MO Opens New International Exhibition Exploring What It Means to Feel Real in the Age of Technology
MO Museum’s new major exhibition How to Feel Real. Art, Technology and Us brings together works by pioneering international figures in media art and Lithuanian artists. Curated by Marius Armonas, Jurij Dobriakov, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė and Philipp Ziegler, the exhibition is a collaboration between MO Museum and ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, one of Europe’s leading institutions for media art.
Featuring landmark works from ZKM’s collection, the exhibition explores questions that are becoming increasingly urgent in a world shaped by technology: how do we feel real, and what does it mean to be alive?
How to Feel Real marks the second collaboration between MO Museum and ZKM. Last year, the two institutions presented Lithuania’s first art exhibition dedicated to video games in Vilnius. According to Milda Ivanauskienė, Director of MO Museum, it was clear from the very beginning that the two institutions did not want to create yet another exhibition about technology. The more pressing question was what technology might tell us about ourselves.
“Today, technology has become an almost invisible layer of our everyday lives. It changes not only how we work, communicate and create, but also how we experience reality, as more and more of our lives are mediated by screens, algorithms, networks and data. This exhibition is therefore, first and foremost, about the human being,” says Ivanauskienė.
Bringing together works created predominantly from the 1990s to the present day, the exhibition opens up a conversation about both the possibilities offered by technology and the anxieties it provokes. How to Feel Real features works by internationally renowned artists who have shaped the history of media art, several of which are being presented in Lithuania for the first time. These include works by Nam June Paik, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, and Lynn Hershman Leeson, among others.
The curatorial team brings together Dr Marius Armonas, curator at MO Museum; Dr Jurij Dobriakov, curator, critic and Associate Professor at the Vilnius Academy of Arts; Dr Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Kingston University London and a researcher in Science and Technology Studies; and Philipp Ziegler, Head of the Curatorial Department at ZKM.
The curators point out that there is often a strong temptation to subscribe either to a cornucopian vision of a technologically shaped world or to a dystopian view in which existing power imbalances are further exacerbated by technological innovation. Techno-optimism and techno-pessimism are both part of contemporary politics, and artists inevitably reflect critically on both.
“We tried to move beyond this binary framing of the relationship between technology and society by drawing visitors’ attention not only to fundamental critiques of technology, but also to the seemingly mundane and playful ways in which technology shapes social life.
After all, technology also produces fascinating aesthetic forms and creates sensory environments; contemporary artists engage with these aspects of technology in very interesting ways,” says Rindzevičiūtė.
The exhibited works create a conversation across time, from early artistic responses to the arrival of computers and the internet to contemporary explorations of artificial intelligence and the growing digital mediation of our world – and ultimately, ourselves.
