The forecast forty years ago was uncannily accurate: high-tech, space-age, light-speed technologies would alter forever the way humans interact with their environment. What no one then could know was just how deeply technology would penetrate our conscious perception of the world around us: we don’t have to think about what is real and what is virtual, we have already gone well beyond these simplistic limits. We live the network, we work the global, we dream the electric.

Yet part of what made the predictions of the 1960s so significant was their built-in criticality: a comical, cynical if not diabolical irony that made the future accessible and irrelevant at the same time. Today it is difficult to understand what effect this hybridized real-virtual environment is actually having on the human experience. Where does it begin and end? Or have we become the binary elements that switch on and off? What point is there to distinguishing authentic from artificial?

Come join Matrix-Ville: What is Real/Virtual? with our special guests, including some of the original 1960 protagonists, this year’s contributors and invited critics. The discussion should get everyone thinking about how Radicals like Ugo La Pietra and Superstudio turned their contemporary realities into oddly wonderful visions on the future, or how today’s media artists twist the familiar world around yet again.