A few months ago, the festival accès)s( in Pau (France) invited the audience to have a critical look at the idea of a techno-driven progress, at a propaganda machine that promise that new ‘advances’ in information and communication technologies will solve our problems and fulfill the dreams we don’t even know we had. All we need to do is update, upgrade and replace our devices
Category Archive: other reports
Where are we heading? What are the conditions of survival for our region and the world at large? What are the struggles and what kind of strategies do we need for survival?
The Survival Kit festival explored the theme of local and global survival through the lenses of visual art, music, food, discussions and lectures.
The most compelling part of the day for me was when i discovered the nominees of the Digital Storytelling competition. Because the focus of the selection is as much on new forms of interactivity as it is on strategies to weave a compelling story, all the projects were deep, multi-layered and compelling. Some took me ages to explore. Take the super addictive podcast of the now cult “Serial” for example…
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Finally! I found some time to type down my notes from the DocLab: Interactive Conference, a one-day event that looked at how artists, film makers, designers and entrepreneurs are exploring digital behaviour and redefining the documentary genre in the digital age
A few days ago, the Haus der elektronischen Künste (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel inaugurated its new premises with a three-day festival of drones, music performances, immersive data explorations and giant mushrooms.
HeK space is a cultural center dedicated to the new art forms of the information age. The programme is as sleek and geek as its buildings be but its spirit is critical and inquisitive. HeK takes technology out of consumer culture and looks at its more meaningful, socially-engaged or aesthetic uses
Retail Poisoning is the act of intentionally injecting: critical / corrupt / fake / glitched data and/or hardware, in existing online and offline retail outlets
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Upper Space took up the renovated engine room of a former cotton mill in Manchester to organize a series of exhibition, workshops, screenings, talks and public interventions that invited citizens of Greater Manchester to reflect on possible alternative and resistance to ‘consumerism and the disempowerment that it represents’
Speculative designer Lisa Ma is looking for the relevance of Luddism in the modern era by shifting focus from digital and communications technologies to the innovations of biotechnology industries. These biotechnologies which have started to pervade the food, health and ecological systems will undoubtedly attract their own forms of luddism. So who are the BioLuddites? Where are the group and individuals who ask for a demystification of biotechnologies and who are calling for a public debate about GMOs, systems ecology, hormone replacement, etc?
This year’s edition of the GLITCH festival in Dublin examines how artists use new media to investigate social and political systems to find their position within and in relation to these larger systems. In this fuzzy zone of information production, where boundaries and roles are increasingly blurred, the exhibition deploys humour and critique to reconfigure our ideas about our current digital economic climate
FIELDS investigates the place of contemporary art practices in society and the role artists can take not just as generators of new aesthetics but also as catalysts of active involvement in social, scientific, and technological transformations. While some of the works in the show present a critique of ongoing political or ecological issues, others go a step further by suggesting positive visions for the future
Critical Exploits showed how a new generation of artists, designers and engineers are taking a highly critical approach to the development and use of the engineered systems and infrastructures that we increasingly rely on for daily life
Showcasing a comprehensive selection of the group’s diverse output, the exhibition includes video, software, net art, installation, and performance. F.A.T. Lab members will also be creating and hacking on new, cutting-edge projects to be added to the exhibition on the fly
n All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (a title that refers to a passage in Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. ) Deller takes a personal look at the impact of the Industrial Revolution on British popular culture, and its persisting influence on our lives today.
A couple of weeks ago, i was in Derry/Londonderry. Beautiful landscapes, super friendly people, vegan-approved yummy food at the Legenderry Warehouse, stunning socially-engages exhibitions i’ll tell you about later and a city-wide event called Lumiere. Lumiere is a festival of 17 projections and installations that lit up as the night came onto the city. It is a crowd-magnet, a place to bring your family and marvel at what artists and designers can do with light. Some of the works, however, had depth and bite
BPB12 explores how space is constructed, controlled and contested, how photography is implicated in these processes, and the tensions and possibilities this dialogue involves. This year’s Biennial provides a critical space to think about relationships between the political occupation of physical sites and the production and dissemination of images
Finally! An art & tech festival that makes sense. A festival that resonates with the media art expert and the casual passerby alike. An event that values art above in-your-face tech prowess. It was my first visit to an AND festival. I found it witty, surprising, often thought-provoking and enlightening
There’s an exhibition featuring sci-fi, history, video games, homosexuality, soap operas, censorship and a powerful sense of humour at Cornerhouse in Manchester right now. The show is called Subversion and it questions and knocks around whatever assumption you might have about an homogenous ‘Arab world’, whatever image politicians and the media might have given you about its culture and identity
Robots and Avatars invites visitors to imagine a future -not so distant from now- when the advance of technology will bring us in even closer contact with artificial intelligence and machines and force us to re-assess what we now define as ‘life.’ How do we envisage our future relationships with robotic and avatar colleagues and playmates, and what point does this evolution cross our personal boundaries of what it is to be a living, feeling human being?
