Matrix-Ville: What is Real/Virtual?

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A continuous live conversation – with multi-medial screenings, and special guests 

Host: Peter Lang. 

With: Lucia Babina (cultural producer, Rotterdam), Gian Piero Frassinelli (Superstudio, Florence, Italy), Saskia van Stein (curator, Rotterdam), Tjebbe van Tijen (Imaginary Museum, Amsterdam), Piet Vollaard (architect and publicist, Delft)

The forecast forty years ago was uncannily accurate: high-tech, space-age, light-speed technologies would alter forever the way humans interact with their environment. What no one then could know was just how deeply technology would penetrate our conscious perception of the world around us: we don’t have to think about what is real and what is virtual, we have already gone well beyond these simplistic limits. We live the network, we work the global we dream the electric. 

Yet part of what made the predictions of the sixties so significant was their built-in criticality: a comical, cynical if not diabolical irony that made the future accessible and irrelevant at the same time. Today it is difficult to understand what effect this hybridized real-virtual environment is actually having on the human experience. Where does it begin and end? Or have we become the binary elements that switch on and off? What point is there to distinguishing authentic from artificial?

Come join Matrix-Ville: What is Real/Virtual? with our special guests, including some of the original sixties protagonists, this year’s contributors and invited critics. The discussion should get everyone thinking about how Radicals like Ugo La Pietra and Superstudio turned their contemporary realities into oddly wonderful visions on the future, or how today's media artists twist the familiar world around yet again.

Peter Lang has a special interest in radical movements in architecture and arts. He recently co-curated Environments and Counter Environments: Experimental Media in Italy: the new domestic landscape, MOMA 1972, in which he focused on the experimental video and film works by the radical futurist movement in Italy during the 1960's and 1970's. Lang also co-curated Superstudio: Life without objects for the London Design Museum (2003). Peter Lang holds a bachelor in architecture from Syracuse University (USA) and a PhD. in history and urbanism from the New York University. Lang is associate professor with the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M University in College Station, USA.