How can the advancement of digital image production technologies expand worlds and invent applications with a range from audiovisual to scientific aesthetics? An area under constant exploration in the most diverse industries, X-Reality, an acronym that converges the expansions offered by virtual, expanded, immersive, augmented and mixed reality in everyday life, will be discussed and exhibited at X-Reality USP 2021 – Resignifying Presence. The Exhibition and Conference brings together national and international works in three different exhibitions, in addition to bringing audiovisual directors, scientists and representatives from creative and technology sectors together for a series of discussions and debates between March 19th and 28th.

Registration for courses and conferences is open. The entire event will be transmitted virtually and is free of charge.

The theme of this year’s event is Resignifying Presence. Based on the inflections posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, we will discuss the aesthetic-political potential of virtual, immersive, expanded and mixed realities based on the ways in which the sense of presence has been reorganized by communication and media devices.

The Covid-19 pandemic has presented us with a complete resignification of the sense of presence in our daily lives the way it has changed our whole routine and boosted the use of applications, devices and various digital tools such as videoconferencing, in the organization of life and in the ways in which we see and understand ourselves in the current world. The time is more than ripe to discuss the potential of X-Reality in everyday life.

states video artist and Prof. Dr. Almir Almas, coordinator of LabArteMídia ECA / USP and the event’s creator.

The purpose of X-Reality USP is to encourage and support partnerships between research groups, artists, producers and companies in order to contribute to the dissemination and increase in production of X-Reality works and the formation of new audiences.

X-Reality USP 2021 – Resignifying Presence is organized by the Laboratory of Art, Media and Digital Technologies (LabArteMídia ECA / USP) , the Graduate Program in Media and Audiovisual Processes of the College of Communication and Art’s Department of Cinema, Radio and Television, at the University of São Paulo (CTR / ECA / USP). The event has international partners British Raindance Film Festival / Raindance Immersive Stories, and national collaborators MemeLab and Marte Festival. It has received CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) funding through PAEP (Program to Support Events in the Country). X-Reality USP Resignifying Presence is supported by ECA / USP Culture and University Extension Commission.