Now you see me, now you don’t

Albena Baeva

16-09-2022 until 20-09-2022

Reclaiming public space

The new digital normal forces the art world to transform. Artists already use available digital tools to reclaim the public space. Are augmented and mixed realities the answer for contemporary digital sculpture? Artist Albena Baeva (Ploshtadka) and curator Sakrowski (openAR) will discuss these questions in a conversation presenting different approaches on showcasing augmented reality sculptures.

Ploshtadka is situated at the centre of a children’s playground in a residential neighbourhood in Sofia, part of the digital gallery Gallery. This is a home for temporary public augmented reality (AR) sculptures created, supported and curated by artists Albena Baeva and Rene Beekman.

openAR is the world’s first cooperative platform for digital artists explicitly designed to help all artists prosper. Everyone is welcomed to upload a piece there, mint it, and curate a show. Simultaneity is one of the first openAR exhibitions that connects the aesthetics of Socialist Realism to the last thirty years of computer game design in the centre of Berlin created with Blank & Jeron and curated by Sakrowski.

Albena Baeva works at the intersection of art, technology and social science. She uses ML and AI, physical computing, creative coding, mixed reality and DIY practices. Albena is a co-founder of the first gallery for digital art in Bulgaria, gallery Gallery, the AR sculpture park Ploshtadka, Symbiomatter: experimental arts lab, Runabout project and the studio for interactive design Reaktiv. Her work was shown in museums for contemporary art including Essl (Austria, 2011), EMMA (Finland, 2013), MCV Vojvodina (Serbia, 2015 and 2019), galleries and festivals for video and performance in Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Switzerland, Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine and the USA.

Sakrowski holds a master’s degree in art history and works as a freelance curator in Berlin. From 1999 to 2003 he curated and organised exhibitions and lectures on net art as part of the project netart-datenbank.org. From 2007 to 2009 he worked as a freelance researcher on the “Net Pioneers 1.0” research project at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research in Linz. Since 2007 he has been working intensively on the web.video phenomena under the name CuratingYouTube.net and has presented his own video online tool gridr.org (2012). In 2014/15 he worked as curator for the transmediale festival “capture all”. Since October 2016 he has been managing and curating the panke.gallery in Berlin-Wedding. He is a founding member (2019) of the Zentrum für Netzkunst Berlin.