Julijonas Urbonas
Julijonas Urbonas is an artist, researcher, and engineer whose practice moves between extraterrestrial art, critical design, amusement park engineering, performative architecture, choreography, and science fiction. A former Pro-Rector of the Vilnius Academy of Arts and former director of a Soviet amusement park in Klaipėda, he is currently an associate professor at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and the founder of the Lithuanian Space Agency. At the core of his work is the concept of gravitational aesthetics—an approach that exploits the manipulation of gravity to push the body and imagination to their extremes, yielding projects ranging from a fatal roller coaster to an artificial asteroid composed entirely of human bodies
Informed by postphenomenology, space medicine, and particle physics, his work has been presented at major art, design, and architecture biennials worldwide, including the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021. He received the Award of Distinction in Interactive Art at Prix Ars Electronica in 2010, and his works are held in the collections of the Lithuanian Art Museum, the X Museum Beijing, and the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.
