The 2022 Creativity and Cognition Art Exhibition used Venice as a setting for 20 works exploring how art, computer science and design could help citizens imagine alternative urban futures.
Presented at the Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa’s Sala Camino, the exhibition focused on cities facing environmental, social and technological pressure.
Venice as subject and possible model
The exhibition treated Venice not only as a threatened historic city but as a place offering different forms of urban life. Its pedestrian scale, water transport, narrow streets and public meeting points were presented as conditions that could encourage social contact, slower movement and chance encounters.
At the same time, the city’s vulnerability made it an appropriate location for reflecting on climate, infrastructure and long-term survival.
Interactive works across disciplines
The works included installations and experiments concerned with post-pandemic life, water, slowness, landscape and collective participation.
Projects included Looking at Future Venice(s) through Coffee Grounds by Ahmet Börütecene and Jonas Löwgren, Jen Seevinck’s Water Mirror, Sonic Coexistence by Anders Eskildsen and Anca-Simona Horvath, and Lure of Slowness, Hydrological Rhythms by Elly S Vadseth and Boris Kourtoukov.
Other works examined pandemic memory, ecological fragility, scientific collaboration and the relationship between digital systems and physical place.
Facilitators used analogue and digital methods to gather visitors’ responses and encourage collaboration among different participants.
The exhibition’s central proposition was that urban problems require more than technical solutions. Imagination, cultural memory and public participation are also necessary when societies attempt to redesign how people live together.
By placing interactive art within Venice, the project turned the city into both a case study and a partner in thinking about possible futures.