When Art & Technology Collide

Entering Hotel Viennoise, you can’t help but feel a bit anxious since it looks like a scene from Saw. The hotel has been out of use for quite some time and the walls and stairs are almost completely dilapidated. But this is exactly what makes the INTERLab Tele-exhibition, part of the D-CAF festival, all the more intriguing. The vivaciousness of the installations, rife with new technologies, juxtaposed against this ancient architecture gives everything a sublime, surreal vibe. As the curator of D-CAF arts programme, Diaa Hamed, puts it: “The venue is like a playground; you can play with all the pieces freely since it doesn’t have the limits of a traditional gallery. We’ve modified the space tremendously and this flexibility works perfectly in parallel to the other part of the exhibition, running simultaneously in Medrar – a much cleaner, neater space.” 

And, we certainly did play. In every room, there’s a plethora of weird and wonderful installations to mess about with including a photo booth which takes your picture multiple times and turns it into a collage and another where you sit down at a dinner table with strangers, sitting at an identical table at the Medrar exhibition. Proving that arts and sciences go hand-in-hand, this is definitely one worth checking out. 

The exhibition runs at both Medrar Palace and Hotel Viennoise until 28^th of April.