Hello, hello everybody. My name is Davide and I'm here with the two artists, the artist group made from Sai Bao and Yang Mu, two digital artists working and living in the clouds, who this year took care of the exhibition for Art Meets Radical Openness. Hello, welcome. Hello. I think today for the finissage of Lost in a Garden of Clouds, which is our little exhibition during Art meets Radical Openness 2020, which was fully online. We will give a little walkthrough through the exhibition together. But actually, first of all, maybe we have to introduce where we are right now. So this is the AMRO hub and it's a Mozilla hub space that we build especially for AMRO festival. Here you can see you have access to other rooms which are projects from artists that are exhibiting in our exhibition Lost in a Garden of Clouds and we will go through that also. This was a meeting point for all the AMRO participants where they could meet and talk about the exhibition but also about the panels and it was basically, we imagined it as a meeting point where people can gather and have fun somehow. We have the Café Strom which is here next to Serguss so since we couldn't go there because of the quarantine we decided to build it up and that's it. Yeah and we have some servers on this little island with other hub spaces from different artists which we will also see during the show so should we jump right into the webpage? Yes for sure!, welcome to the Lost in the Garden of Clouds. I wanted to maybe contextualize a little bit what was the exhibition about. The exhibition was one of the sections of the festival that we mentioned, Amaro 2020, which had the title of Whirlpools and Tornadoes. The festival is organized by Servus AT and its community every second year and as Saibao already mentioned in the early phase of development of the festival we couldn't realize the festival in the normal form because we had to deal with the corona situation with the pandemic situation and we decided to go to go with the corona situation, with the pandemic situation, and we decided to go for the radical digital version of the festival. So discussions, performances, workshops, and lastly also the exhibition was held online. And yeah, in the early phase of development of the festival, And in the early phase of development of the festival, the team that I was coordinating decided to hand over the responsibility and the fun of transforming what was the the Festival Gateway, which was the place where all the festivals took place and through these different pages you could follow the conference, the workshops or even the food corner. We decided to give to Saibao and Yangmu the duty, the responsibility and also the fun part of transforming the plan of this physical exhibition into a digital one, a virtual one. Yeah, and so when you first enter cloud.radicalopenness.org you can see this thing that you can also see in the background for us. So it's from the usual Google Chrome experience when a website doesn't exist, that it says the site can't be reached. It seems like you got lost in the garden of clouds. And then if you enter it, you will get to kind of like a text-based adventure. So let me read it for you. A guard is blocking your way. Hello, stranger. Do you want to see our beautiful garden? We have a wide selection of interesting exhibits. Or you can meet some stranded folks in our club room and uh yeah if you go to the club room then you enter the mozilla hubs where we are located right now and where you can see us and on the left side you can also see a map with which which gives you a slight direction of where things are, where we located the artists. But maybe let's just go and look at the exhibition. So I click. You pass through a gate. Fluffy clouds surround you. Strange structures are growing on top of them. Where do you want to go first? Hmm. Hmm. Where should we go first? Saiba, where do you want to go? Ocean. Okay, let's go to the ocean. A vast ocean stretches before you. The sun is on the horizon. The sky is pink, orange and a little green actually you realize that your vision is hazy like you are surrounded by fog there is only concrete around you take a stroll on the beach or go swimming stroll on the beach on the shore you pass a sign that reads cancer alley you hear waves crashing on the beach birds chirping and factories rumbling the air brings a familiar smell of toxic water an emergency capsule lies just in front of you check the capsule keep walking or go swimming Davide, david i would like to um go swimming oh let's go swimming then you put on your best swimsuit and swim towards the sun something touches you your right foot swim as fast as you can or dive down? We dive down. Okay, let's go diving. You dive down deeper and deeper. There's nothing around you, only dark water. Your breath is getting short. A thick cable seems to be lying on the seabed. Is there actually a point where we exit this long narration? Follow the cable. yeah, if we follow the cable then we find our first exhibit which is from Cesar Escudero Andaluz Escudero Andaluz Escudero, I'm sorry who created a project it's a DIY device to cut underwater internet C cables which span the globe. For the exhibition we show the video documentation of this piece and you can also download the files from his Dropbox account. So then you can also 3D print at home if you have a 3D printer, so it's, let's say, open source and available for everybody? Yeah, I think the motivation to have this work relates very well to the festival, which is