Karlsruhe | GLOBALE - The New Art Event in the Digital Age

GLOBALE - The New Art Event in the Digital Age takes place over 300 days in Karlsruhe, where ZKM presents spectacular installations, innovative works of art at the interface with natural science, urban area performances, concerts, lectures and conferences.

From June 19, 2015 till April 17, 2016, the ZKM offers exhibitions and events on central twenty-first century themes: globalization and digitalization. The new art format thematizes their effects and shows the decisive tendencies of the twenty-first century by way of the most recent art productions that go beyond the art market.

An actual cloud in the ZKM museum? An uprooted house suspended by a crane in Karlsruhe city center? Spectacular installations, innovative works of art at the interface of natural science, urban area performances, concerts, lectures and conferences – come and experience 300 days of GLOBALE – The New Art Event in the Digital Age. Step into the all-encompassing, otherwise invisible infosphere in the museum-scale, audio-visual installation by Japanese media artist Ryoji Ikeda. Though perhaps not »sitting on a cloud« then by means of a conversion – you can experience the way in which art and science complement one another and, with new tools, transform things into a reality that one had previously thought as impossible. As part of GLOBALE, the new art event in the digital age, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe presents the exhibition Infosphere (September 4 2015 - January 31, 2016). The exhibition gives an overview of art in the era of the digital revolution and its social consequences. In addition, it provides insights into the new data world, whose existence has been finally brought home to the general public through the NSA affair. The biosphere, from the atmosphere to the oceans, forms the habitable zone in which humans and other life forms live. But since the discovery of wireless radio technology based on electromagnetic waves roughly 150 years ago, we also live in an infosphere.

The infosphere spans the Earth with technical media such as radio, TV, mobile communications, and the Internet, which use electro-magnetic waves and therefore guarantee a global flow of information in real time. Without the global, digitally controlled transfer of information and transport of goods and passengers, the existential demands of more than seven billion people could not be met. More than 70 artists will exhibit in Infosphere, including The Office for Creative Research, The Critical Engineering Working Group, Bitnik, Julius Popp, Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon, Tyler Coburn, Emma Charles, Zach Blas, Sterling Crispin, Aram Bartholl, and Jia. For Jia's work, The Chinese Version, an exhibition catalog will be published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.