Realtime gathers artists, curators, scholars and the public to explore big, open questions about the future – through immersive, digital art. The exhibition opens with Realtime 1 – ‘Lilypads: Mediating Exponential Systems’ on 15th May 2023. 

Featuring a selection of three digital artworks each time, Realtime explores up-to-the-minute research, pioneering experiments, and the social impact of future technologies. The first Realtime ‘Lilypads: Mediating Exponential Systems’ – presents the work of three artists: Amelia Winger Bearskin, Libby Heaney and Entangled Others with Robert M. Thomas. Each Realtime exhibition is presented as a large-scale projection, but this is just the start. It is intended as a living, evolving body of knowledge. This new initiative was built in response to the ideals of the ‘web3’ movement (the latest generation of the internet), with a particular focus on how art and artists are revealing new channels for decentralising power, expressing value, and engaging collective imagination as a problem-solving tool.

Nxt Museum’s role is to facilitate critical and curious approaches to emerging ideas and practices; Realtime extends this mission. The art installations on show will visualise the context in which today’s makers ignite tomorrow’s art movements. Each new Realtime will be curated by an arts curator and an academic. For the first show, Jesse Damiani is Curator-in-Residence and Charlotte Kent is Scholar-in-Residence, responsible for establishing and leading the research and conceptual development of the exhibition.

This first iteration of Realtime – ‘Lilypads: Mediating Exponential Systems’ proposes the myriad ways of thinking about the lilypad as a way to move through a complex variety of perspectives on our world: our ecologies, technologies, cultures, and economics. 

The research and the context behind the works, alongside a layer of community participation and conversation, will play a vital role for the curation of future Realtime exhibitions. Work will also appear online through publications, Nxt Museum’s Virtual Gallery, and other initiatives. The museum’s public programming – from panels to performances – will be avenues to foster collaborative learning.