the understanding of what is the amount of energy that all the infrastructure, the internet cables, the submarine cables need to keep up the internet running, which was a topic that was analyzed in 2019 and it was very influencing the whole the thematics that we decided. So when you stay on this page for a while, the internet actually breaks and you come back to the beginning. Yeah. So it's basically like one of these solutions to save the world and not to have all of this energy and pollution due to the internet infrastructure. Well, the solution is like, fuck the internet. So with FAQ, the Free Universal Cut Kit for the Internet Disobedience, which is the name of the work, yeah, César blocks actually our perception of the exhibition. So let's start of the exhibition. So let's start from the beginning. Basically we found the end and the very beginning. As you might have imagined there are multiple ways to go around the exhibition and you might see different things at different times. So let's start again so should we go to the ocean again or somewhere else somewhere else let's go to the cave okay let's go to the cave then you enter the cave it smells like earth and the air is dusty you hear a laughter in the distance. Explore the cave. The passage forks. Which way do you want to go? Go left? Take the right way? Left. Yeah, always go left first. The laughter gets louder and louder. You bump into a bold-headed man sitting in front of an old computer. On the CRT, you can make out a webpage. And here we have a work by joanna mon which is called the hidden life of an amazon user and um yeah david do you want to explain uh the concept of our work um yeah well i mean this is also uh we didn't choose to to to go to this direction but it fits perfectly also to the previous work that we saw. Joanna is working since many years on the topic of how energy consuming all the internet infrastructure is and especially its interfaces and with this work she actually focuses on the energy which is needed from the device that you are using to do a little action online. In her case, she went on Amazon to buy a book, a very famous book from the founder and owner of Amazon Jeff Bezos. It's a beautiful publication which deals with the philosophy of business of Jeff Bezos and gives suggestions to people how to become the next Jeff Bezos. And in that action, she basically tracked and recorded how many trackers and additional software it's loaded when you go through the 12 pages that are the 12 steps to buy an object online like search for the object see the object and you click on it you want buy, you insert your credit card number and all of this. Those are 12 pages and each of this page loads an incredible amount of additional code which is not necessary to run the page but it's basically trackers who monitor and therefore monetize the behavior of the user online which is actually at the very basis of the contemporary web. So she realized that for buying a book, a very little book, the machine will download something like 80 megabytes of code, which is impressive. And the 80 megabytes, what you see here is the code that is loaded from different web services. what you see here is the code that it's loaded from different web services and this is the amount of kilowatt per hour that your device will need to run that so all of this is the kilocalories another measure so she basically shows you how much energy you consume while just purchasing one wood on Amazon. And also shows you all the related tracking code that goes along with that. So leave the boatman. Leave the boatman. You reach the end of the tunnel. The sun is shining in front of you. Lies a blush grass field. In the far distance, you can make out a tiny house. So would we go to the house or examine the field? Yeah, the field. After the quarantine, I don't want to stay in a house anymore. Okay, let's go to the field, I think. And now you can hear already a nice sound. And this is a work by Eva Maria Lopez who reimagined the logos of different famous companies and if you and her work is called I never promised you a green garden and if you click on one of these mandalas you can also see which company's logos she used for the mandala so here we have elbow basf compo bison and sherry and I think Eva Maria, she works a lot with companies who kind of create different materials for like genetically modified food or how chemicals for the agriculture to destroy the non-wanted weeds in fields. Yeah, exactly. I think it's a very romantic, let's say, project. I mean, I see the whole exhibition actually very romantic. Somehow I think that the youth, I mean, she creates these mandalas which are, and also the whole environment, it's very relaxing, but at the same time the locus refers to something that is actually not relaxing. But I mean, it's very relaxing. But at the same time, the logos refers to something that is actually not relaxing. But I mean, it's not something that we perceive as good, as would be like meditation. And also the fact that these logos, these mandalas, are appearing randomly. And they pop up, and they overlap. And this kind of meditation is interrupted by this chaotic setup. It kind of reminds us of these nice images are actually something that is not nice. Yeah, and this was actually very, for me, a very good example of the work that is behind the exhibition, because Eva Maria Locke works in different ways, but very often she realizes actually some gardening projects in which she creates gardens actually with the shapes