SXSW Reveals 2020 Art Program Installations

AUSTIN, TX — SXSW officials on Wednesday unveiled the 2020 art program to be showcased at next month's festival.

The SXSW Art Program showcases experiential and conceptual visual artworks that apply emerging technologies and immersive environments to spark discovery, inspiration, and connection, organizers explained. The nine installations — one of which will be housed in the Virtual Cinema — use technology as a vehicle to explore a variety of topics including the human spirit, the role of technology in our society, and how we interact with our environment.

The arts program is presented by The Lego Group.

50 Moments

Artist: Celine Held, Logan George, Engineers: Rebecca Skurnik, Azalea Vaseghi
50 Moments highlights voices rarely heard. Five interactive screens display 50 short videos from individuals experiencing homelessness in New York City, recorded between 2015 - 2018. These stories are personal, mined from hours of conversation, giving viewers the opportunity to listen to intimate stories without the need to respond. Viewers can choose the next story shown on the screen with their phones, and replay stories via an interactive website.

ARTECHOUSE Presents Future Sketches

Artist: Zach Lieberman
ARTECHOUSE is the nation’s first innovative digital art space dedicated to showcasing experiential and technology driven works by artists who are forerunners of the new age in the arts and technology. A compilation of engaging, extraordinary installations that combine creativity, artistic vision and cutting edge R&D. Imagine different possible futures - at the intersection of computation and design, for the interaction between humans and computers, where the boundaries between the visible and invisible are broken down, using expressive augmented reality.

Grow Your Own Cloud - The Data Garden (Denmark)
Artists: Cyrus Clarke, Monika Seyfried, Jeff Nivala
Grow Your Own Cloud - The Data Garden reimagines the cloud by storing data nature's way - in the DNA of plants, working in collaboration with nature to alleviate the threat of Data-Warming.

Legacy
Artist: Nancy Baker Cahill
Legacy is an original, site-specific, animated AR drawing in 360° that addresses gentrification and climate change in Austin. Each brushstroke and color is inspired by either a local natural element or “unnatural” development. As the drawing increasingly twists, breaks apart, and coalesces, it transitions from organic tree-like marks to inorganic glass and mirror fragments. Legacy will be geo-located across from the Austin Convention Center in Brush Square park where it will hover above the treetops.

Man and Woman Munch Museum at House of Scandinavia
Artist: Edvard Munch
Experience an original Edvard Munch painting at the Scandinavian House of SXSW! Titled Man and Woman, the artwork invites visitors to explore and reflect Munch’s universe, his ideas of the sexes and our existential relation to nature. Learn more about Munch and the picture in one of our daily popup presentations. Lasting ten minutes, it will give you a concise yet rich introduction into one of the pioneers of modern art.

Secret Garden
Artist: Stephanie Dinkins, Presented by NEW INC, Nokia Bell Labs, In partnership with Scatter
NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator based in New York, presents Secret Garden, an immersive storytelling installation that combines audio vignettes told by black women with dynamic, responsive visual feedback. The work is experienced as a non-linear episodic narrative of a multi-generational past, present, and future simultaneously. Conceived by artist Stephanie Dinkins, Secret Garden is inspired by autobiographical, ancestral, and futuristic experiences that highlight black female consciousness throughout history.

Spectre (United Kingdom)
Artists: Bill Posters, Daniel Howe
Spectre presents sculpturally as a stone circle for the 21st Century and invites users in to worship at the altar of Dataism with the gods of Silicon Valley. Acquire the power of a tech giant; learn the secrets of ‘black box’ technologies; and explore the ethical and moral impacts of surveillance capitalism on privacy, trust, truth, and democracy.

Terminus (New Zealand)
Artists: Jess Johnson, Simon Ward, Soundtracks by Andrew Clarke
TERMINUS is a virtual reality journey in five parts; journey through an arcane world of alien architecture and cryptic symbols, illustrated over several years through drawings by Jess Johnson, animated by Simon Ward, and enriched with soundtracks by composer Andrew Clarke.

The Future is A Constant Wake
Artists: Ariel Rene Jackson, Micheal J. Love
The Future Is A Constant Wake (2019) centers soil as tools to access knowledge from the past for the future. Ariel René Jackson collaborates with Michael J. Love to propose a somatic way of forging a connection with the past through touch and movement.

The Fair Grounds: Bumper Car Ballet (The Netherlands)
Artist: DROPSTUFF MEDIA
The Fair Grounds: Bumper Car Ballet playfully tackles the social implications of emerging autonomous technology. Visitors become a subject to the cars and experience first hand what it means to lose control when a computer takes over.