KIBLIX 2020—2021: Virtual Worlds Now
International Festival of Art, Technology, and Science
KIBLIX International Festival of Art, Technology, and Science, critically investigates the contemporary technological media and their use in the context of contemporary arts, culture, and education. With the new long term focus of KIBLA on XR technologies, and considering that 2020 is probably the most virtual year we have lived so far, the key question we are asking for this year’s KIBLIX is what are the virtual worlds now?
This is not the question of technology as magic, but the critical evaluation of the intersections and disconnections between the virtual and the physical. On one side, we are faced with a persistent ambition of industry towards persuasive technologies, designing the virtual to fully assume, control, and subsume the physical, while on the other, we are constantly needing to mitigate technological incompatibility with the physical as such. KIBLIX 2020 will therefore place the experience of the human at the centre – with their material limitations and socio-political conditions of the body - while understanding the virtual environments as spaces for speculative realities, variable identities, and ever more acute social transformations.
The KIBLIX 2020—2021 International Festival will take place in the new COVID-19 hybrid with pre-events from 24 November onwards, with special focuses on December 2020 and throughout 2021. Alongside artistic research projects, which will be fully presented on KIBLIX website and following the "lock-unlock" options and physically on KIBLA PORTAL exhibition center, seminars, thematic panels, and audiovisual performances quarantined GameJam and other virtual activities.