that you see here. So the mandala shapes are used into a urban garden, a little park that she actually creates using the so-called super weeds, which are plants that are resistant against chemicals. And yeah, which is a very physical work. And then in the case of the exhibition, we had to transform it. to transform it no maybe maybe i think you were dealing with this work mostly we i mean no we did together and yeah basically eva maria gave us a very clear let's say project like she said okay i imagine my project like this, she made a mock-up and we helped her to build it up. So usually she doesn't work with this kind of media, she mostly makes public art projects but in this case she really enjoyed also to switch in this direction and she was very very into it and it was a very nice collaboration okay so yeah now we are in this field of mandalas and the only thing that we can do is relax. Ah, but there's a person saying, hey, you're not supposed to be here. This is a private area. Some guards yell at you. They are still far away, so you could run away potentially. Run into the forest, talk to them or run back into the cave. No cave. I would talk to them. Alright, maybe the cave? No cave. Okay. I would talk to them. All right. Maybe they are nice people, eh? Yeah, let's try. The guard brings you to their corporate building and takes all biometric data and digital data from you. Then they leave you, look through the filing cabinets or talk to the building. File cabinets. Well, yeah, I'm not so... I'm not... So let's look at what... Look inside of the filing cabinets. You find a grey folder that looks totally out of place. A post-it on it says, Do not trust the information of the internet. It follows a logical law. Internet destroys your life. Think for yourself. Believe in your dreams. Think of your future stay a punk open the folder of course yeah yeah let's look into it so yeah so we get this it's actually three works that are kind of merged into one by a local artist whose name is Franz Xaver or Xav for short and his work is called the earth from 1993 and earth 2019. So here on the left we have maybe we play the video side by side we have the two different visualizations of our blue planet so and i think what Ruxav did here is that he took data long-term data and visualized it for us to see and yeah for example on this side it says, In the rainforest of South America beats the heart of the world. In the middle of the pictures you can see the creation of the water vapor of the earth. Recorded from 2014 to 2016 from Amru to Amru by GOES13. More than 50% of the pictures were interpolated and colored by infolab. The sound is a PD patch by FX with hydrogen. I'm not sure if you can hear it well. I'll try to make it a bit louder. And on the other side is a visualization of one year from the Meteosat receiver. And in the center is a work that is called Slow Stream, Rotting Apple since 1992. And here the artist kind of creates a picture every, oh I don't even remember, every couple of days or something of an apple that is rotting since 1992 and you can actually get one of the pictures by yourself. there was a way to get like an SHA key that kind of creates a picture just for you so here you can be an owner of a pic, do now take a picture and then there's a human check but I don't see there should be some kind of equation but I can make the equation myself okay so be sure that it's right one plus one is two let's submit true true make your entry so now we can create the picture for ourselves you can read the meta text of the last picture. So this is the person before who created a JPEG file from IfaDing and now with the next meta text you will be allowed to take the picture in your ownership or you could leave a message. this is only possible before the next picture is created if there are more than one people who are using the service only the latest entry will override all so let's put a little message hello from 20 submit contract entry in the chain so now we have we have the have the last picture of the rotting apple. Yeah, I think this is Xav, he is one of the community members that is working in the Stadtfürstatt since a long time and this is like a very clear, like a very nice example of these kind of processes which are always spanning over a very long period of time. Also this one is, I asked him at some point if really these apples are there since 1992. He said yes and therefore there is this very incredible texture. But also the other, the more media-related works, they span over years. And yeah, it's something that is very interesting because then in this rhythm, this slow rhythm of creation, or like leaving something to become something interesting over time is something that kind of nowadays is not... we cannot afford to wait, we have to be fast and I think he's, exactly in this work of the apples, he's he's applying, like he's trying to create this relation between moments of time so because then in this work, as far as I got to know every as you explained every apple is connected to the previous one every picture is connected to the previous one as a as if it was a kind of a chain of reaction or a blockchain of Apple pictures. Yeah Yeah apples Yeah Okay, let's close the folder and see. Oh, while you're putting the folder back, the light suddenly turns off. You're surrounded by complete darkness. As you search for the switch, you find the door handle. Open the door and we're back into the cave. You enter the cave. It smells like earth and the air is dusty. So