In the second week of April, during the first physical collaboration days, the ten winning artists of the S+T+ARTS AIR Open Call and eight AIR consortium organisations will gather at the experience centre RCR La Vila (Girona, Catalonia, Spain). Having this mulit-disciplinairy group with various fields of knowledge—technology, research, industry, and culture, we are looking forward to discuss the progress made during the exploraiton phase.
A few months after the launch of the S+T+ARTS AIR project, with intense explorations, the team of artists and members of the Consortium will meet for the first time in person in a Workshop where the group work sessions will take place and where they will share the different proposals that each artist works with. In this meeting, the Consortium will also meet to evaluate the work that will be presented and discuss the final proposal of the project. So far, work has been done on the more conceptual phase of the project, and from April 10, the production phase will begin. We are also working so that the final result of all these months of work can be presented publicly as part of the 15th edition of the Manifesta festival, which will be held this year in Barcelona.
About AIR
Air is not only an invisible substance that we breathe and keeps us alive, but a substance that we feel on our skin that connects us with our environment and complements our senses. A substance that allows the existence and propagation of sound and, therefore, the existence of verbal language, the development of language and logical thought and, thanks to it, the development of science and technological progress. Its quality and quantity concerning people also determines well-being and quality of life. It is, therefore, about identifying and showing specific facts that have their environment in the air and thus be able to make the invisible visible.
S+T+ARTS AIR is an artistic residencies program promoted by the European Commission. Between December 2023 and September 2024, it supports and hosts ten artists through regional residencies distributed in four hubs (Barcelona, Stuttgart, Rome, and Koper) and distributes 400,000 euros.
The project focuses on two main themes: resilient interspecies urban ecosystems and Human AI Ecosystems. This presents a unique opportunity for artists to collaborate at the intersection of art, science, and technology. The artists are working towards defining, experimenting, and prototyping in collaboration with a dedicated core team from the consortium.
The Consortium
The Consortium created in the autumn of 2022 is made up of 8 organizations from 5 different countries belonging to various fields of knowledge, of which two of the main supercomputing centres in Europe should be highlighted: the High Performance Computing Center – HLRS (Stuttgart, Germany) and the Barcelona Super Computing Center – BSC (Barcelona, Spain) which interact in a leading way with art, technology and science, in addition to the Media Solution Center Baden Württemberg – MSC (Stuttgart, Germany) which is dedicated to promoting access to new technologies in industry and art and which he is the coordinator of, the Sony Europe laboratories (Rome, Italy) which conducts research in technology, among others, around cities and PiNA (Koper, Slovenia) in the application of new media in an interaction very much aimed at civil society and with the organizations of artistic experts ÉPICA Foundation La Fura dels Baus (Badalona, Spain) of anticipatory arts and human simulations, In4Art (Rotterdam, Netherlands) an institute intensely dedicated to art-driven innovation and RCR Lab·A (Olot, Spain), the open architectural laboratory space to develop creative research and transversality.
This project is funded by the European Union from call CNECT/2022/3482066 – Art and the digital: Unleashing creativity for European industry, regions, and society under grant agreement LC-01984767
