CIVA: Electro-Esoteric Avatar Seance Event

ELECTRO-ESOTERIC AVATAR SEANCE
with Margarete Jahrmann, Aliya Davletova, Bernhard Staudinger, Daniela Weiss | Hr Litto, Klimentina Milenova, Marlene Mautner, Maxim Shchapov, Sebastian Scholz, Wassily Bartuska

The diverse group of multidisciplinary artists from the newly established master program – Experimental Game Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna – is joining forces to bring a new type of experience to the CIVA Festival audience.
Through the medium of games and play, the group explores the wide range of their unique creative abilities to build an interactive, hybrid environment – a borderland of physical and digital realities.

The artists will perform a séance to resurrect long gone avatars from the virtual beyond. Together with CIVA Festival at Belvedere 21, they build a haunting environment and an electro-esoteric interface with an ouija board°° control for supernatural artefacts. The audience is invited to meet digital ghosts, learn about their fate and ask them for fortune-telling. It’s not even as expensive as a regular medium. Avatars are a representation of ourselves in the digital realm, the translation of physical beings into a virtual world. What kind of freedom occurs when we imagine ourselves out of the limitations of our own body, putting internalised social and political perceptions of a body into question?

All of us have avatars in social networks, in games, or as costumes. They are an attempt to feel one’s own body in another dimension, state, or form. Will the alternative body affect whoever is inside? How does it feel to own an ethereal body? What will it become when the user leaves it?
If our physical body is mortal, is the digital one as well?
The electro-esoteric avatar séance attempts to re-connect with the avatars from our past, to learn from their experiences and get a hint about our fortune and future.

°° Ouija Board definition: a board with letters, numbers, and other signs around its edges, to which a planchette, movable pointer, or upturned glass moves, supposedly in answer to questions from people at a séance.

By Experimental Game Culture Department at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Head: Univ.-Prof. Mag. art. Dr.phil Margarete Jahrmann

26 February 22, 15:00, Eventspace, Belvedere21, admission free & registration necessary