Some of the works on show at Kinetica this year are candidly whimsical, others explore responsive architecture, pay homage to Jean Tinguely or to Newton’s third law, take the form of small models of celestial mechanics, or of experimental music gigs on modified Fisher Price Turntables
I like GAMERZ because it’s eclectic, because it makes me discover plenty of artists i had never heard about before but also because it reminds me that festivals should be left more often in the hands of artists. They take risk, follow their whim, trust other artists barely out of the academy, and care little about sticking to genres and formulas
This year, the organizers and curators at STRP had the admirable and timely idea of setting up an exhibition that brought the spotlight on the history of Dutch art and technology. The show was both a celebration of the talent of media artists in The Netherlands but also a gesture of support towards the Dutch new media institutes (namely V2_, Waag Society, STEIM, Mediamatic, WORM, Submarine Channel, NIMk) whose survival is threatened by drastic (and short-sighted) governmental cuts
The last edition of STRP attracted almost 30,000 visitors. They came for the concerts and parties of course, but also for the performances, exhibitions, conferences, workshops and associated events that were taking place in the city of Eindhoven. The exhibition was particularly exciting with its mix of no tech and high tech
Prédiction was the biggest exhibition of the International Design Biennial in Saint Étienne. Its ambition was to reposition the boundaries of contemporary design, exploring in over 100 artefacts and 2000 m2 the new types, methods, and practices of the discipline
Fast, furious and enthusiastic images from Sao Paulo and the 11th edition of the FILE Electronic Language International Festival, i think the report will have to wait till i’m back in Europe
The Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts has invited about a hundred artists to question society’s growing desire for control, surveillance, and regulation. A worrying tendency which leaves space for accident, irrationality, for the unexpected and the absurd
Onion scanners, tv screens used as percussion instruments, storm inside a transparent cylinder, genetically modified blue carnations brought back to their original white, techy Japanese-style glockenspiel, etc.
Paintings on silos, a new capital of Asia, typographic wallpapers, replica of Shanghai hardware store, EU Green card lottery and porcelain human bones for a biennale that celebrated contemporary artists who believe that art has to offer more than a spectacle
Refuge – Architectural Propositions for Unbound Spaces explores the causes and spatial impact of migration through voluntary or involuntary “refugees” who are transforming cities around the globe. Individuals or groups are elegantly or forcefully encapsulated from within the context of the city and society. Refuge produces an ever more atomized urban tissue where the “camp” has become both spatial paradigm and everyday reality, be it in the form of a gated community, slum, or humanitarian refugee camp
It seems that, given a choice, most Americans choose to live in a homogenous community over an heterogenous one. However, the suburban landscape of semi-public spaces that exist in between these homogenous communities reveal, here and there, what Interboro calls “spaces of encounter” where diverse social and ethnic groups coexist, interact and generate complex relationships and networks
Whether they take the Skyscraper Index seriously or not, people agree that Architecture is conditioned by the economical climate. Architectural projects were the first casualties of the current financial crash, and architects, along with bankers, were the first who suffered collective layoffs. Rien ne va Plus, an exhibition taking place at Bureau Europa in Maastricht, delves into the economic crisis and its intricate relation with architecture
The exhibition The Art of Fashion: Installing Allusions explores the intersection between fashion designers’ boldest experiments and the world of contemporary art. 25 international artists and fashion designers participate to this exhibition. 5 of them were commissioned new pieces that investigate the convergence of art and fashion
The exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam investigates the borders between fashion and art. Today’s fashion designers use installations and performances, and their designs are often more sculptural than wearable. Five of them have been commissioned to make new work specifically for the exhibition
In a series of symbiotic encounters and parasitic relationships, the solo presentations are often interrupted by incongruous presences or perturbed by unusual juxtapositions: drawings by Kara Walker surround a tomb by Urs Fischer; Maurizio Cattelan’s homeless man kneels down in front of Kiki Smith’s Bat Woman; Robert Gober’s haunted rooms incorporate Gregor Schneider’s architectural fragments, etc.
Hans Bernhard on why UBERMORGEN.COM are not activists, but ‘actionists – in the communicative and experimental tradition of viennese actionism – performing in the global media, communication and technology networks’
The symposium ‘Positions in flux’ focused on some of the major parameters for the current and future development of contemporary art. In particular it aimed to reflect on the aspect of cultural sustainability of art projects, art and technology initiatives and art curating
One year after the Brussels’ exhibition Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age, Yves Bernard from iMAL and Domenico Quaranta curate a show that, once again, puts a magnifying lens on the new media art pieces that have found their place on the art market
What happens to your online profile after you die? Do you want it to remain online, so friends can leave a message in your memory? Or do you prefer having it deleted, so no confusion can arise about your death? These questions are the inspiration for the new exhibition Ik R.I.P., the third in the series about self-representation on the internet.
For the 2009 edition of its festival, Radiator put the emphasis on the theme of the urban networked environment and its effect on our day to day lives. The organizers commissioned artists to develop projects that investigate and challenge the dominant forces at work in an increasingly hybrid and ever-changing urban environment
Mudam is Luxembourg’s very own and very classy museum of modern and contemporary art. I’ve been following their always exciting and bold programme for a couple of years and was very eager to see it but then you need a rock solid motive to spend a day in Luxembourg. The other day i woke up and decided that MUDAM would be mine
Paulistas much chagrined by the pauperism of this year’s São Paulo Biennial pointed me to its Off version. The Parlela is a selection of artists who invite us to reflect on the influence of space in their respective works. Although the selection stretches over several continents, most of the pieces are by Brazilian artists