we explore the cave and this time maybe we go to the right um the passage forks again which way do you want to go let's go right again fine some stairs lead down into the ground oh should we take the stairs down or should we keep walking? Keep walking? Go down? I would go down. You walk down a spiral staircase. On the bottom lies a massive grotto. An underground lake stretches in front of you. Walk along the shore of the underground lake or dive into the water. Walk along the shore? Yeah. Great. dive into the water walk along the shore yeah great you walk along the foreshore the air is getting moist and your feet start to get wet a heap of ragwood is blocking a passage so we move the wood while trying to move the wood you realize it was once part of the ship and this is a work called Carbon Rifts by the artist duo Froud. Or Froud? I'm not sure how to pronounce it. And what they did here is, it's also, it used to be a physical, or it was supposed to be a physical exhibition where they are kind of taking ragwood out of the swamp or out of the British coast coastway and they also calculated the amount of CO2 that is actually trapped inside of the inside of the ocean or the shore of Great Britain. And here you can see a little window into their documentation where they show random videos of this exploration inside of the shore and trying to excavate the shipwrecks and the wood that they consist of. So their practice is very much research oriented, they deal with very complex research topics and somehow in this work Prod who also had an artist talk in the conference section of AMRO they explained like the research behind that and it was a very very poetic and beautiful image that they were saying, explaining this work, stating that basically there is more CO2 trapped into this shipwrecked wood around Great Britain, if I'm not mistaken, than what is actually in the woods, in the actual forests of Great Britain. So there is more wood in the water than wood above the water. I think they really enjoy the idea of the narratives per se and so when we talked they made up let's say their own story and I think they also like to tell their project through narratives somehow and and it was also the the results was a collaboration with them and yeah they they had very clear idea of what they wanted let's say. Should we go further? Yeah. Great. So, ah, that's again the guard who's telling us that we are not supposed to be on this private property what did we do before we talked to them we talked to them before we can talk to them again if you like or we can run to the forest let's go to the forest let's go into the forest everything is green the air fresh. You truly are in forest. As you wander around between the trees, you realize that you got lost. You glimpse two silhouettes in the distance. Try to find people or explore nature. Try to find people. Let's go check if we can see the silhouettes. Oh, you find a place where people must have camped. There is no one to be found, but they have left a booklet. It's from 2006. It seems likeonsored Influencer Pandemic Evacuation Rehearsal. And it's also an online PDF and the work that they did in 2006 during a different kind of pandemic. And maybe David, do you want to explain a bit of their process? Yeah so the 2006 there was the bird flu right? As far I can look up online browse while we are going through the exhibition. Yeah, and yes, the bird flu, exactly. So, well, Heath Bunting is a long time AMRO participant, has been here many times. And he is very often doing activities on the outside of the cities into natural landscapes and using this as an important part of his heart practice and becoming kind of independent from what is the infrastructure that we live here inside. And at the beginning is the infrastructure that we leave here inside and at the beginning of the of the pandemic we realized we received an email from him that let us remember that he made this work 14 years ago and was basically very contemporary at the beginning of the pandemic, we saw every moment people doing work about the pandemic, but basically he did it. So what did he do? He fled civilization in 2006 and went for, I think, two weeks in the forest. And he documented this activity of trying to escape the virus and creating a manual like the one that we are seeing now. Let's say here in this page you see the method of travel, what is the best method of travel in case of pandemic, basically bicycle I would say or like very personal traveling modalities hitch hiking is not really an option but maybe it brings you somewhere much faster so this this manual is at the same time a documentation of their artistic process of survival camp but also like a manual that potentially could be helpful. And I would say of course the project actually like the PDF normally is not how we are looking at it now we made it up like we make it make it transformed it like we make it dirty in order to create, let's say, create visually our narration. So leaving the idea that this booklet was in the forest since 2006. And so then suddenly you are walking there and you find it and this can be helpful now and you can use it now for the new pandemic so it was also a very funny process because let's say that most of the projects were physical and we made them virtual digital in this case was the opposite it's like we printed out the video I mean yeah PDF was already already digital but we print it out we we transform it, let's say we made it old and then we put it in the website. That was