Flavia Mazzanti and Manuel Bonell are media artists and co-founders of Immerea, a Vienna-based indie studio focusing on the development of VR games and interactive installations. Their interdisciplinary practice explores new modes of perception and interaction in virtual and hybrid spaces, with a strong focus on artistic quality and level of experimentation.
Their work has been exhibited internationally at institutions and festivals including Ars Electronica (Linz), DIG Shibuya (Tokyo), Kunsthaus Graz, DA Z – Digital Arts Festival Zurich. Alongside their studio practice, they are both active as university lecturers, speakers, and co-organizers of XR Austria, Austria’s largest community for immersive technologies.
Art, Games, and the Surreal in Times of Socio-Political Rupture
FROG 2026 – Talk
When real-world conditions become incomprehensible, can the surreal offer another way of confronting it?
The talk investigates how artistic practices across literature, visual art, film, and video games construct spaces of possibility in response to socio-political oppression, violence, war, personal and collective trauma. Focusing on surreal and fantastic modes of representation, it asks how departures from realism can offer alternative perspectives through which extreme realities can be perceived, questioned, and reorganized – not by escaping them, but by making their contradictions and disruptions visible.
Starting from the work and life of British-Mexican painter Leonora Carrington and Soviet novelist Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” (1967), the talk examines how imaginary worlds emerge in response to profound experiences of personal and socio-political rupture. Within these worlds, ordinary categories cease to be reliable: humans coexist with supernatural beings, bodies transform, time and space become unstable, and institutional authority itself becomes absurd. The impossible does not try to be a replacement for reality, but becomes rather an artistic means of reflecting conditions that have themselves become difficult to comprehend through conventional forms of representation.
The research expands this perspective across artistic media, from visual art and literature to films such as “Pan’s Labyrinth” (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) and video games including “Pathologic” (Ice-Pick Lodge, 2005) and “Ad Infinitum” (Hekate, 2023), and extending to social and psychological repression as in “Silent Hill f” (NeoBards Entertainment, 2025). Across these works, surreal environments, fragmented temporalities, and unstable perceptions provide parallel perspectives and artistic strategies on different forms: from visual and narrative representations to playable spaces in which surrealism can become embedded in environments, interactions, and rules. Games allow these destabilized realities not only to be observed or imagined, but to be navigated, acted within, and confronted through play.