2 October 2025 - 1 February 2026
Civa – Contemporary Immersive Virtual Art
|indeterminate⟩⟨apparatus|
The Civa media art festival highlights the interplay between contemporary technologies, realities, and experiences across digital, physical, and hybrid spaces. This year’s festival and exhibition will focus on the realm of quanta.
More than a century of research in quantum physics has shown that the universe is neither deterministic nor entirely comprehensible or rational. At the microscopic level, matter behaves according to principles that defy classical logic: particles can exist in multiple states simultaneously, their properties emerge through interaction, and through entanglement, they can remain connected even across light years.
Quantum research has unsettled the long-standing distinctions between subject and object, perception and matter, and Self and Other. In a world shaped by ecological crises, technological disruptions, and epistemic ruptures, these insights also find resonance in contemporary art.
The Civa media arts festival is co-organized and continually developed by Belvedere 21 and sound:frame.
Further information can be found below or at
|indeterminate⟩⟨apparatus| brings together artistic approaches that view the indeterminate as an aesthetic, political, and speculative realm. The artists engage with quantum concepts through poetic gestures, multi-layered embodied experiences, and playful abstraction. They explore the infrastructures of emerging quantum technologies and experiment with their creative potential. In doing so, they shed light on the frequently overlooked ecological and social implications that these technologies present while also negotiating their possibilities and inherent ambivalences.
The exhibition title, |indeterminate⟩⟨apparatus| draws on the bra-ket notation, a formalism used in quantum mechanics to describe states and their transformations. “Indeterminate” refers to an unmeasured quantum system—a state of potentiality where nothing has been established yet. “Apparatus” refers not only to the measuring instrument but also to the complex constellation of the observer, the observed, and the conditions of their encounter. This apparatus extends beyond the laboratory to encompass the structures that define what qualifies as knowable and visible—institutions, bodies, discourses, and power relations.
|indeterminate⟩⟨apparatus| asks how a quantum worldview could take shape that embraces a grammar of non-binarity, allows for indeterminacy, and reconfigures the apparatuses through which reality is created. Here, indeterminacy is not viewed as a limitation of knowledge but rather as a fundamental prerequisite of reality. Instead of an either/or choice, it opens up the possibility of both/and.
Belvedere 21
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Late Night: Thursday
11 am - 9 pm
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Arsenalstraße 1, 1030 Vienna