actually something that Hit suggested as well as to do, he was very much thinking in which, like very trying to embed this into the narrative and think where would you actually find potentially one of these books this book has been used in the you know in another pandemic was left in the in the forest and then you would find it there since then so it has to be ruined it has to be destroyed and then dirty and yeah we went for that thank you david for your experience in making things dirty my specialty cool so um now should we go check out the lab that we can see on the other side of the river let's go for it let's go to the lab. Okay, and here you find a laboratory in the midst of this forest. People are inviting you to stay for tea and learn about plants and technology. Another house is close by. So this is another Mozilla Hubs space by the artist duo Nikola Brakova and michael klotner who created the living lab which is also a project that was supposed to be offline where people would would meet in physical space and as far as i understand create or about uh different plants over tea and have like um yeah little audio visual experience of uh how to combine technologies with um yeah different let's say that they in the beginning they were supposed to have a physical workshop and then we asked them to move in this Mozilla Hub, so for them it was something completely new. But they really enjoyed also creating this new virtual space and I think they really put lots of effort and it was a nice result and people that joined the tea ceremony, let's say, they really enjoyed it. Yeah, that was an interesting part of this kind of Mozilla Hubs where, yeah, so Michael and Nicola, they were looking into different kind of environments, from the technical and technological one to the natural one and how do they merge and they created actually this workshop situation because their practice is very much workshop oriented and it kind of mirrored what they're doing in their practice. The workshop itself becomes the artwork and then this space that hosts the workshop it's part of it as well. So they don't create, they don't not only discuss, they create spaces. Actually the original idea for the exhibition was to create a kind of a space, a physical space in architecture made out of scrap material to host workshops. So this is what they did here and they eventually, yes as you Saibao mentioned, they did their worship in this space. Yeah, and inside of the hubs you have another very meditative kind of experience where you can also see the spirit. but um yeah let's maybe not stay for too long and um go to the other house close by oh yeah all right let's go into this civilization let's go to civilization after all these environments. You knock on the door of the building. Nobody answers. The door is unlocked. The guitar is pulling strings completely automatically. It is connected with cables to sensors on the roof, picking up environmental data. And this is a work by Mathieu Zurstrasse which is called particle and during the exhibition for three days he was actually so he built a device that picks up environmental data and transforms it into an automated musical instrument that can pull a string. During the exhibition he live-streamed this, so for eight hours per day you could see into his home while the instrument is playing itself. Maybe we can have a minute look into Maybe we can have a minute look into how this looked like and sounded like. Thank you. yeah and the data that the device is picking up is actually CO2 gas from his rooftop. And I think all in all, it's a very beautiful piece also in the way that he presented the work. inside of his home was a unique part of this exhibition, which is also like as a livestream thing from your home. I think it was like a strong work in that sense. You kind of felt close to the work and to the artists somehow. Also because it was really like that, yeah, the exhibition is digital but it goes into his private space and I really like this idea of having well we don't have the exhibition physically here but the physicality the materiality of the exhibition is spread around Europe where at the place of the of the participants of course we didn't want to do this for all the works because for many others there was also some other possibilities were open and but this one really worked also because it deals with a very specific and location-based material. Yeah okay let's leave the house and go to the nearby city. Yeah. Okay. Let's leave the house and go to the nearby city. You approach a city of large skyscrapers. Everywhere you look, there are gray building blocks. They seem to stare back at you and listen to your footsteps as you walk among them. Ask the buildings why it is staring at you or walk around the city let's uh ask the building let's ask the building yeah what do they have to say the building says that it is smart and trained to watch over the people inside it invites you to learn more about smart cities and to discuss the topic with others sure And yeah, this is another Mozilla Hub space from Kairos. Let's load the room and see what they created for us. Yeah, Kairos is an artist duo, an artist collective made from Andreas Zingerle and Linda Kronmann, who has been working with Sergo since many years and they had a long research in South Korea where they really went deeper into the content and the production of the smart cities, the cities of the future. And their practice in South Korea was really based on visits into these cities where