Ars Electronica Festival 2016

In 2016, María Castellanos and Alberto Valverde participated with Environment Dress 2.0 in the Ars Electronica Festival, held at POSTCITY in Linz under the theme Radical Atoms and the Alchemists of Our Time. The festival brought together international artists, scientists, researchers and technologists to explore new relationships between the physical and digital worlds, materials, technology and contemporary forms of creation.

Castellanos and Valverde presented Environment Dress 2.0, an open-source body interface equipped with environmental sensors that records variables such as noise, temperature, atmospheric pressure, ultraviolet radiation and the presence of certain gases. The data collected make it possible to perceive environmental conditions that lie beyond the direct reach of human senses, exploring technology as an extension of human perceptual capacities.

The work was presented within the festival’s STARTS section, dedicated to connections between science, technology and the arts. This context also featured projects by Neri Oxman and the Mediated Matter Group, Nervous System, Airbus, Autodesk and The Living, Verity Studios and ETH Zurich together with Cirque du Soleil, among others, bringing together different approaches to new materials, digital fabrication, interfaces and the relationship between technology and the body.