digital impact: the immersive visions of 15 global artists go beyond time & space

digital impact is not just an exhibition

Through the works of artists like Refik Anadol, Random International, and Six N. Five, Digital Impact is breaking digital barriers. An experience more than an exhibition, the project unravels in Barcelona, turning the Spanish city into a sample of the creative force of a reality full of possibilities. Present and future meet as artificial art and design reveal limitless ideas and concepts, all explored through interactive and immersive installations. The event runs from 27 April to 27 August, 2023, right after the world’s annual leading audiovisual exhibition, ISE.

Infinity by Universal Everything

15 global artists bring digital art into the collective

Hosted at Disseny Hub and proposed by Antoni Arola Studio, Digital Impact is Barcelona’s first great experiential exhibition of digital art with the aim of bringing it closer to citizens and integrating it into the collective consciousness in order to provoke reactions and emotions of the public. The exhibition stages, through the artistic avant-garde, design, poetry and interactivity, the impact that virtual creations have on us and, above all, the effect that we have on them. With Barcelona as the playing field the event explores the different facets of the people and the city itself in a parallel reality. Through the unlimited imagination of 15 global artists, Digital Impact creates a space of constant transformation, a timeless place to be and to feel, timeless, where anyone and anything fits.

Public (II) by Random International

London-based artist Davide Quayola uses technology to explore the tensions and equilibriums between opposing forces: the real and artificial, figurative and abstract, old and new. With audiovisual performance, immersive video installations, sculpture, and works on paper, he builds ‘Storms’ — a series of video works that explore landscape painting in the form of advanced technology. Quayola ‘paints like the already painted’ but with techniques never used in painting before.

Storms by Quayola (David Quayola)

close-up of Storms by Quayola (David Quayola)

FutureDeluxe is a research-driven global creative studio focused on experimentation that seeks to define and explore the edges of emergent visual and technical cultures. With ‘Your Garden is a System, Too,’ the group of artists cultivates algorithmic blooms to create living soundscapes.

Your Garden is a System, Too by FutureDeluxe (work in progress)

Machine Memoirs: Space is a machine-based visual speculation of humanity’s historical attempts to explore its depths, unveiling the connections between obscurity and openness, creating an alternate data universe of abstract forms. For this work, Refik Anadol and his team obtained all of the data from publicly available sources of NASA archives. Afterwards, the team analyzed and classified the collection of visual data conceptually with the help of machine intelligence and taught the visual memories of each machine to artificial intelligence with the GAN algorithm named StyleGAN2ADA.

Machine Memoirs: Space by Refik Anadol

Josué Ibáñez is an immersive experience designer, media artist and creative director who works with emerging technologies, data-driven paintings and experimental digital environments in Mexico City. With the project Drift, Josué creates a passage where the audience experiences an infinite move of flows from the city of Barcelona painted by real-world data.

Drift by Josué Ibáñez (work in progress)

Infinity is a never-ending video artwork, an endless parade of unique personalities born from code with the idea of getting a glimpse of something new every time you look, for every minute, of every day, forever. Universal Everything, the artist, is an international media art and design collective established in 2004. They mainly produce screen-based artworks that combine cinematic computer-generated imagery (CGI), physics simulations, and real-time gaming graphics to create new moving images.

Generative Architecture aims to explore the in between of different disciplines, looking to highlight the common factor ‘Beauty’ present in all of them, and asking the fundamental question of our time: Can we automate the creation of what we as humans deem beautiful? The award-winning designer and artist Ezequiel Pini is the name behind the Barcelona-based Six N.Five creative art studio, who for this occasion, collaborated with Someform, a Berlin-based design and branding studio specializing in the conceptual and creative development of complex 3D design systems.

Generative Architecture by Six N. Five Studio and Someform Studio (work in progress)

In the media installation DeepTime, Field.IO. employs geological data simulations and custom AI artistic models to generate many possible ‘climate futures’ and see them evolve in accelerated time. Their visions speculate on the future of the human condition and the as yet invisible synthetic nature in which it exists. An artwork that allows visitors to explore time, through morphing accelerated earth landscapes, based on real world data predictions.

Public (II) is a sentient environment of monolithic objects. Made from fabric on a monumental scale and suspended from the ceiling in a linear formation, the monoliths respond collectively to those who enter their habitat, perhaps turning towards a visitor or shying away from them. Random International, the creator of the project, is a post-digital art group founded in London that explores the human condition in a technological world, and are best known for their large-scale interactive installations.

Public (II) by Random International

Pep Salazar, CEO, OFFF Barcelona and Director, Digital Impact Exhibition – OFFF Barcelona is giving a keynote speech during ISE (more here)

exhibition info:

name: Digital Impact | @digitalimpact.art

director: Pep Salazar

curator: Héctor Ayuso

artists: Refik Anadol; Quayola; Random International; Universal Everything; Alba G.Corral; Antoni Arola; Brendan Dawes; Domestic Data Streamers; FIELD.IO; FutureDeluxe; Joëlle Snaith; Josué Ibáñez; LowkeyMoves; Six N. Five Studio & Someform Studio; and State

location: Disseny Hub, Barcelona

dates: April 27 – August 27, 2023

event info:

name: ISE 2023 (Integrated Systems Europe)

keynote speaker: Pep Salazar, CEO, OFFF Barcelona and Director, Digital Impact Exhibition – OFFF Barcelona

location: Fira Barcelona Gran Via, Barcelona

dates: 31 January – 03 February, 2023