Rare Effect returns, 11-15th November, at Arroz Estúdios, and venues across the city. This year’s lineup features artists, musicians, theorists, technologists and filmmakers thinking through what it means to be alive and online right now.

This year’s Rare Effect theme is Countersurveillance, asking participating artists, thinkers, and audiences to set their critical gaze on the hyperstructures that watch, govern and shape our realities, and to speculate on where we go from (now)here.

We’re being watched. By our friends, our family, our employer, our gym, our feed, our chatbot, and ourselves. We self-regulate in fear, or perhaps hope, of being seen in the panopticon of everyday life.​

But what does it mean to look back? Not through nostalgic rose-tinted Meta glasses, but locked in direct eye contact with the surveyor. Is it even possible? The mega-corporations that dictate this watching leave us with more questions that answers when we look closer at how, when, and why our data is being collected.​

Are our phones listening to us? Are fitness apps selling our geo-located run club data? Does it matter in a future where content is not only algorithmically tailored to, but generated for, our tastes and moods?​Still, the looking feels important. If images are becoming less reliable, or perhaps obsolete, does their fallibility predicate a return to first-hand experience? Art has, at its best, always been good at showing us how unreliable reality can be, and how feeling can come from out of nowhere.

Obsolescence - Rare Effect returned for its fifth edition from 7-16th November 2024. The 10-day programme featured an Open Call for digital art exhibition across the venue, live jams & music club nights, film programming, and emerging technology workshops investigating what’s next in AI, blockchain, and electronic arts.

Continuing to build upon the theme of migration we explored in 2022, we are expanded the conversation to the wider reality of obsolescence. The deterioration of cultural and natural ecologies has become increasingly apparent, and we felt that it was urgent to situate ourselves within this reality. Imagining hopeful or dire extremes, art helps us to address our position within the world we inhabit, while providing possible avenues for adaptability, perseverance, and resilience.

In collaboration with Refraction Festival and Artdao, we've put together 10 days of digital art, music, and more.

Artists were taking concepts of visualization, sound, and their various forms, blending them together to create cutting-edge audio-visual works that merge our senses into a single collective experience.

We had stunning works of our resident artists Eric Hanu and Burst.

Volume 3 of Europe’s first crypto art festival brought together more than 90 artists, from October 27th to November 6th 2022, at Arroz Estúdios. Rare Effect challenges and explores the relationship between physical and digital space, creating a bridge to the metaverse.
In Vol. 3, the festival featured national and international artists, including interactive installations and performances, with virtual reality, augmented reality, light installations and sculptures.The program also featured 10 days of music, with recognized artists, panels on crypto art, Web3 and cryptocurrencies. Staying true to the philosophy of presenting the possibilities of future technologies to local and international artists and creatives, Rare Effect Vol. 3 brought innovative exhibitions, shared the use of tokenization/NFTs and crypto wallets, as well as provoked visitors to interact with art installations and breaked through some of the existing barriers between what is physical and what is digital.

This year’s edition also seeked to raise awareness about the issues surrounding migration. “Migration is happening all around us. It is part of the annual cycle of many animals and is necessary for our acceleration in the technological world. As humans, we have developed the ability to migrate, but this is not always a privilege granted to all of us,” maintained the organizers.
Rare Effect was envisioned, conceived and built from a community of artists, creators and enthusiasts from around the world.

Rare Effect vol2 was a 10-day cultural program, featuring a digital crypto art NFT exhibition and live music performances. It happened physically at Arroz Estudios in Lisbon and virtually in the metaverse developing the portal between physical and digital arts. The event combined 2D & 3D digital displays, AR & VR exhibits, as well as performance art and live-streamed music acts.

The program included artworks from burst, Gene Kogan, Sean Mick, Miguel Rodrigues + Grandpa's Lab, Sylvain Souklaye & Will Da Costa, as well as performances from Mim Suleiman, Mosca, Ransom Note (w/ Bawrut, Lakuti & Manfredas), Violet b2b Photonz & DAO Records.

Throughout the exhibition, visitors were able to interact with the art on display, installations and performances through the use of decentralised finance (crypto currencies) and a digital wallet to play around with crypto-economics concepts.

Rare Effect was the first digital and crypto art exhibition presented by the international collective Art Progression Now. Rare Effect invited all visitors to rethink provenance, ownership and distribution of Art.
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The first part from 10 to 20 of February 2021 on Cryptovoxels with the second happening later in March physically at Arroz Estudios and virtually. The exhibition features a combination of visual projections, 2D & 3D digital displays, (AR & VR) exhibits, as well as performance art and live streams.

Throughout the exhibition, visitors were able to interact with the art on display, installations and performances through the use of decentralised finance (crypto currencies) and a digital wallet to play around with the crypto-economics concepts of Rare, Fair and Rekkt.