Life As No One Knows It
A week of radical imagination, art, and exchange in Aspen.
AIR brings together artists, scientists, technologists, cultural leaders, and audiences to gather in Aspen’s alpine landscape. The program begins with a closed-door retreat and culminates in a free public festival featuring performances, newly commissioned artworks, and interdisciplinary dialogues.
What does it mean to be human at a time when life itself must be redefined? AIR 2025 creates the conditions for a different kind of attention—one that allows the subconscious to surface, and for meaning to be felt before it is named. The gathering takes inspiration from Paul Chan’s multi-year odyssey in programming a synthetic self-portrait through artificial intelligence and Sara Imari Walker’s challenge to conventional definitions of life in her book Life As No One Knows It, from which AIR 2025 takes its name. The renowned artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney will headline the future-facing program, which draws inspiration from the historic Aspen International Design Conference, where pioneering figures such as John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Sontag, and Steve Jobs convened between 1949 and 2006.
Commissions & Performances
Each day of AIR 2025 showcases bold new site-specific works by a global roster of artists working across sound, movement, sculpture, film, and performance. Matthew Barney stages a large-scale performance in a former drill hall, André 3000 offers a meditative set blending spiritual jazz with transcendental flute, Cannupa Hanska Luger conjures a chorus of ancestral whistles, Mimi Park crafts an evolving sculptural ecosystem, Jota Mombaça delivers a three-act opera in response to Aspen’s natural landscape, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Rafiq Bhatia present an electro-acoustic film performance, Sophia Al-Maria joins forces with musician Davia Spain to summon an otherworldly transmission—part séance, part song-cycle, part science-fictional lament—and Paul Chan introduces a conversation with Paul′, an AI-generated portrait of himself.
The projects evoke the poetics of human acts—singing, breathing, dreaming, communicating—and respond to Aspen’s landscape, history, and spirit. Together, they invite new forms of communion, resistance, and transformation.