Biennial of Digital Art 2022: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Concept

Conditions of Existence

In 2018, we held the 1st edition of the Biennial of Digital Art, where we took artwork, reflections, and ways of doing to an audience of over 70,000 people in Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, under the theme Hybrid Languages.

At that time, when we started developing a Biennial focused on art, science, and technology, under the adjective "Digital", we tried to elucidate that we were in a field of production and knowledge that blended together without the need for borders, through an increasingly post-digital society.

Themes like the environment, which we perceive, live and change through biotechnologies and digital technologies, science, and art in a biocybrid context inhabited our exhibition gallery, seminar, workshops, and artistic presentations. Other diverse agendas were also addressed, among them economics, politics, social relations, and technologies. At the end of the event, we introduced the theme Conditions of Existence in reference to the next edition (2022).

In a forced hiatus from global events due to the covid pandemic, many new arrangements have emerged in our lives and societies, involving all possible spheres of our daily "living".

As if by chance, the theme previously chosen at the end of that year, Conditions of Existence, seemed to have been a kind of preview of what the world was about to experience as a social, political, and economic condition. But, after removing the "by chance", there really was no prediction of what was to come, even though we knew of the risks enunciated by experts in various fields about the world we inhabit. 

Conditions of Existence is, in fact, a continuation of thought, a collective and propositional writing, in which we invite artists, scientists, thinkers, and creatives from various fields, to compile a temporal extract of what our conditions of existing in the world are.

A biennial is like a book that, through chapters, we try to give voice to narratives and visions, ways of "being" and "seeing" in the world with sentient things. And when we say "things" we are including a digital ontology (of life) in an intersection or overlapping with the human ontology of being in the world, where forms, processes, and ways of existing are in almost omnipresent coexistence with what we understand as sentient, in an approach beyond bioorganic and biotechnological. A more holistic look that considers the third parts (algorithms, intelligent computing, digital forms of "life") very much present in our daily lives. 

If we treat Hybrid Languages as the impossible separation between art, science, and technology, producers of tools capable of fabricating new realities, and new life experiences, in Conditions of Existence we seek to understand, think and propose the ways of coexistence. How to coexist, "live", "be" in the dimension of a biotechnological and post-digital world?

The questioning is comprehensive when one realizes that existence takes place from different and multiple perspectives. The perspectives on the "how to exist" and its "conditions" are, in a way, an infinite exercise of the very way of perceiving and living the world.

Existence, coexistence. Conditions of existence.

What forms of existence are possible in our present?

What are the human conditions in the face of the technical and digital world?

How are we inserted into a digital ontology of life that redirects the human sense of being and living?

In the advance of biotechnological and digital societies, where do we coexist?

Art, science, and technology are rich fields of knowledge and human production. Above all, they are places of our existence and produce forms and senses of living. We are immensely diverse if we consider that the conditions of existence are scaled from geography, politics, economy, cultures, customs, and mentalities. But in the approach of a world inhabited by data, information, artificial intelligence, intelligent machines, and biocybrid relations we are in a much more complex web of "being-in-the-world". The digital humanities, as a field of study, has been trying to mitigate the effects of this and enhance our way of dealing with ways of existing and operating in the digital, for example.

In its second edition, the Biennial of Digital Art seeks propositions for the adversities but also, in the midst of the potentialities of the conditions of existence, artistic-scientific works with the use of digital technologies in the most diverse forms of expression such as speeches, texts, images, audiovisual and virtual forms, as well as diverse doings, that can be integrated into an important chapter of our artistic, intellectual, social, and political production at this moment.

Selected Submissions