) past and future that haunt our ecologically fragile planet. We navigate a twilight terrain of our very weird present where reality and fiction, familiar and alien, past and future mingle and cross-bleed.
The intensive starts with two days of public events/symposium and continues with five days of a closed-door RGP (Real Game Play) experience with workshops by guest mentors.
Worlds’ End Symposium
Worlds’ End Symposium focused on the interrelations of art, play and ecological thinking at the nexus of politics, asking which imaginaries should shape artistic and institutional practice in a time of planetary upheaval. Featuring lectures, discussions, a transformational game, and a screening and guided tour of the related exhibition, the symposium looked at speculative tools, approaches, and iIdeas that can help us put to rest the world-songs that have shaped our Anthropocene ecologies, tune in to the rhythms of those emerging, create the conditions for radically new modes of being, and come to terms with the reality of extinction while ‘learning how to see beyond the approaching horizon of the end, towards that which shall come’ (F. Campagna). More information....
Speakers: Áron Birtalan, Alice Bucknell, Carina Erdmann, Cécile B. Evans, Tom K Kemp, Klara Kofen, Lucia Pietroiusti, Lukáš Likavčan, Omsk Social Club.
Worldbuilding session: DIM – a game for sightless minds and curious limbs. By Áron Birtalan.
Worlds' End Hackathon
Worlds' End Hackathon is a real game play (RGP) designed and facilitated by Omsk Social Club. It takes place through the lens of a collectively fictioned process-based Live narrative. The narrative is centred around the idea of a group of strangers meeting without prior knowledge of each other and attempting to perform a succession of ritual worldings. The group attempts to form a series of hyper-worlding sigils that effectively provides multi-stable images of new interdependent flourishing ruins beyond this reality stack. Making palpable and demonstrable the need for the end of the world as we know it whilst simultaneously hacking an alternative ecology for the living.
Three active working groups were on site during the hackathon: The Walkers, The Phoenix Keepers, and The Exo Protos. Each participant is allotted a team before arrival; they hack their world capsule for over 90 hours together while choreographing and facilitating one worlding session, which all hackathon members attend. The whole experience is facilitated by a group known as The Stewards; they onboard each participant and generally care for and hold space for the event… Read more about the play on @omsk_social_club IG.
Workshops
Engaging with somatic techniques, supersensory awareness, performative ethnography and narrative co-creation with synthetic intelligence. Embedded into RGP and attended by participants of Worlds' End Hackathon. Mentors: Špela Petrič, Ida Hiršenfelder, Emma Waltraud Howes and Alice Bucknell.
ARIA residents
Alice Bucknell and Áron Birtalan / Learn more: here and here
Developed and curated by: Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth / Real game play design and facilitation: Omsk Social Club / Production: Projekt Atol Institute (Lara Mejač and Uroš Veber) / In collaboration with: Šum journal (Društvo Galerija Boks) / Co-Production: Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, International Centre of Graphic Arts Ljubljana (MGLC) / Visual design 2024: Nicola Tirabasso.
ARIA is co-funded by the European Union as part of the Creative Europe framework and supported by the Ministry of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana.
