Intropias: A sensory journey through sound, scent, and space
In a fictional setting, visitors explore grief and memory through virtual reality headsets or follow a corridor of trees linked by a virtual mushroom network. The festival scene emphasizes how participants experience sensory encounters, turning the art into a shared, immersive moment. Intropias Interactive Arts Festival unfolds through October 23, with venues including the Garrigós wells, the Alicante Water Museum, Las Cigarreras, and the Alicante University Museum.
The festival enters its second year with support from cultural agencies and partners, presenting four interactive installations and two workshops. A festival organizer notes that audience participation breathes life into the project, describing technology as a friendly intermediary that connects the public with both art and the environment. This framing highlights collaboration, public engagement, and the role of speculative media in contemporary art as observed by the festival’s co-directors.
This year the focus is distance. Themed explorations help directors convey relationships of scale and velocity while measuring space and time. They invite reflection on how events influence one another through a sequence of actions. The public will see how distance can be held, broken, or redefined on an emotional plane, all woven into a carefully crafted program.
The secret life of trees features a facility opened at Pozos de Garrigós. The project brings together architects, civil engineers, and multimedia artists from the University of Alicante and international partners to build a networked forest of trees. The installation uses technology to illuminate how trees communicate through a fungal network, inviting visitors to engage with the system and share minerals in a living, evolving ecosystem.
Presentation of the interactive arts festival Intropias at the Museo de Aguas de Alicante provides a focal point for visitors to explore the blend of art and science within a regional setting.
That afternoon, from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM, an artificial tree built in Alicante will connect with a similar structure in Canada. The creators describe how physical distance can be navigated through technology, enabling the connected trees to emit sounds and trigger movements during later days of the visit.
Another installation, Absent Metaverse by architect and visual artist Jorge Bermejo, offers an immersive virtual reality experience to explore grief and its expression. The project invites visitors to share space for personal reflection, using headsets to access sensations that words alone cannot convey and to observe how a stage for audiences enables them to witness the inner process.
This installation opens at Las Cigarreras on October 19, complemented by micro spaces that explore sound and scent, a program supported by the Valencia College of Design. A workshop titled Orbiphones examines interactive uses of ultrasound, scheduled for October 21 at the Museo de las Aguas and the UA Campus and the Alicante Technical Center. The data collection workshop on Remote Object Detection runs at the UA Campus and the Alicante Technical Center.
The festival’s leadership outlines a vision that blends tradition with modernity and innovation across the museum field. Organizers emphasize that the event serves as a focal point for avant-garde artistic acts, positioning Intropias as a beacon of cultural experimentation that resonates with audiences across the region and beyond, including audiences in the United States and Canada seeking new perspectives on technology-enabled art.