they explored and documented how the life there is. So for the show here they decided to create another virtual city containing the documentation of their visits, of their field research in South Korea and Songdo. So here you see that the city is actually, well the city, the rhetorics around the marketing that the city council is actually doing is to offer the perfect place where to live, where everything is perfectly designed and you can feel safe, and through technology you feel safe, of course, and so many people are living there and working there, and it's the perfect combination of nature and sky-crazy spirit, basically. And in their field research, I realized that actually they don't work. All this planning doesn't work. And there are actually very few people living there because the city works as a shopping mall where you rent out spaces and there is no real political citizen in that sense. So basically if the city doesn't work economically then nobody is going to live there. And this is what happened in many of these projects and here we see also the documentation of how Songdo reclaimed, was built on what was before actually sea. It was a sea area that over the year was reclaimed from the sea and was the basis for creating this city. So here they claim, the critique that also Kharyk is doing is also that through the marketing this city they present themselves as super healthy, super green and very friendly for the ecosystem whereas in their background they are born through the destruction of the nature. Let's see, before the quarantine they were supposed to have these video installations in which we would have been able to see these videos that now we are watching here in the Hub. And then I really like actually this solution the hub and the videos together like the idea of recreating this kind of smart city mozilla hub and we also have to say that andrea zingerle was actually one of the first that suggested us also to use mozilla hub as a gathering space and we had also various meetings with him to talk about this Mozilla Hub solutions. It's actually the first time I used Mozilla Hub and I went in Mozilla Hub was thanks to Andrea Zingerle so I think we should also thank them for this very good suggestion. In this video what we see is basically the idealization of the citizen of the smart city. This is the second part of the research which deals with face recognition software which is very often used in these smart cities. Where the single person is very stereotyped and then the city takes care that the person is happy or not happy and we can only imagine all the background of profiling and analysis of its own citizen into this control infrastructure. Okay, great. Should we explore the rest of this smart city? Sure. You walk around for hours and your feet start to hurt. There seems to be no one around except the tall buildings. So now we can enter one of the buildings or we can check our phone for directions. We would check the phone. Check the phone. Let's check the phone because the phone always knows. You open Google Maps and it says that there is a traffic jam on your road. There are no cars. A guy is turning the corner with a red trolley full of phones. He tells you the fastest way out of the city is by boat and this is a work by simon wecker which is called google maps hacks which got a lot of attention this year or in the past year and what simon is doing is he takes a lot of what Simon is doing is he takes a lot of phones with Google Maps on them and then he walks on a street in Berlin and by doing this performance he's actually giving other users who are using Google Maps it shows them that the road is blocked and full of cars. So here's a little documentation video of this work. I'm going to do it again. So you can see that here, just by walking, creating this picture. Yeah, so now should we take some rest or take a boat out of this? Are we tired already? I'm a bit tired, maybe I would take some rest or take a boat out of the sea. Are we tired already? I'm a bit tired maybe I would take some rest. Maybe you should go in one of the buildings. You approach a city of large skyscrapers. Everywhere you look there are grey building blocks. So let's ask for a room. You pay for the room with your data the robot gives you the keys and a pikachu onesie you take the elevator and arrive in a shady little room put on something cozy and go to sleep oh now you are in a dream world and this is another little adventure by Maloes de Farc which is called villains and heroes and it is also a kind of text-based adventure that she did but for a different in her game or story you play a character that somehow gets into a villa full of people like donald trump steve bannon kelani conway peter teal nigel farage so people from the far right and also um i don't know some very people who are rich and this is based on um uh like the mercer family who have like this annual costume party in their house which they call the owl's nest on long island in new york and York. As part of the game you kind of walk around different rooms. So you basically get an invitation to their party which is a mistake and inside of the room you have to kind of identify the 25 guests and you can talk to them. to kind of identify the 25 guests and you can talk to them so um yeah maybe we should just tell people to play it whenever they feel like it because this work will also it's not only on our page but if you google villains or heroes and villains um and um you can um yeah find it online yeah this