Are You for Real. Cosmotechnics, Counterfictions, and the Art of Worldbuilding
Through its touring exhibition, "Are You For Real" aims to expand international cultural exchange and contemporary co-creative exhibition practices through transnational dialogue around digital world-making experiments, aesthetic investigations, and performative and political reflections. It addresses the material and immaterial aspects of the digital and how they are perceived by various disciplines.
18 Artists
2 Contributors
Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás,
Concept
Nina Frohm,
Project Management ifa
About the exhibiton
“Are You for Real. Cosmotechnics, Counterfictions, and the Art of Worldbuilding” spans multiple themes and directions across six thematic clusters. The exhibition engages with infrastructural issues, exploring the manifold ways in which the virtual worlds generated by computation depend on the planet—while also feeding on its ecosystem’s imagery, relations, and data. At the same time, it imagines alternatives for the world from which they emerge.
Speculating on what never was but might have been, the artworks envision the regenerative power of the virtual and its potential impacts on real-world scenarios, ecosystems, and interspecies alliances. These are collaborative human-machine explorations that provide counter-narratives around technology, artificial and natural agency. They interlace reality’s warp and weft, reconstructing it through a fusion of technology and magic, while reformulating ancient traditions. As the foundations of reality begin to crumble under the weight of technological transformation, it becomes ever clearer that reality is not a fixed constant, but a weave in a state of perpetual becoming—an inquiry into the shifting landscapes of foresight. Truth moves like sand, the boundaries between past and future blur, and certainty dissolves into speculation.
Some of these artworks venture into uncharted algorithmic territories, critically uncovering new forms of agency, resistance, and resilience. They pose pressing questions about whether Web 3.0 truly holds the promise of a decentralized, federated internet or whether it merely revitalizes extractive fantasies and marketing schemes. They suggest that digital world-building may give rise to tactical algorithmic agency or, alternatively, they give voice to the specters of mythological and historical figures to digitally reimagine stories of resistance, revive traditions, and investigate conflict or colonization. If lost futures haunt the present, rediscovered knowledge may offer new perspectives.
“Are You For Real” was launched in 2020 as an online platform by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen. Between 2020 and 2023, the platform was curated by Julia Grosse, Yvette Mutumba, and Paula Nascimento, and between 2023 and 2025 by Giulia Bini and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás. The physical iterations of the exhibition, based on the platform, are curated by Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás since 2026.