THE GATE explores Hamburg’s identity on the basis of the familiar image-slogan, the “gateway to the world”. The two-part exhibition in urban space makes use of various interpretations of the metaphor and follows its trail where the city engages with itself: in HafenCity. In Europe’s largest inner-city urban development project, a sense of tradition meets a striving for innovation; here, the latest vision of the “gateway to the world” is being translated into constructed space.

Each with its own format, the two parts of THE GATE show HafenCity as a constantly changing organism in which buildings and people exert reciprocal influences on each other. Five overarching chapters connect a locally situated audio library and an art trail of 16 stages leading through HafenCity. The audio library brings together ten entertaining podcast series, which convey interesting facts about the district from very different perspectives and in a vivid way. The content can be browsed at home or while on the move in HafenCity.

Curious phenomena are lurking in the town of Herford! Having been invited by Marta Herford, Austrian artist Martin Walde discovered striking and surreal aspects while exploring the town that he proceeded to capture in a series of poetic and bizarre narratives. Shunning the usual sights, he brings shapes, colors and smells of the town into focus, and also reveals remarkable assemblages that normally go unnoticed.

The app “Cyber Dust: A Digital Parkour across Herford” offers an unusual tour of Herford using your own smartphone. As users explore the town with the digital map, they find QR codes that make AR (augmented reality) objects visible as virtual extensions of the real environment. Together with Martin Walde’s stories, new angles on supposedly familiar elements of the town are revealed, encouraging users to get creative themselves.

Since this is a PWA (progressive web app), it needn’t be downloaded and can simply be accessed using this link:

https://cyberstaub.marta-herford.de

A Fragment of Eden explores spaces of a symbiotic future in which humans are no longer considered separate from nature’s ecosystem. The artworks open up fictional spaces of possibility and ask about the future city: What might it look like? How do we want to design it?

In addition to the installation at Goseriedeplatz, the project includes four further satellite works by the artists Nike Kühn, Collectif Grapain, Malte Taffner, Lea Schürmann and Christian Holl at the locations Goseriedeplatz, Waterlooplatz, Dornröschenbrücke and Welfengarten. The four satellites will rotate through Hannover’s urban space at regular intervals for four months. The accompanying app, which navigates users from place to place, enables interaction with the works and other visitors via chats.

For the first time, the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen is presenting a digital art experience for smartphones in collaboration with the artist Florence Jung and the Berlin-based developer team interkit. Sam is the title of the app, which will be available for download from 28 October in the Apple App Store and the Google Playstore.

With Sam, Florence Jung reflects on how technologies construct emotionally charged spaces that blur the line between fiction and reality, and how these complex digital entities breed an illusion of intimacy that encroaches on daily life. In an era where everyone publishes thoughts and opinions on their own device, Sam also presents an experimental approach to literature that continues Florence Jung’s incisive exploration into contemporary angst and its effects on our collective psyche.

As an online friend, Sam reaches out to you via chat and accompanies you through everyday life over the span of a few weeks. Attentive residents will also be able to encounter Sam’s presence in a wide variety of places in Siegen’s urban space.