This year, the festival’s line-up of live shows and audiovisual performances will take place at Central de Diseño and Auditorio de Casa del Lector, where renowned experimental creators and new values of this field will showcase their groundbreaking and essential works. 

The lineup of live shows offers a broad range of concepts and formats: undisputed visionaries of electronic music such as Oval; true explorers of new technologies, who generate their own creative devices, such as NSDOS, Kom-om-Pax, Verbose, or Zan Lyons; collaborations of artists who blend their works to reach new dimensions, such as Kataryna Gryvul & Alex Guevara, CoH meets Abul Mogard, or Venus Ex Machina & Xtrux; female creators who combine tradition, folklore or classical music with current sounds, such as CORIN or Rocío Guzmán; unpredictable, powerful live shows by LustSickPuppy, Halina Rice, or Beatrix Weapons; projects with a strong presence of artificial intelligence in their creative process, by Lorem or Riccardo Giovinetto; and audiovisual explorations with a protest element, like the ones by Joakim, addressing current affairs such as the preservation of the environment.

This year at Matadero Nave 0, in a collaboration with European project Realities in Transition, the VORTEX section includes virtual reality experiences such as From the Main Square by Pedro Harres (Brazil), a cohesive, critical portrait of social fragmentation, which obtained the Grand Jury Prize at the section Venice Immersive, in the prestigious Venice International Film Festival 2022, or Quatum Bar by Christina “Xaos Princess”, which invites us to have a real, immersive conversation with an artificial intelligence, so that the artist can explore the use of conversational robots in social VR environments, and the ethical issues concerning the current development of such technologies. 

The piece Nine Dragons by contemporary artist Yang Yongliang (Shanghai), will take the audience to a mythological, immersive flight through the eyes of a Chinese dragon. Templo de la carne / Tragedia Zoophilica, by artist Juan Le Parc, is a dramatized animal tragedy, staged as a slow, macabre and mechanical choreography, where visitors explore an ancient temple built with meat from delicatessen and butcher shops. With Nerd_Funk, Iranian creators Ali Eslami and Mamali Shafahi will show us a digital identity which exists in Instagram, following the trail of contemporary digital culture. A VR installation to go inside and reflect on the new reality born out of social media.

The multiawarded work I Saw the Future by experimental filmmaker François Vautier immerses the audience in a 3D space with echoes from the futurist predictions by visionary and humanistic master Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the script for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey: and the revolutionary mixed reality multiplayer video game Eggscape, created by Herman Heller and Jorge Tereso, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the section Venice Immersive, in the prestigious Venice International Film Festival 2022. Users play some charismatic and funny egg-shaped characters, which narrow escape from a relentless invasion of alien robots, in a virtual environment layered on top of the real physical surroundings.

Besides, the main screen at Nave 0 will show two pieces by Robert Seidel, Hysteresis and Touha, both based on experiments with artificial intelligence by the essential German digital artist and with sounds by Oval.

One of the most outstanding works at this year’s festival will be the performative installation Shrink 01995 by Lawrence Malstaf (Belgium), which can be visited at Plaza Matadero, with free admission and in different passes.

The installation represents the strange nature of the world we inhabit today, through the participation of a series of performers suspended vertically in the air, inside two large transparent plastic sheets. The piece is equipped with a device that sucks the air and allows the performers to hold on and slowly change position, until they gradually freeze between micro-folds.

This year, the Ciudad Aumentada section will feature the piece Compost AR (Flowers for Suzanne Clair)by Spain-based Australian artist Lauren Moffatt, using video game techniques combined with conventional painting techniques to digitally reconstruct flowers and plants, and to explore forms of environmental recovery and deceleration. A strange, digital, undetermined live entity to experiment on the screen of our mobile device at different points of the outdoor space at Matadero.

At Centro de Experiencias Inmersivas MAD. Madrid Artes Digitales, with the support of the Taiwan Ministry of Culture and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, the project by Taiwanese collective Naxs.corp., ID0, will explore the decentralized structure of post-Internet society. Blurring the limits between video, film and games, this installation will allow 50 people to enjoy the virtual space of this piece simultaneously, and to interact among them from their mobile devices.

Besides, at Plató de Cineteca, L.E.V. Matadero will showcase the work Visual Bird Sounds by Andy Thomas, where the artist has compiled sound recordings and photographs of birds and other travelling animals to study their remote, natural habitats, animating them in an extraordinarily creative way, using generative motion graphics algorithms. Behind this work we find a strong criticism of the impact of technology and the progress of society on the planet’s natural ecosystems.