Signal Festival to Light Up the Galleries: Seven Venues Will Present Unique Installations!

The eleventh edition of Signal Festival will present the largest-ever gallery zone at seven Prague venues, prepared by a new curatorial team led by audiovisual artist Pavel Mrkus.

The unique installations will focus primarily on exploring the boundaries of audiovisual and digital art using new technologies such as AR, 3D scanning technology or original sound and light systems.

During the four days of the festival, it will feature unique works by Mexican-Canadian multimedia artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Polish creative studio Ksawery Komputery and Spanish audiovisual collective Playmodes, among others.

This year, Signal will once again build on its successful collaborations with Laterna Magika and Kunsthalle Praha and celebrate its centenary together with Czech Radio. Visitors can explore the full programme of the gallery zone with a Signal Plus ticket, while Signal VIP allows them to visit the gallery privately, without queuing or waiting.

The Signal Festival will kick off on 12th October and run until Sunday 15th October.

The largest gallery zone in the festival’s history

4 days of the festival, 20 installations, 7 of them in the gallery zone. This will be the 11th Signal Festival, which will present the largest gallery zone in its history.

This year’s programme will take place in 20 locations. The seven multimedia installations in the gallery zone, which open up new dimensions of audiovisual creation with their technical processing and depth of artistic message, thus testifying to the dynamism and progressive tendency of the festival’s programming, will be accessible to visitors only with a ticket.

There are two types on sale, namely Signal Plus, allowing access to the festival’s gallery zone throughout the festival, and Signal VIP for those who want to experience the festival in a unique intimate atmosphere, without queues, waiting and with guided tours at selected locations. Both ticket options will also give visitors access to the group multimedia exhibition ELEKTROSALON: From the Rave to the Gallery, taking place as part of the accompanying programme in Hall 40 of the Holešovice Market Hall. Detailed ticket information can be found here

A further 13 free installations will be on display on two festival routes – The Centre and Karlín / Holešovice. For the first time ever, the festival will also extend beyond the main routes, presenting satellite installations, i.e., existing artworks in public space that will be brought to life with sound and light projections.

Body heat and virtual cold

The installation Thermal Drift by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, which will be on display in the playground at the Lyčkovo Square Primary School and Kindergarten, makes playful use of thermal cameras, enabling a novel technique; visitors use them to create portraits of themselves using their own body heat.

The impressive immersive installation FLUX by the Polish creative collective Ksawery Komputery follows on the Karlin route in Invalidovna. The hyperbolic conception of the object, assembled from 800 metres of double-sided LED strips combined with an eight-channel sound system, depicts the subtle and subconsciously embedded virtual reins of our contemporary society.

Visitors find themselves in a completely unique authorial portal between physical and apparent, digital reality. Not only does the project stand out for its impressive design, for which Ksawery Komputery has assembled its own hardware and software systems, it also symbolizes the importance of online space in the everyday communication of the contemporary world.

Exhibitions that absorb

A careful alchemy of sound, light, space and object will be offered by the immersive installation Horizon in Hall 13 of the Holešovice Market Hall. The largest installation of the entire festival comes from the Spanish audiovisual studio Playmodes and offers a journey beyond the boundaries of physical space, complete with a literally immersive experience.

The Prague City Museum will host the project Emotional Memory by the Laterna magika collective, celebrating its 65th anniversary. The performance will offer an extensive set exploring time and its cyclical nature. It will return to the company’s original technologies, such as kinetic scenography, live cinema or motion capture, and set them in motion through live dance and performance.

Signal Festival in cooperation with the Museum of the City of Prague will offer visitors another unusual experience. For the first time since the reconstruction began, the main building in Florenc will be open to the public for a few days. Visitors will thus have a unique opportunity to enter its second floor before the official opening.

Monuments of human activity and echoes of the natural realm

This year, the Signal Festival continues its successful collaborations. Kunsthalle Praha will host an exhibition project called The Grief of Misfit Cathedrals, which will capture the transformation of abandoned industrial complexes into concrete monuments of architecture through immersive film and spatial sound.

The exhibition will remain at Kunsthalle Praha after the festival and will be on display until 14th January 2024. At St. Salvator Church, artists Michal Rataj and Jan Trojan will present a unique sound installation called Immersion: Sumberged in Sound which reflects the unique ecosystems around Lipnice Castle and St. Margaret’s Church and reveals their strength under the layers of technological noise.

The installation will be complemented by a scenographic realization by Dragan Stojčevski originally created for the production King Oedipus at the National Theatre. The sound installation is created on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Czech Radio.

Playground for children and adults

Another gallery zone installation will take place in the Hybernská Campus. The interactive exhibition Signal Playground: The Rainbow by the Czech studio 3dsense is the first installation designed specifically for children visitors of the Signal Festival; however, its sophisticated and intense visuality will also attract adults. The exhibition consists of several different exhibits that invite exploration through small interactions.

Visitors can freely wander through the installation space, letting themselves be carried away by their own space-time and fantasy world. The installation will be accessible every day of the festival from 2:00 p.m.