planetary skins

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed the fragility of the political and economic frameworks onto which our societies are built. At the same time, we have recognised how closely connected we are, and how digital and urban platforms redesign and act on agency and the intensity of relations. The more time we spend on video conferencing apps, the more we experience a lack of closeness and bonding. And we feel trapped by corporate business models and their corrosion of privacy. Increasingly, we acknowledge that there is no way back to an old ‘normal’ and that we require solutions away from capitalist appropriation.

What is missing, however, are platforms that connect physical and virtual space to take better care of the many ways people meet, think, act and make together. The range of existing applications offer neither the conceptual nor the technical features required, especially for an advanced and transgressive artistic practice. Hence, there is an urgency to break new ground in interweaving art, architecture, design, discourse and technology on the basis of open source and free access. And a postdisciplinary artistic approach lends itself well to a collaborative practice that aims to reinvent the platform in an experimental-speculative way.

We think of PLANETARY SKINS as a common and multi-layered 'osmotic skin' that connects digital and physical space to offer new forms of access for performative-discursive practices in which visitors are involved as actors. This does not mean that its platform is built from the ground up and with the associated costs. Because the technologies, applications and infrastructures necessary are to a large extent available, the point is rather to curate and integrate them in a meaningful way.

PLANETARY SKINS takes a step forward from reflecting critically on the hybridisation of presence and the rise of dataism experienced today. Instead, the project reaches out into local spaces and at the same time collects and works with their heterogenic perspectives, ideas, controversies and competencies. As an artistic format, the platform is a space of creative participation and debate opening up to the potentials, ambivalences and conflicts of multiple presences which we want to rethink, technically advance, aesthetically hallucinate and collectively imagine. Because solidarity (and the courage it requires) is not just a political idea. In a networked world, it requires alliances that feed new life into technologies and infrastructures in order to be felt, fought for and lived in all diversity.

Almost daily, we experience that critical reflection alone does not lead to a change of perspective, another politics, another world. To the contrary, the technocapitalist differentiation machines and their business models are explicitly based on critique as (increasingly automated) capacity to differentiate, evaluate and appreciate. It is necessary for an advanced art practice to rethink fundamental positions and offer concrete utopias that are at least mindful of the diversity, and often disparity, of local, regional and world-spanning conditions, perspectives and requirements.

The technosphere strikes and gets under the skin differently in different places. How we imagine the world and the planet, on which the former exists, depends on local cultures, conditions and perspectives that can vary widely. The artistic-discursive activation of conflicts and potentials are an important motif of PLANETARY SKINS. For without the willingness to expose oneself to the other, and to the dissonance this might entail, we won’t be able discover the commonalities that would allow us to embrace the deeply felt solidarity we need to counter the catastrophic impacts we are already witnessing socially and ecologically.

The question we ask with THE FUTURE OF DEMONSTRATION is: how do we evoke the aesthetic, technological, pedagogical and political forms of resistance that the term demonstration offers us?

As a platform project, PLANETARY SKINS aims to tackle this question by offering a space that demonstrates the manifold and divers interweaving of ecological, social, cultural and artistic micro- and macro-layers. In a sense, life on earth is not only nested in, but depends on, these layers. Technological formations gain the upper hand against biological and climatic reference points, which become endangered and as a result, endanger the human species. The COVID-19 crisis made it clear how profoundly ecological changes affect us and showed not only the fragility of our physical bodies, but socio-political bodies, i.e. the social, economic and political structures on which our societies are built.

The street as a public space for political action remains indispensable. But equally indispensable is the creation of new spaces and tools for demonstration and participation. We need to take steps ourselves to connect the analogue and the digital ‘world’ if we do not want to cede the design of our communicative media and our creative means to proprietary interests and the state-military-finance complex. New forms of sociality – as they manifest, for instance, in various resistances against political inactivity vis-a-vis the climate catastrophe – also require artistic formations that allow testing, discussing, demonstrating and experiencing ideas speculatively and experimentally.

In this regard, we are interested in a nonindividual ‘formation’ we call the artist-as-collective. Rather than creating objects of beauty for disinterested pleasure or interest-bearing value, the artist-as-collective extends the conversation to wider collectives, allies and audiences. And because agency is only meaningful in context, its practices focus on affiliation, alliance, assemblage and materiality obtained from entering spaces of controversy and opponency, bringing forth ‘subjects’ with their very own, poietic, agency in time.

Within the context of PLATFORM AUSTRIA and the question it raises as to 'a conversational space on future potentials and their architecture,' PLANETARY SKINS can be described as an experimental architecture-laboratory for demonstrating the potentials of the artist-as-collective in different shapes and forms, ranging from conversational discourse to political-activist investigation, from post-media art and performance to from viral knowledge space, and many more. The architecture of multi-user systems, in particular, has great but as yet underutilised potentials for bringing people together in open contexts that enable new forms of art, discourse and participation (and without the need to travel). PLANETARY SKINS applies their fluid architecture to curate techniques and skills and integrate them into a meaningful new framework for performative, discursive and participatory applications. Its multi-user environment is based on the UNITY 3D real-time engine and utilises Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Lidar Scanning, Kinect motion sensing, Machine Vision, Video Mapping, Point Cloud, 3D Objects, Chatbots, video/ audio streaming, amongst others.

At public events, the platform is projected in order to access its virtual space (from the venue) and see its physical space (inline via live stream). Performers and other actors, visitors and algorithmic objects (in-)act on both planes of the platform. Thus, we create a fluid encounter between the immersive environments. Additionally, both ‘worlds’ are streamed online (live edited). The virtual environment and tools are made available to all actors. In the physical lab, a virtual space extension is developed through which the real space experiences a supplement or extension in the virtual space. At the same time, the real space is seen in the virtual space by means of a live stream - the spatial mirroring thus goes in both directions, the virtual space also experiences an expansion through the media image of the real space. Everything is live, everything takes place in real time. Actors (partly invited through open calls) and audience find themselves simultaneously in an art installation, a 3D environment and a film set. They can switch between the two spaces or be active in both.

PLANETARY SKINS is a prototype for probing concrete utopias in a postdisciplinary fashion. It emphasizes lines of connection as well as rupture between thematic clusters – many of which are today interconnected, from climate change to global circulation and production logistics to artificial intelligence and automation, to data and urban platformism. Hence, the project aims to ‘give space’ to unfolding the aliveness of ecological and social, architectural and artistic, biological and technological micro- and macro-levels. Its response to the urgencies of our time is to exceed contemporary criticality by exploring and demonstrating in various constellations how resistance can be rethought towards new forms of resolution in the broadest semantic sense of the word.