The Civa media art festival highlights the interplay between contemporary technologies, realities, and experiences across digital, physical, and hybrid spaces, focusing this year on the realm of quanta. The exhibition explores how quantum physics insights into indeterminacy and interconnectedness resonate with contemporary art and challenges traditional distinctions between subject and object.
The Civa media art festival, co-organized by Belvedere 21 and sound:frame, focuses on the intersection of contemporary technologies, realities, and experiences across digital, physical, and hybrid spaces, with this year's theme centered on the realm of quanta.
More than a century of quantum physics research has revealed a universe that is neither deterministic nor entirely comprehensible, where particles exhibit behaviors that defy classical logic. This exploration of quantum principles challenges long-standing distinctions between subject and object, perception and matter, and Self and Other. These insights find significant resonance in contemporary art, particularly in a world grappling with ecological crises, technological disruptions, and epistemic ruptures. The exhibition title, | _indeterminate_⟩⟨ _apparatus_ |, draws on quantum mechanics formalism to explore an unmeasured quantum system—a state of potentiality—and the complex 'apparatus' of observer, observed, and their encounter. It questions how a quantum worldview can embrace non-binarity, indeterminacy, and reconfigure the creation of reality, viewing indeterminacy not as a limitation but as a fundamental prerequisite.
The festival and exhibition feature artists such as Black Quantum Futurism, Alice Bucknell, Libby Heaney, Natalie Paneng, and Mike Rijnierse, engaging with quantum concepts through poetic gestures, embodied experiences, and playful abstraction. They examine the infrastructures of emerging quantum technologies, their creative potential, and their frequently overlooked ecological and social implications.
