DATAS Talk: Sfera collective
Join us for a DATAS TALK on October 1st at 6 PM CET, featuring the Sfera collective (Sylvia Rybak, Marco Winter, and Ula Sowa Przybylska) in conversation with Weronika Lewandowska.
Sfera will present their project Anthrome" a room-scale audiovisual installation simulating a hyperreal, reactive biosphere. Anthrome explores the myth of the libertarian "exit" through techno-utopian visions like Biosphere 2 and seasteading, interrogating how closed systems reproduce control, surveillance, and eventual failure under the guise of autonomy. The project highlights that escapist desires, favoring individual gain, paradoxically depend on communal participation.
Developed during a 2-month online program, this public talk will further analyze contemporary exit projects, the transformation of sensor data, and the fragility of isolated systems, while examining the historical development of the "Californian ideology."
Register to take part in the event ↩︎
Sfera, formed by Sylvia Rybak, Marco Winter, and Ula Sowa Przybylska, is a research-driven collective working across digital art, media theory, and immersive production. With backgrounds in photography, data science, cultural anthropology, and sound, their practices converge around the critical exploration of social and economic structures, speculative aesthetics, and technological mediation. Their current work spans themes such as hauntological aesthetics in video games, the cultural dissemination of systemic imaginaries, and immersive modes of storytelling.
Weronika M Lewandowska – creator of immersive narratives, poet, performer, and cultural studies PhD, as well as the coordinator of DOK Exchange XR Programme (DOK Leipzig) and Co-curator of “Embodied Realms”– the new XR and performance art festival in Poland. She served as an expert for the Committee for Innovative Film Projects at the National Film Institute (2021) and mentor of the Climate Challenge XR project for the European Space Agency. She writes and researches XR climate games for the Guest XR – an international research project on the AI agent for harmony in social XR (Warsaw University).
Co-funded by the European Union as part of the Creative Europe framework. Views and opinions expressed are howeverthose of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or EACEA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Co-funded by New Democracy Fund / Danish Cultural Institute.
DATAS (2025-26) is an assembly convened to amplify unheard voices from Central and Eastern Europe, and Southern Caucasus, reflecting on the relationship between the self, technology, and power. Produced in partnership between Goethe-Institut (Germany), Izolyatsia (Ukraine), MeetFactory (Czech Republic), Projekt Atol (Slovenia) and Tallinn Art Hall (Estonia).