A hybrid festival in the city of Uppsala, Sweden.

The concept of the Otherworldly festival is the sense of awkwardness, a way to describe the sense of alienation occurring in our time through the development of new media technologies like AI, identity mining, facial recognition etc. Tempting and melancholic, eerie and visionary; the blank page that our possible future prospects could hold, is up for a larger discussion and examination. And it’s an open-minded view on innovation and sober vision of our modern wonders though art. All based on a fascination for the dystopian but also the possibly utopian expressions that follow the prognosis of our nearest future, in speculative fiction, in music, art and writing. By artists, writers and composers. The thinkers Bernard Stiegler, Timothy Morton and Jonathon Keats have been an inspiration, in starting this festival of hybrid works, that will hopefully grow over the coming years.

Tardigrades are microscopic survivors, capable of resisting extreme temperatures, from the absolute freezing point to extreme heat. They survive in space and can remain frozen for thirty years, resist vacuum and radiation through a chemical kind of suspended animation. Yet they are highly sensitive to climate change, when their environments are threatened due to a rise in temperatures in their natural habitats, wetlands and moss. They are resilient fighters in a microscopic format. Monumental, yet ephemeral creatures floating between life and death; as a symbol, as mystical beings, and as sculptural objects in their own.

The Slow Walker project aims to place these beings as gigantic AR-objects in a lush city park, and make them visually present using geo-fencing, smartphones and/or AR glasses. The colossally enhanced creatures measure about 50x100 meters, and move extremely slowly through the parklands, grazing and interacting with the audience as they come closer. The digital artwork is accompanied by a soundtrack and a voice over, providing an extra dimension to the highly social sculpture.

Partly inspired by Timothy Morton’s ideas about the “Hyperobject”, manmade phenomena that are too large to grasp, such as AI, climate change, global economy, Internet etc., this new way of experiencing the world provides ground for philosophy, science and art to merge. The piece dwells on a sense of otherworldliness, extraterrestrial and alien. Instead of a hyper object, it focuses on something minute but tangible, the Tardigrade*, to envision the passage of time, the vulnerability of life, through exploring the extreme slow tempo of the beasts at the intersection of life and death. They look at us, as if knowing.