Curatorial Statement

TTTLabs Official VR World is an immersive virtual environment produced as part of TTTlabs BioFeral.BeachCamp: New Repro FlaOctomingopus – Non-Human Bioart Bodyart on the Beach (Crete, Fall 2024). It brings together artists, researchers, and technologists who participated in this durational experiment of skill sharing, co-creation, co-education, and co-development.

Developed from the spirit of Taboo Transgression Transcendence in Art & Science, the project reflects on urgent questions raised by extraordinary scientific advances and the ethical dilemmas surrounding reproductive technologies, transgenic germline alterations, animal behavior studies, and more-than-human perspectives. Through installations, performances, and texts, the works in the VR World invite visitors to rethink reproductive futures, artificial wombs, eco-burial, embryo grading, surrogacy, and posthuman family planning in dialogue with ecological responsibility and speculative imagination.

The virtual space was created with extensive use of AI tools for image and video generation, 3D modeling, textures, text and research, extending human and nonhuman collaboration into digital co-agency. It is both an exhibition and a research environment, open to experimental knowledge-sharing and collective play.

In this sense, TTTLabs Official VR World is not a static exhibition but a living archive of encounters between art, science, technology, and nature, where the boundaries between disciplines blur into new hybrid practices. It is a collective proposition for regenerative cultures and interspecies futures.

Credits

Curated by: Terrabytes Glitch Lab (Augusto Calçada & Xristina Sarli)– Brazil & Greece

Produced as a part of:

TTTlabs BioFeral.BeachCamp: NewRepro-FlaOctomingopus - Non-Human Bioart/Bodyart on the Beach (TTTlabs BFBC Fall 2024) - Rewilding Cultures project co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union and Interactive Arts Lab - Ionian University with C' Sculpture Studio - Athens School of Fine Arts Annex of Rethymnon (BIOART Creta Project2)

In collaboration with: Ionian University, Interactive Arts Lab & Webteam (Minas Pergantis, Roubini Oikonomidou, Aristeidis Lamprogeorgos)

Participating artists: Adam Zaretsky, Augusto Calçada, Brian Contreras, Callum Siegmund, Chiara Pitrola, Dalila Honorato, Isidora Fernandez, Ivana Tkalčić, Kristin Lucas, Mr NoGoFollow, Nathalie Dubois Calero, Nafsika Tzanoulinou, Nupur Doshi, Praba Pilar, Xristina Sarli

Adam Zaretsky

Adam Zaretsky, Ph.D., is a former researcher at MIT's Department of Biology and an experimental bioartist with over a decade of teaching experience. His art practice critically explores the legal, ethical, social, and libidinal implications of biotechnological materials and methods, with a particular focus on transgenic humans. He has led the VivoArts experimental bioart class at institutions including SymbioticA, RPI, Leiden University, Waag Society, and currently serves as Visiting Professor at the Ionian University and Creative Director of TTTlabs and TTTfellows in the Rewilding Cultures project.

Augusto Calçada

Augusto Calçada is a Brazilian multimedia artist whose practice moves across art, science, and technology through an experimental and speculative lens. His projects merge video, sound, installation, performance, bioart, and creative coding to explore cultivable futures, ancestral technologies, and sensitive interfaces between body, machine, and nature. Drawing from practices such as biohacking, open science, DIY, and technoshamanism, his works articulate themselves as immersive and interactive systems that propose experiences of deep listening and transgression.

Brian Contreras

Brian Contreras is a Guatemalan artist focused on creating interactive and community-engaged art. His work addresses socio-environmental issues, exploring themes of identity, biology, and language, aiming to foster dialogue, reflection, and collective action through communal experiences.

Chiara Pitrola

Chiara Pitrola is a hydrofeminist practitioner working with rituals as a form of technology to hold ecological issues. She is concerned with embodied practices, ecology, deep listening and DIY community care. She also explores transcorporeal flows, herbalism and advocates for oral poetry as a form of spell, protest and imaginative tool.

Callum Siegmund

Callum Siegmund is a bio/nano-artist and resident at SymbioticA since 2020, creating DNA nanosculptures using nanotechnologies like DNA Origami. His work uses humor and satire to critique bio and nanotechnology. He studied neuroscience and tissue engineering and collaborated on the award-winning project Bricolage at the 2022 Ars Electronica.

