Plásmata is an open-air exhibition in the public space that takes place under the Greek midsummer night sky and explores the shifting boundaries between the material, natural, and digital worlds. The exhibition, whose title means ‘creatures’ in Greek, launched in Athens in 2022 and travelled to the historic city of Ioannina in northern Greece in 2023. This year, Plásmata III returns to Pedion tou Areos park in the heart of Athens with a presentation of 25 hybrid digital and physical works, marking a moment of transformation for both the park, and the exhibition itself, which is the largest open air new media art festival in Europe. This new edition focuses on the nature of post-AI reality as one that is malleable and open, rather than stable and fixed. The hyper-personalized, the synthetic, the hallucinatory—these are not deviations; they are the new conditions of experience.
The exhibition is free of charge and open to the public wandering through the park. Participating artists include: Andreas Angelidakis, Ziad Antar, Yoann Bourgeois, The Callas, Dionysios, John Fitzgerald, Pierre Christophe Gam, Moritz Simon Geist, Efi Gousi, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Noemi Iglesias Barrios, Kalos & Klio, William Kentridge, Aias Kokkalis, Jiabao Li, Botao Amber Hy and Matt McCorkle, Manousos Manousakis, Natalia Manta, Maria Mavropoulou, Afroditi Panagiotakou, Janis Rafa, Andreas Wannerstedt, Robert Wilson.
The inaugural edition Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams and Data in Pedion tou Areos park in summer 2022 was visited by more than 400.000 people.
Plásmata III invites us to look beyond the surface, exploring the complex interplay of rituals, fantasies, and the search for meaning in a world that seems to be ever more in a state of constant flux. In this third edition of the immersive exhibition, we ask: How do our identities shape—and how are they shaped by—our understanding of reality? What happens when magic and technology converge? What brings us together, and what repels us? What is nature, what is real and what is not, when the surreal becomes the dominant visual language and even algorithms hallucinate? The line between the real and imagined, the digital and tangible, is increasingly blurred, yet these questions remain as relevant as ever.
Afroditi Panagiotakou, Artistic Director of Plásmata III and Onassis Foundation, comments:
‘In this year’s Plásmata, we create a dreamlike atmosphere where the boundary between reality and fantasy blurs. Our intervention in the park is subtle and seamlessly integrated into the landscape. The participating artists challenge algorithms and certainties, using their imagination as a tool. Though seemingly natural, the park is a curated experience, just like the artworks, which invite visitors to see the everyday with new eyes. Our Plásmata, strange and adorable, intimate and tender, urge you to feel, to wander, to pause. This year, Pedion tou Areos transforms into an amusement park, a place where all good things seem possible.’
Prodromos Tsiavos, Curatorial Director of Plásmata III and Director of ONX, the Onassis Foundation’s global platform for new media art and digital culture, comments:
‘Just as generative AI conjures reality from patterns, sustaining its illusions through audience complicity, so too does Plásmata III fabricate meaning—fluid and fixed, artificial and tactile. The illusionist becomes a model for technological intervention, revealing not what is true, but what can be made true through collective belief. We walk a thin line, where the unreal becomes surreal, and the surreal becomes real. In the artificial nature of the park, in the blurred line between seen and unseen, the exhibition asks: What if the unreal is more real than we thought? What if illusion holds the key to reality?’
Plásmata III includes a series of parallel events, in part implemented within the framework of the Smart Attica European Digital Innovation Hub initiatives co-funded by the European Union and within the framework of the European Digital Deal program co-funded by Creative Europe.
Press release from the Onassis Foundation
Image: Aias Kokkalis. Still from Ares Awakening. 2025. Video installation. Image courtesy of the artist
