Since its launch in 2015 as an initiative of the European Commission, S+T+ARTS, innovation at the nexus of Science, Technology, and the ARTS, has promoted the integration of artistic practices with advanced research and innovation. It has done so via the annual STARTS prize honouring successful collaboration of artists and engineers, STARTS residencies of artists in technology institutions and STARTS lighthouse pilots that have made artists an integral part of their research.

NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS aims to emphasize the vital role that collaboration in scientific, technological, and artistic domains can play in furthering contemporary research and integrative forms of cutting-edge artistic creation. In its first iteration at STATE Studio in Berlin in July 2020, NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS will feature a selection of artworks, objects, and documents highlighting the manifold scope of S+T+ARTS actors and activities—STARTS Prize winners or works of artists from STARTS residencies and STARTS light houses.

Transcending punctual interaction, shared languages of experimentation emerge in common research environments. Every work in the show is a fragment of a newly organized system, a piece of a world-like sphere not fully formed or complete or fully real, but steadily emerging. By way of their visionary capacity and structural insight, these works place the viewer on the verge of reality and demonstrate the elasticity of limits. If the new is shaped by research and informed by experimentation, the selected projects readily approach what is or could be about to happen. They posit thresholds—unexpected expressions of what is to come. As capsules of an unfinished, truncated, propositional tomorrow, these works are an almost-here. In the form of robotic sculptures, 3D prints, bas-reliefs, digital animations, film, sound, and light work, they make potentiality manifest and claim the conceptual space of what may be close to happening.

The exhibition is curated by Manuel Cirauqui with the collaboration of Silvana Fiorese. NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS thus explores phenomena of reciprocal influence and cross-pollination between technology, science, and the arts, all at work in each of the selected projects, to open up new modalities for innovation and creation in the foundational spirit of S+T+ARTS.