What if you could see sounds, hear colors, or taste shapes? What if you could immerse yourself in a world where the boundaries between senses are blurred and the possibilities of expression are endless? This is the premise of Synesthetic Immersion, a new media art exhibition that showcases the work of eight artists who use cutting-edge technologies to transform one form of art into another.

Synesthetic Immersion is the debut exhibition of 0xCollection, a digital and new media art collection and initiative based in Basel, Switzerland, that aims to develop contemporary digital art for the future. The exhibition is part of the Signal Festival, a biennial event that celebrates light art and emerging technologies in Prague, Czech Republic. The exhibition runs from September 8th to November 8th, 2023, at the Arts Space Bořislavka, a former metro station that has been converted into a cultural venue.

The exhibition features eight leading artists working in the field of new media, whose work converts one artistic form into another through radical interdisciplinary technologies. The artists explore ways of expression that the audience is familiar with, such as classical music and painting in the projection of QUAYOLA (who was part of the Signal Festival in 2015), literature in the video cantos of Nancy Baker Cahill, or sculpture transformed into an immaterial object in the AR piece of Sougwen Chung. Others explore the experience of encountering art, which has been a topic of great attention in the academic world since the advent of new media in the 1990s. Carsten Nicolai challenges the spatial experience of reality in his installation and Ryoji Ikeda examines the definition of beauty through the eyes of hardware. The third group adds one more key question: where and when does the synthesis of vision and techné, which we call art, really begin? The biological experimentation of Daito Manabe, the implementation of quantum computers in the work of Libby Heaney, and the development of post-human identity by Lu Yang pose this problem.

Through Synesthetic Immersion, the viewers are invited to put aside their usual way of seeing and expecting what art should be, and instead ask themselves what art could be – both today and in the future. By exploring the conversion of traditional artistic forms, the concept of spectatorship, and artistic vision into new media formats, it is possible to start moving towards an understanding of what our cultural heritage and shared past mean for the current era, sometimes called technopocene.

More information about this exciting exhibition can be found on the Signal Festival website. You can also visit the website of 0xCollection to learn more about their vision and projects.

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