the game is also like um it's a very nice uh i would call it like interaction interactive fiction like um it's a game yeah i think i think that the artist also would like to call it in that way um and uh this this uh call it in that way. And this includes a lot of the research that Marlouz has been doing over the last years about lobbyists and political structures in the US, which we all know they hit back and influence also very much what is the contemporary European politics. And in her practice, she's very much dealing, like, focusing on the topic of greenwashing and environmental activism, but also political processes. And when I played it, I played it fully, the game, it took a while, but I really got an overview of very specific characters that are acting in this network of people. Like a white guy or another white guy? Another white guy, the other white guy. You can also click and talk to him and see who this person might be yeah and you kind of have to figure out who they are disguised as yeah um yeah but uh you can also uh ah yeah and of course uh maro's game and uh her like where the interactive fiction was also a big influence on how we designed our exhibition um yeah as a kind of interactive so the trick was to the difficult part was i think to embed an interactive fiction in within another interactive fiction i like it's very like kind of meta inception style i would say yeah so now we can pinch ourselves to find ourselves walking aimlessly through a jungle how long have you been doing this are you awake it seems like this is clear this clearance in front of you behind you can make out a peculiar wooden structure so now we can go to two places where we already have been either to the structure let's see which is um the laboratory yeah the laboratory and now we can this time maybe we keep walking along the river where we come to the shore you pass a sign that reads cancer alley and i think we have been here already before. But maybe now we can check the capsule. Yeah but this time instead of swimming we go and check the emergency capsule just flies in front of us. And here we can see a work by Christina Gruber. a work by christina gruber inside the tiny capsule somebody left muddy reflections of the past christina had like a lot of memorabilia of a journey down the cancer highway and she had many many many like really huge amount of videos, pictures, sounds and we very, I mean I personally very like this messiness somehow, so talking with Fer, talking with the artist, we were wondering how we could embed this in our exhibition and then we said look, in some of your videos it's very important the presence of your desktop for instance, which is very messy and maybe we should try to make a similar experienceia in this way. And you go now this is the past and then you go present, future. A fragile place in the deep south of the United States, fueling the rest of the country and dealing with problems of loss flooding engineered solutions displacement poisoning and living on the edge and yeah her experience of the cancer alley was that from because it's a river there's a river flowing into the ocean and there's a lot of industry that kind of just pushes out toxic materials into this water. Christina is also a biologist who focuses on populations of fish and so one of her interests was also to look into how fish kind of adapted to this toxic kind of water and yeah, here we go I think on one of them, yeah, here you can see a fish that is getting bred. You can hear the sound of the Mississippi eroding. And these kind of short poems were also from texts that he sent to us. No. Cristina took part in the 2019 research that I took with her, which was a one year long research progress process in which Cristina and Antonio Zinano were invited by the service to work on the topic of the environmental impact of the Internet Interceptor, which flew and influenced a lot the whole festival and the exhibition that you are watching now. She is working a lot in doing this cross-field with the science. doing this crossfit in science. It was a pleasure to work with her material and her vision. It was also nice that she really wanted to incorporate some point to the narrative of the exhibition so now we get out of the capsule and again we come to this point where the police talks to us and tells us that we are in the wrong place so we can again talk to them or run into the cave i think uh yeah now now it gets a bit tricky because there are some uh there i mean a lot of times you go in a loop and i think that's also the funny part which is also the funny part yeah so that's we talked to the building already I think so far why it's so empty on the streets I think here we haven't been here yet so this is the work by Malte Steiner called The Price of Berlin and it's also a kind of window onto another Mozilla H hubs like space but this is this is created by the artist itself um so it's a yeah it's um yeah it's a work called the big crash and you can enter this three-dimensional space again. Davide can tell you a bit more about what the big crash is or the price of Berlin while I look around this space. Yeah, sure. Well, Malte is an artist who's actually living in Berlin and he's been working in the world of 3D animation and 3D modeling since the 90s, so he saw a lot of this the state of the art of this software and this software has been developed. So he developed this work actually for AMRO into a fully open source version, which we appreciated a lot. So the work is dealing with the