A three-day festival from the future
04-06 NOVEMBER 2021 | 17:30-22:30 | Eugenides Foundation’s New Digital Planetarium (387, Syngrou Avenue)
An Onassis Culture production, organised in partnership with the Eugenides Foundation as part of the 7th Athens Biennale ECLIPSE, with the support of the Berliner Festspiele.
Athens – a city in transition, focused on the past – is seeking out its own future and undergoing a transformation so rapid that it cannot be comprehended by our minds and senses. Onassis Culture is bringing The New Infinity Athens festival to the city for the first time, in partnership with the Athens Biennale, the Berliner Festspiele, and the Eugenides Foundation: a three-day festival exploring the limitless possibilities of techno-visual culture through a series of iconic works presented from November 4 to 6, 2021, at the Eugenides Foundation’s New Digital Planetarium.
Visual artists, filmmakers, video game designers and musicians – inspired by their own concepts of yesterday, today, and tomorrow – are inviting us to join them for three days filled with cosmic dust and its beyond. Speculative, post-cosmic realms, galactic sculptures, the pandemic, post-industrial music symphonies – there’s space for it all in these fulldome films.
The New Infinity Athens presents works by artists of the digital age. The evolution of life from the time of the Big Bang down to the present day (David OReilly, “Eye of the Dream”), stories of people from around the world in the wake of the pandemic, represented visually with cascades of choreographed space-debris (David OReilly, “The End of Stories”), a hypnotically enchanting séance that revives Earth’s lost prehistoric biosphere in the most poetic of ways (Agnieszka Polska, “The Happiest Thought”), the sci-fi qualities of earthly objects (Fatima Al Qadiri & Transforma, “Extraordinary Alien”), fantastical objects and new soundscapes (Robert Lippok & Lucas Gutierrez, “Non-Face” & “SPIN”), psychedelic experiences resembling those made under the influence of ayahuasca (Jan Kounen, “Ayahuasca – A Kosmik Journey”), a planetoid like a galactic sculpture, astronomical phenomena, and alien ecosystems (Theo Triantafyllidis & Sun Araw, “VHW7”), and a post-in dustrial symphony that presents our civilization as a decaying, imploded space (Actress & Actual Objects, “Grey Interiors”). The event programme also includes intermediary sound performances by Panos Alexiadis, ILIOS, and Devika.
Since 2017, Berliner Festspiele’s programme series “The New Infinity” has invited visual and sound artists, filmmakers, and video game designers to enter into the unconventional architectural space that is the planetarium and create new works to be presented at such venues, and fulldome festivals around the globe.
The New Digital Planetarium – one of the largest, most state-of-the-art fulldome auditoria in the world – is a high-tech space capable of showcasing elaborate simulations of artificial worlds, making it the perfect venue at which to present striking images of our times. Founded sixty years ago, its dome seeks to capture and convey the star system, and break down boundaries in order to allow outer space to be explored in the most realistic possible ways.
The festival is being held as part of the 7th Athens Biennale ECLIPSE, which takes place from September 24 to November 28 in three neighbouring venues in the centre of Athens. In ECLIPSE, narratives from contemporary Black, queer, speculative, and radical artistic voices converse with practices of rituals, worldmaking, and interdependence. ECLIPSE presents a translocal chapter of contemporary thought that champions a revisiting of identities and a queering of history, aiming to summon transformative powers to usher us beyond the current era into a space of thought and reflection.
