Solo.

Inside the Ars Electronica Garden Athens, Onassis Stegi presents Data Garden, a multimedia installation, and the results of HackAthens 2020, a series of five works in the form of film, digital games, sound drama and mobile apps. While having a very different point of departure, both projects explore the local vs. the global, the endemic vs. the permanent, algorithms and rituals, data, ecologies and bodies.

“Solo” is a video work commissioned by Onassis Stegi in the context of HackAthens 2020: What Comes After?". 

Solo is a digital application for those who have experienced, and are yet to experience, urban solitary confinement.

The app’s R&D process is based on research and reflection upon the relativity of time, the fundamental significance of human touch and smell, the debated boundaries between the real and the metaphysical, and thus the question of whether to remain in the current condition or to move forward to another.

Does loneliness have time, smell, and texture? Or is it characterized by the complete absence of such qualities? Can we digitize emotions?

Can we experience time through the time of literary works? Does the clock get hacked?
Is the skin an autonomous desiring-machine with its own intelligence? Does the skin have its own agency? And if so, can we hack it? Is loneliness just the boundaries of our flesh, or something more than that?

How can we digitally reproduce smells?

How do we lead ourselves towards self-awareness?

And if we become light, if we disembody ourselves, if we move to another dimension, will we still be solo?