Ars Electronica 2020: Alex May artworks and videos
· exhibition
Alex May presented multiple projects in Ars Electronica 2020, including Quarantine, Fermenting Futures, and Acquired Immunity, across the online and distributed Kepler's Gardens programme.
Alex May had several projects featured in Ars Electronica 2020: In Kepler’s Gardens, a distributed edition of the festival shaped by pandemic conditions and spread across online and international partner contexts. The programme included Quarantine through the KONTEJNER Garden, the Fermenting Futures video within the STARTS Journey, and participation in Acquired Immunity, a group programme developed through FEMeeting: WEB.
Taken together, these presentations showed the range of May’s work across ecology, biotechnology, and speculative futures. Quarantine placed ArchaeaBot within a wider exhibition concerned with pollution, interspecies communication, climate change, and the post-human body. Fermenting Futures brought research on yeast biotechnology into an art-and-science context, while Acquired Immunity situated May’s work within a broader collective response to the onset of COVID-19.
The significance of the festival appearance lies in that breadth. Rather than representing a single project in isolation, Ars Electronica 2020 presented several strands of May’s practice together: digital systems as tools for cultural reflection, biology as both material and metaphor, and art as a way to make complex scientific and ecological questions publicly legible. Within the altered conditions of 2020, the programme also showed how these works could circulate across hybrid exhibition formats without losing their conceptual focus.