topic of real estate market speculation, which is something that in Berlin is happening since many years and with all the processes of gentrification. And he's, through a software, he's scraping and harvesting the data from websites dealing with real estate, like advertisements, visuals and so on and then through an algorithm that the machine learning algorithm is creating this 3D artefact which represent part of these buildings that are being sold or bought and offered online. And through the physical version of this work, you see also the price of these buildings, the original selling price of the building. And in this case, you see it close, you see some further information close to the building, the ruins of the city, somehow criticizing the ways that the city is being taken apart and changed through speculation Okay We just one work missing Which one is it? Yeah for this we have to go so we can check them up Yeah, for this we have to go... So we can check the map So we are somewhere in between the city and the ocean and this is also kind of like how you how you would navigate this Lost space or lost cloud. Where are we now? So now we are You walk on an empty road. The musical tunes are coming from small buildings on the edge of the city, behind it lies a forest. So if we go towards the forest we go in the other way, no? Yeah, but you can, like from the forest you can go, but let's go into the city, and then from the city we can... Walk around the city we can walk around the city, check the phone for directions and then take a boat out of the city. So we are clearly on the ocean, no? Yes, and now a vast ocean stretches before you, the sun is on the horizon, the sky is pink. Take a stroll on the beach or go swimming. take a stroll on the beach or go swimming and i think we have to go swimming and then you put on your best swimsuit and something touches you and then you swim as fast as you can and this is where vitals has his piece which is another and last mo a Mozilla Hubs space, which is called Aniu. So in our narrative, you stick the head out of the water and you're surrounded by melting ice caps. Tiny boats are dropping ice cubes into the sea. So let's load the new three-dimensional space. And- the new three-dimensional space. And actually, Richard, I think Davide saw his project somewhere. Yeah, during the research lab. During the research lab, me and Antonio went to Riga, to the RICS-C festival, where we made our first presentation of the greenwashing research that we have been doing and we met we saw the work of Greenham who was actually a physical work prototype of this very practical solution towards climate change if the of the ocean is getting too warm and the ice is melting too much well then we build a ship and we try to restore it cooling down the ocean as if it was a cocktail so the prototype of this machine is to have a solar powered or in this case a wind powered solar and wind powered machinery that actually creates ice cubes to throw them into the ocean. And yeah, I mean, it deals with a very clear, with a topic, very contemporary topic of the climate emergency and the global warming and in this way he decided to bring his prototype into a new further step in which visitors can actually be on this ship. Yeah I think the work is very ironic and I really like the way he decided to talk about this topic in this ironic way, I found it very funny somehow. And he built up the boat, then he made the 3D model and I think he did a really nice job. It really gives you the idea of being in the Antarctic on the tiny boat that drops ice cubes potentially into the Arctic. Yeah, so that was it, no? And I would say to close the tour we should also also maybe go again to cesar's work yeah and um and have the the crash of the of the page again yeah so here on the right side thank you to all the artists of course thanks to the curator david thanks to the exhibition designers young mo and sambao you for holding with us this walkthrough. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. See you in the next project. See you in the next AMRO. See you in the next AMRO. Or before. Probably before. Hopefully before. See you one day. In real life. So we're still waiting that the page is fresh, you know, before we stop. Yeah. Five, four, three, two, one. Okay. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. See you one day in real life So we're still waiting that the page is fresh, you know before we start 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Almost Yeah, let's cut the cables I think it's not when you cut the cable Yeah, I don't remember how long 90 seconds Yeah, now we can use this very last moment to... I want just to state that I really like this process and I think one of the motivations of the narrative that we built and now it starts again is to have... Actually work about the virtuality of the exhibition but virtual not in the sense of only online but also to have a virtual space that was one of the first meetings that we had we had where we we decided to have this virtual space in the sense of creating possibilities of potential of imagination for the viewer. So that was a part of the intention of giving hints of something that happened and you see this in many of the works and the viewer through the storytelling potentially goes into the story and has an empathic relation with the works, so everything is more narrative. Okay, so now we've reached the end of the exhibition, at the end of this video, and thank you for staying with us. Bye!