”Keep You Alive” is an art project, a hybrid physical and digital experience produced by Halucinarium Art ON for Unilever South-East Europe (January 2020).

Keep you alive was about embracing the future and evolvment without losing yourself in the process. Connect and reconnect with you with and without technology, access your own reality and be present and active in the collective reality, adapt, adjust, express yourself, live your emotions and do good for you, for others and last but not least for the planet.

Concept, Project management & Production: Halucinarium ART ON

Artists: 

  • HYDRA PHYGITAL PROGRAM – HALUCINARIUM EXTRACT, a healing experience by Agf HYDRA and Maurice Andresen
  • I, HUMAN by SAINT MACHINE

Artist selection: Carmen Casiuc
Client: Unilever South-East Europe
Location: Bucharest, Halucinarium Gallery
Year: 2020

THE CONCEPT

You’ve come to the time when you have to admit that your concept of reality is continuously changing. You are connected, but somehow you reached the maximum loneliness level, you are accessing new territories and subjects, but somehow you feel everything is superficial, you reached the highest level of knowledge, but somehow you feel you know nothing at all. You often ask yourself if on the way you lost something in the tumultuous path through a life guided by ever-increasing technology. Has being human in such a reality became the hardest part?

Don’t forget that humans shaped tools and instruments, created new methods and processes, and crafted elements of the natural world into usable items. As an animal species among many other species competing for survival, this was our unique route to success. We have created the successful formula that allowed us to conquer the planet and now it has turned out to be the thing that now threatens our very own existence.

With advancement comes new opportunities for humans who seek them. It is important to keep you alive as a human. You have to unlock the key for upholding the bonds that hold our society together despite the transformation.

Keep YOU Alive is a phygital game brought to you by Unilever, the believers that business growth should not be at the expense of people and the planet. Keep You Alive is translated into reality through an immersive art experience based on wellness, ritual, life, nature, digital, emotions, connections.
Expect nothing and feel everything.
Let yourself be guided through technology in a mixed reality environment for emotional development. Live your emotions naturally, permit yourself to be vulnerable and fragile in order to develop more interpersonal relationships and a powerful sense of being you, 100% present in the moment. Unlock each stage and reconnect with you.

Don’t be scared about the future and evolvement, don’t loose yourself in the process, connect and reconnect with you with and without technology, access your own reality and be present and active in the collective reality, adapt, adjust, express yourself, live your emotions and do good for you, for others and last but not least for the planet.

The game is easy to play because it’s in you! Keep You Alive!

ARTISTS

I, HUMAN by SAINT MACHINE

If you could collect your customers’ emotion data on a real-time basis, how will you use this technology?
A body installation awarded by the prestigious Art&Technology Center of Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, during their international exhibition in 2019, it comprises a circuit of interconnected masks which collects human emotions to control in real time the vital biological processes of a euglena population placed at the Center for Advanced Laser Technologies in Bucharest. Developed around the idea of interconnectivity, I, Human demonstrates how machine sensing could provide solutions to our current climate emergency, while testing new models of synergistic behavior mediated by technology and identifying coherence patterns.
The degree of emotional cohesion of the users connected to the installation controls the frequency and intensity with which the laser feeds a euglena population, making it a metaphor for our evolution as a species, which may depend on connected sustainability.

SAINT MACHINE is the pseudonym of a Romanian experimental artist, the author of body responsive installations that investigate biological processes and study the notion of space as living structure. Her works are organism-like sculptures that carry a digital core, use the human body to function and question the willingness to cede physicality and biological needs in exchange for digital content. In the interaction with these hybrid organisms emitting light, one’s success in controlling them is always equivalent to letting oneself assimilated by them. Her body responsive installations have been presented in prestigious media art festival such as Ars Electronica (AT), Athens Digital Arts Festival (GR), MADATAC, Medialab-Prado (ES), Laval Virtual (FR). In 2020 SAINT MACHINE has been invited to participate in the South Korea Changwon Biennale.

PHYGITAL PROGRAM BY AGF HYDRA

What could be the opportunities and challenges of a world where all human senses are digitalized through Virtual Reality (VR)?
One answer is Phygital marketing, an integration of physical customer experience into eCommerce. Experimenting with integrated senses-based interfaces to Oculus headsets, AGF Hydra in collaboration with digital artist Maurice Andresen envision the possibility of digital spas allowing them to use the senses of touch, sound and vision to experience a private massage therapy. This experience is particularly targeted at audiences that are experiencing some sort of social discomfort and feeling isolated and disconnected from reality.
Phygital Program is presented for the first time in Romania and it invites you to a unique multi-user immersive experience which takes further the approaches to Virtual Reality (VR) specific to game industry and showcases the technological development towards a merged reality indistinguishable from physical world. Within a scenography of sensations, bodily emotions and virtual stimuli are synchronized. Testing the idea of providing senses-based services for group activities in a digitalized format, it seeks to reduce climate impact and strengthen group cohesion from remote locations.
The experimental project received international attention and was previously included in Arcade East’s 2019 Design and Politics season in London, United Kingdom, Souvenir at Spatio Murat in Bari, Italy and Musica Sane at Museum Kesselhaus Herzberge in Berlin.

AGF Hydra is an Italian artist, fashion designer and performer working between London and Berlin. Her practice revolves around the possibility to expand the spectrum of bodily experiences in relation to virtual reality. Anticipating a digital humanist utopia in which physical regeneration and emotional enhancement is sustainable and possible through sensory-based interfaces and prosthetics, she funded the label and research program entitled AGF Hydra. She currently develops the HYDRA PHYGITAL PROGRAM, a series of itinerant immersive performative installations and workshops focused on developing sensorial interfaces for AR and VR environments. Conceived as private wellness events, the public experiments a unique intertwining of physical and visual stimulation which collapses the frontier between the real world and the digital reality.