Aspen Art Museum organizes inaugural AIR Festival

Aspen Art Museum recently announced the program for AIR, a flagship initiative that aims to position creative individuals as the leading force that drives change in society. AIR 2025 will open in late July with an artists’ retreat, followed by a public festival from July 26 to August 1. With AIR, Aspen Art Museum is developing fertile ground where artists can engage in interdisciplinary conversations between the visual arts, music, science and philosophy, along with presenting envelope-pushing commissions.

This inaugural festival will gather international artists to contemplate what it means to be human in a time when life itself is being redefined by rapidly-evolving technologies and currents of thought. Presented under the title Life As No One Knows It, the gathering derives its inspiration from Sara Imari Walker's eponymous book and Paul Chan's multi-year experimentation in programming to create a synthetic self-portrait through AI. The stated goal of AIR 2025 is to foster an environment conducive to the surfacing of the subconscious into the visible world.

Despite being new, AIR is firmly grounded in Aspen's legacy as a nexus of innovation and creativity, deriving its inspiration from the International Design Conference in Aspen. The conference ran from 1949 to 2006 and gathered pioneering figures from the worlds of science, art, music, journalism and business such as John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Sontag and Steve Jobs. Founded by the Chicago entrepreneur Walter Paepcke and informed by the Bauhaus philosophy, the annual event sought to promote closer collaboration between artists, designers and manufacturers in applying modern design methods to elevate everyday objects into art and support business profitability.

The character of Aspen Art Museum as a non-collecting institution has also set the tone for the upcoming festival. As Nicola Lees, the Nancy and Bob Magoon director of the Aspen Art Museum stated in Frieze, “AIR, and our wider museum programs, are about taking risks by investing in what may come, rather than what we know already exists.”

The inaugural AIR will see a diverse group of artists, thinkers and cultural leaders converging on the Colorado alpine resort, where a series of vibrant keynotes, collaborative exchanges and site-specific installations spanning several media will highlight the critical role that art has in representing and molding our common perception of reality. Among the artists appearing at AIR will be several prominent figures from the world of moving image art and time-based media. Apichatpong Weerasethakul will be presenting his 2022 electro-acoustic film On Blue, a project done in collaboration with the composer Rafiq Bhatia. Matthew Barney will feature his newest live performance TACTICAL parallax, an exploration of the mythology of violence that is embedded in the American landscape.

The iconic filmmaker Werner Herzog will hold a keynote in which he examines the idea of “ecstatic truth,” a poetic form of insight that goes beyond factual accuracy, which can endure the distortions created by artificial intelligence, deepfakes, and digital illusion. Paul Chan will demonstrate to the public Paul′, the latest version of a synthetic self-portrait which he has been developing over the past several years; he will discuss the philosophical, psychoanalytic and thanatological currents that were instrumental in shaping Paul′ and his understanding of what a “machine” is and how “intelligence” is manifested.

Other significant names participating at AIR include: Glenn Ligon, Thelma Golden, Aria Dean and others. More information is available at the AIR Aspen site.