[x] ---From massive data mining to financial trading algorithms, from instantaneous communications to immersive technologies, the virtual increasingly shapes everyday life. But contrary to popular opinion, it is not defined in opposition to the real : they are complementary and indissociable.

Raw materials extractions, production plants, data centers - the virtual carries its own material reality. In no way detached from its environment, it exists and takes shape inside it.

Beyond its physical materiality, the virtual participates in the (re)definition of our perception of the world. Through its capacity to explore a new range of possibilities, whose various representations (tales, drawings, photographs) participate in the development of our collective and individual intelligence, the virtual encourages the multiplication of experiences and modes of perception. Thus, it becomes a tool to understand phenomena whose logics and features would be otherwise imperceptible. It allows for the reevaluation of our interactions with our environment - and by distancing the real, to better apprehend it.

For a few years now, we have witnessed a general virtualization of our society, affecting not only the information and communication sectors, but also the broader economic and financial activities, the collective structures and the private realm. Virtualization gets to influence and disturb our lifestyles by proposing new social paradigms, for example by facilitating the emergence of virtual communities and organizations.

By its existing condition, the virtual compresses territories, spaces and temporalities. Collaboration, exchange and discussion are facilitated by the dissolution of boarders and the ease of information exchange, accelerating collaborative convergences and allowing for anyone to develop its social, cognitive and intellectual potentialities in a dynamic, emergent and cooperative way.

Henceforth, the virtual acts as a breeding ground for a multiplicity of ecosystems, where the mesh of digital communications sets up a new form of collective and community intelligence.

altered realities

Invited by La Cité Fertile, the open-source label and collective Club Late Music asked artists and musicians to explore the ecosystem(s) of the virtual, in order to question their limits and their intersections with our reality. Through a mutual aesthetic and a shared critical standpoint, the program navigates between immersive experiences questioning on their own and as a whole the notions of identity, community, distribution and information perception. More than a simple virtualization of society, it embodies and exhibits a deep transformation of our relationship to the world.

While the consideration of Internet evolved from technical tool to the constitutive technology of a new socio-political context, the experiences hereby presented not only use immersive technologies as a tool or medium, but consider them in their relation to society and their capacity to transform it. As Net Art engendered Post-Internet Art (also called Internet-Aware Art), here is anticipated the idea of "Post-Immersion", considering the immersive experience as a force having transformed social and cultural structures. The subject matter is then not immersion as en entity but the reconfiguration of multiple facets of society, overcoming the piece focused on novelty. With their capacity to materialize and make one feel complex or immaterial phenomena, to invoke a familiar body language, or to submerge one in virtual worlds freed from any physical constraint, these experiences, often the result of collaborative production, reveal an ecosystem emerging from collective intelligence. Information exchange, inter-individual dynamic interactions, tools and models lead to the emergence of propositions whose sentient properties exceed what could have been produced by disconnected individuals. "Creation" does not arise from the mind of a single individual but is distributed across the exchanges of broader cognitive ecologies.

adriengrigorescu

music + art design + architecture art direction + images

sound design + ost research + teaching about

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grigorescu.work (at) gmail.com

music + art

design + architecture

art direction + images

sound design + ost

research + teaching

about