Dalila Honorato

Dr. Dalila Honorato defines herself as a social scientist, a facilitator of safe spaces, fostering the convergence of ideas on liminal issues within the realms of Art & Science. Her research centers on embodiment, monstrosity, the uncanny, and the acrobatic balance between phobia and paraphilia. Professor in Aesthetics and Visual Semiotics at the Ionian University, Greece, she also collaborates with the Center of Philosophy of Sciences at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. She is the creator of the TTT conferences Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence in Art & Science and co-founder of FEMeeting: Women in Art, Science, and Technology. She is PI of the Rewilding Cultures grant (Creative Europe 2022–2026) and serves as director of the Interactive Arts Lab at the Ionian University.

Isidora Fernandez

Isidora / Ipi Fernandez studied a Master's degree in Scientific Communication (Barcelona) and has worked as research assistant, project designer and STEAM experience designer in Chile and Spain. Recently she directed SFC's Arts & Science department, where she has designed citizen participation projects merging art and science such as creative workshops or exhibits.

Ivana Tkalčić

Ivana Tkalčić, born in 1987, is a multimedia artist and researcher. She earned degrees in economics from the Faculty of Economics and Business and in fine arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb, University of Zagreb as well as graduated from WHW Akademija. Tkalčić has exhibited solo and in group events across Europe and globally. She has received numerous nominations and awards including the Radoslav Putar Award, HPB Grand Prix, and RCAA. Her residencies span countries like Italy, Belgium, Norway, and the U.S., including 2023 Art Omi in New York and 2018 V2_ Lab in Rotterdam.

Kristin Lucas

Kristin Lucas is a flamingo expert and artist. She explores connectivity as an interpersonal process and a condition of the digital age that is as technological, electrical, and cybernetic, as it is familial, ancestral and ecological. Her wide-ranging embodied experiments are characterized by playful, open-ended inquiry, often involving collaboration and audience participation. She teaches at University of Texas at Austin.

Mr NoGoFollow

Mr NoGoFollow is a multi-disciplinary artist, cultural producer, researcher, and educator. His work weaves intricate stories using found objects, focusing on archives and their significance. Recent residencies include CREATE, Irish Museum of Modern Art, and PACT Zollverein. His research for the UN Decade for People of African Descent explores African heritage and contemporary issues.

Nathalie Dubois Calero

Nathalie Dubois Calero is a BacterVirHuman, scientist (Ph.D. in biology, UPMC, France) and bioartist (MFA, University of Windsor, Canada). Her feminist/queer works explore human-microbe relationships through workshops, performances, ontological workshop games, and videos/sounds. She collaborates on MaterVirus with Cecilia Vilca, and Waterbodies with Ada Gogova—member of Incubator Art Lab, Windsor.

Nafsika Tzanoulinou

Nafsika Tzanoulinou, born in Athens, graduated from the Department of Social and Education Policy at the University of Peloponnese in Corinth. Currently studying at the Athens School of Fine Arts, she explores materials and practices, focusing on human-to-nature pattern interactions.

Nupur Doshi

Nupur Doshi is a curator and researcher based in Mumbai, India. Her work explores para-art trajectories, examining provocations from critical philosophy and transdisciplinary studies across counter-histories and speculative futures. Selected for residencies at Easttopics and Medialab Matadero and given lectures and presentations at the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music and Winchester School of Art, she has been awarded the Global South Scholarship for the Art & Curatorial Practice Certificate Program at The New Centre for Research & Practice.

Praba Pilar

Praba Pilar is a queer diasporic Colombian artist creating wildly interdisciplinary art projects focused on technologies of life, which have been featured in museums, galleries, universities, and festivals around the world. She has a PhD in Performance Studies, co-directs the Bioarts Ethical Advisory Komission, and teaches at California College of the Arts.

Xristina Sarli

Xristina Sarli is a hybrid curator, researcher, and artist working at the intersection of bioart, XR, and eco-social practices. They are the co-director of TOP Lab, Berlin’s first DIY bio lab and transdisciplinary community. An award-winning animator, 3D and XR artist, whose work explores multispecies gaming, regenerative cultures, non-human intelligence, and collaborative networks across art, science, technology, ecology, and activism.