The UNESCO City of Media Arts Karlsruhe presents 9 artworks by local and international media artists and collectives in the urban and digital space from August 16 to September 17, 2023 in the city center, flanking the SCHLOSSLICHTSPIELE Light Festival – for free and accessible for everyone.
Since 2019, the UNESCO City of Media Arts Karlsruhe in long-standing cooperation with the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe presents digital, interactive and virtual art in the public urban space with the aim of providing media art for citizens and guests of the city to experience. Streets and squares, building facades, parks, public institutions and shop windows will once again become a digital stage for light and media arts for four weeks. The exhibition will feature installations, videos, projections and performances from Karlsruhe’s UNESCO Project Funding Program for Media Arts, as well as interdisciplinary projects that facilitate a creative exchange at the interface of art, technology and science. The focus, both in terms of content and through the media and methods used, is on addressing the sustainability aspects of the United Nations’ Agenda 2030.
In a preview, the works Sonos Mineralis by Anna-Lina Helsen and SensUs, curated by Daria Mille, Rasa Smite and Ratis Smits, can already be experienced at the Karlsruhe Museum Night (KAMUNA) on August 5, 2023 at and in the Natural History Museum.
Participating artists and projects are:
Holger Förterer und Eva Judkins, The Silent Chaos of Colors
The Silent Chaos of Colors is an interactive video projection using the effect of an excessive burst of colours. The work invites visitors to perceive their own body and the effects of their movements in a playful, chaotic, expressive or meditative way. Furthermore, the visitors can interact with each other and thus, individually or in groups, actively control the play of colors.
Location: Ettlinger Tor Center
Opening hours: Mon-Sat: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Fangchao Bi, The voice of the city
For the sound installation The voice of the city Chinese artist Fangchao Bi recycles plastic waste and fishing nets collected from the ocean and lakes to form the materials into a new shape. With the use of waste und different sounds the work reflects pollution of the oceans, a serious problem that has worsened over the past few years.
Location: Otto-Dullenkopf-Park
Sarah Degenhardt, INNER JOIN
The audio-visual 2-channel-installation INNER JOIN grounds itself in the profane scene of cooking as a starting point for an immersive and abstract examination of a physical-digital borderline experience. Read passages of text, whispered and spoken fragments create a new space of thought about our inner life and the quality of our bodies in an increasingly digitalised time.
Location: Kaiserpassage
To be seen daily from 6 to 10 p.m.
Anna-Lina Helsen, Sonos Mineralis
Within the sound installation Sonos Mineralis different primeval-epochs are sonified and can be experienced in a completely new way. The artist combines interactive and spacial elements, appealing several senses simultaneously, while creating experiences and telling stories by pictures and sound.
Location: State Museum of Natural History, 2nd floor (1.OG).
Opening hours: Tue-Fri: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sat+Sun: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Eva-Maria Lopez, paper trees
The augmented-reality installation paper trees displays the relationship between nature and paper. The tree – an important element within biodiversity, is compared in relation to the use of paper. paper trees visualizes the connection between local paper consumption and the global climate and connects people and nature in a new way.
Location: Marktplatz Karlsruhe
Isabella Münnich, Anna Manankina, Jung Eun Lee, Rihards Vītols and Jurgis Peters, SensUs. Augmented Nature-Culture
SensUs reveals the unseen processes of nature inside of the city of Karlsruhe. The participating artists created virtual pieces of art that question the symbiotic relationship of biological and social processes while displaying historic and current development of nature-culture and visualising scientific, ecological and social data. Curated by Daria Mille, Rasa Smite and Ratis Smits.
Location: Friedrichsplatz/State Museum of Natural History
Gerardo Nolasco-Rózsás, Die Hochzeit von Himmel und Hölle
The title of this project is an homage to the book of the same name by poet William Blake which was written during a time of great political and social change due to the French Revolution. The AR-performance has two cartoon characters as the main actors: A hippopotamus (Rousseaus noble savage) is dancing with a crocodile (Thomas Hobbes Leviathan). This dance is the starting point for a reflection on our own personal natural state.
Location: Kaiserpassage
Michail Rybakov, Himmel über Karlsruhe
The website himmelueberkarlsruhe.de broadcasts live the current colour of the sky above Karlsruhe. Just the colour. Whether rain clouds or sunrise, a Sahara-sand tinge or a wintery gray. The collected light is archived and the resulting strips of colour tell a story, a very special, personal one, a story of the days past.
Location: Rathausfoyer
Opening hours: Mon-Fri: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
VOLNA, Fluchtpunkte
Fluchtpunkte is an installation of light examining the transformative nature of our own existence in a symbolic fashion. Due to the placement of two laser projectors facing each other and a row of black partition screens found in between this installation it unfolds as an abstract form of display of this transformative journey.
Location: TRIANGEL Open Space Kronenplatz
Opening hours: Thu-Sun: 8 to 12 p.m.
Media art is here is realised by the City of Karlsruhe’s Department of Cultural Affairs Karlsruhe in close cooperation with der Karlsruhe Marketing und Event GmbH and the ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien.
Kindly supported by AV DATA, Sparkasse Karlsruhe, Ettlinger Tor Shopping Mall und TR Vermögensverwaltung.
Click here for the press release.
