AND PRAXIS: The pioneering generation of new media art
Telematic art, interactive art, artificial life, bioart, virtual reality and generative art. The artists who invented these concepts come together at the NEWART Centre in Tarragona, Spain. More than thirty pioneers, authors of The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of New Media Art, Volume II: Artists and Practice, present a work they have chosen themselves.
They built a field without museums, without a market and without manuals, and turned it into an internationally recognised discipline. AND PRAXIS has no curatorial selection: the pioneers themselves decide how they wish to be remembered. Each artist has chosen a work that encapsulates their practice, sometimes remastered for the occasion, with just one condition: it had to work in a plug and play format and be able to travel through the cloud.
The works coexist in a large immersive environment of screens that functions as a contemporary picture gallery: a collective layer of image and sound experienced together. At the same time, each work can be seen and heard up close, on its own terms.
This generation’s legacy is at risk. The works that broke new ground depend on machines, software and formats that are disappearing. AND PRAXIS is therefore also the visible part of the creation of a living archive: identifying the works, documenting them and activating conservation protocols, just as artificial intelligence is transforming the field they founded once again.
A compendium exhibition initiated by Professor Paul Thomas, editor of the encyclopedia, in collaboration with Vicente Matallana and Jaime de los Ríos.
Venue
NEWART Centre, Tarragona, Spain
Opening
Thursday 22 October 2026, 7 pm
Symposium and Performance
22 October, from 4.30 pm
ScentDia – Memento 2026 – Presented at AND PRAXIS
ScentDia Memento acts as what Velonaki calls a ‘Perception Identity Marker’: a perfumed ceramic funnel that uses scent to capture, communicate and recreate the memory of a robot that is no longer present.
It extends ScentDia, A Scent for a Robot (2025), the final chapter of the Diamandini series, a sequence of works centred on a humanoid robot that Velonaki has developed since 2011. In ScentDia, Diamandini responds to ‘her’ visitors and surroundings through movement, sound and, for the first time, scent.
Created with perfume creator Manos Gerakinis and philosopher of science Luisa Damiano, it is the first custom scent developed for an interactive social robot. As the robot moves through the space, it leaves a trail of its own fragrance, making visitors aware of its presence. The memento keeps that presence alive through smell, once the robot itself has gone.
