By Suzanne Davis
What happens when an art museum beloved by the world’s glitterati goes off-script—and into the algorithm? This July, the Aspen Art Museum unveils AIR 2025: Life As No One Knows It, a sweeping new initiative that’s part public festival, part retreat, and entirely unlike anything the Rockies have seen before.
Running July 29–August 1, 2025, the program is a high-altitude playland for the senses—where artists, thinkers, and coteries of the simply curious come together for three days of experimental performances, mind-expanding talks, and late-night gatherings, all anchored by lead sponsorship from luxury jewelry company, Lugano.
“We envisioned the program for AIR 2025 as a kind of rhythm you can fall into,” says Vic Brooks, Aspen Art Museum’s Curator at Large. “Each day unfolds in tune with the diurnal cycle and shifts between registers.” In other words, the schedule breathes like nature itself.
Adrián Villar Rojas, Two Suns, 2015. Unfired clay and cement recreation of David by Michelangelo, blackout curtains, handmade tiles (cement, sand, turba, and pigments) embedded with organic, inorganic, human and machine-made matter collected in New York, Kalba, Rosario and Ushuaia. Courtesy: Marian Goodman Gallery. Photography by Jörg Baumann.
Mornings begin in a dream state with a collaborative film-performance by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Rafiq Bhatia. Afternoons hum with provocation, featuring a series of talks—punctuated hourly by the sounding of Indigenous artist Cannupa Hanska Luger’s chorus of ancestral whistles—while evenings melt into music, movement, and twilight communion.
“It’s not just about watching or listening,” Brooks adds, “But about being fully present and participating. I hope visitors will feel that charge in the air.”
The title—Life As No One Knows It— is drawn from physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker’s book of the same name, which proposes a radical rethinking of what constitutes life. The concept imagines life not as we’ve known it, but as what it might become: emergent, unpredictable, and increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and synthetic forms—like elk calves wobbling through the Maroon Bells, on their way to being stags.
“We were drawn to this idea as a way of framing the world we’re living in now,” says Brooks, “A world where both ourselves and our environment are increasingly composed of interwoven natural and artificial life forms and systems. Art and its sensory capacities can help us navigate the unfathomable scale of this shift—and help us reflect on what it means to be alive, and to act with agency.”
One moment not to miss: Artist Paul Chan’s performance, which takes the form of a live discussion with “Paul”—an AI-generated version of himself—to explore the dimensions of the false self and the possibilities of synthetic subconscious. Expect an uncanny, witty dive into the world of simulated souls—and with it, perhaps, ourselves.
If past summer events were sneak previews—like mountaintop performances by Ryan Trecartin and Jason Moran, or surreal Smuggler Mine by Matt Copson and composer Olivia Leith —this is the full symphony.
“Those earlier experiments became the blueprint,” says Daniel Merritt, Chief Curator at the Aspen Art Museum. “They built a dedicated community around them—one we’re excited to expand.”
The air might be thin in Aspen, but the ideas are thick.
Visit www.airaspen.org for more information.