SIMPLICITY - the art of complexity until 5.09 , Linz (Austria)

Our world’s increasing complexity and its tension-filled interplay with our own growing need for a comprehensive, comprehensible overview of the world will occupy the focal point of attention at the 2006 Ars Electronica Festival. This theme is the common denominator of a feature-packed calendar of events, conferences, symposia, exhibitions and performances that will comprehensively showcase the state of the art of global media culture.


See the online program

Mute Vol 2 #2 - Dis-integrating Multiculturalism OUT NOW

Since the advent of multiculturalism in the 1970s, the redefinition of race in cultural terms has gone hand in hand with an official discourse of respect for cultural difference and diversity. Today, in the wake of 9/11, the rhetoric of tolerance is visibly breaking down. As state policy shifts from the celebration of difference to an anxious call for assimilation, the racial other (whether citizen or immigrant) is under renewed pressure to integrate herself into society.

In this issue of Mute, contributors read the crisis of multiculturalism – political, scientific and social – as both a neoliberal offensive and a challenge to rethink the relationship between particular identities and universal rights, evolutionary science and biopower.

Texts by: George Caffentzis, Matthew Hyland, Daniel Jewesbury, Marek Kohn, Eric Krebbers, Hari Kunzru, Melancholic Troglodytes, Angela Mitropoulos, Luciana Parisi, Benedict Seymour

Impakt Festival 23.-27.08 Utrecht (NL)

The Great Outdoors,
This year, the Impakt Festival takes place in August for a change. We have included many outdoors activities to give the festival a real summertime feeling. You can barbecue every evening at the AV-BBQ, while some remarkable films are being screened in the open air. In the Floating Cinema, you can watch films while sailing through the canals of Utrecht. Every afternoon, there is an Audio Picnic with live music in the garden of the Centraal Museum. Apart from all these outdoor projects, the Impakt Festival will also include the first Dutch solo exhibition of the Swiss artist Olaf Breuning. The visual artist Hans Op de Beeck from Belgium will give a general overview of his works in two film programs. A number of film programs will draw attention to street art. The music program will be varied as ever, including not only breakcore, dubstep and minimal techno, but also a performance by the Englishman Phillip Jeck that will serve as an accompaniment to the old Soviet film Battleship Potemkin. The slightly weird Apparat Organ Quartet from Iceland will give a concert on the opening night. To top it all, the Feed project by Kurt Hentschläger from Austria will immerse visitors in a unique audiovisual experience they will not easily forget.

< Up Dating Art and Technology > 17.18.19.08 Cultural Centre of Spain in Santiago (Chile)

< Up Dating Art and Technology > A series of conferences that will aboard the limits between art and technology from expiriencies made by artits, will take part during 6 pm through 9 pm. in the Cultural Centre of Spain in Santiago, during the days 17th, 18th and 19th of August, and broadcated online to Espacio H in the city of Cordoba, Argentine. Thus corresponding to the first step, since between the days 24th to 26th of August, will be broadcasted the 8th Digitale Day Works , from Cordoba to the School of Arts in the city of Valparaiso.

The shrinking of electronic devices, the democratization of the access to information, the speed of the data transfer, the new destribution systems for decentralised information, the new techniques of genetic maipulation, the personal computers and the wireless communication are just some of the phenomenas produced from the digital revolution. Chile, as a nation, direct or undirectly, has not been excempt to these changes which have been manifestated in many different contexts:

Firstly; the images of the planet Mars shown in Eugenio Dittborn´s Fugitiva catalogue, were taken from the NASA...
Visit the site.

State of the Image Festival 2006 04-09.09 Arnhem (NL)

From 4 up to and including 9 September 2006 the festival ‘State of the Image’ takes place in the centre of Arnhem. For the experts in the audiovisual business and the media line there are readings, workshops and master classes. But also for the general public there’s much to see and to do. Interactive movies which the viewer itself can exert influence on the course of the movie. The public can actually see and make knowledge of with the production of a lot of art films, video clips and games. The last night will be spectacular with a VJ performance of nobody less than Peter Greenaway.

Peter Greenaway is a well-known movie director from among others the cult movie The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover. Another international guest is Chris Hales, a pioneer in the field of interactive film. Three nights the public can enjoy watching the screens and, with live actors, the public can exert influence in the course of the story.

Arnhem has a wide history in the field of experimental and renewal video productions and the organisation shows it with the programme component Square Eyes. How are digital films get manipulated? And what does it mean for the people watching it?

A diversity of digital films and movies, produced in The Netherlands and in foreign countries, is shown. But also Audio Visual artists from this particular area can show themselves. For the youngsters among us, there will be workshops to get familiar with interactive media.

A varied program for young and old, for people making and people watching it.
Visit the site.

Container Culture San Jose (USA)

Container Culture is an exhibition developed by the Curatorial Working Group of the Pacific Rim New Media Summit. Each curator has selected one or more emerging regional artists to present at ZeroOne San Jose / ISEA2006, using a shipping container as not onlly its means of transportation but also as the "white cube" for its exhibition.
One of the most significant examples of cross-cultural encounters in contemporary art is the traveling exhibition. The traveling art exhibition has often served to operationalize and exemplify the cross-cultural encounters and exchanges that are deemed “necessary” and “natural” in the globalized art world. However, a range of social, political, economic and art historical differences generally complicate the globally themed traveling exhibition. The artists in traveling exhibitions are rarely able to adequately respond to each new context through their works, which is what these exhibitions are meant to initiate. The traveling exhibition thus converts each new cultural context to, essentially, an empty container for the art works, with little ability to respond to the exhibition site as physical location.

Container Culture is an exhibition of art works that travel from different port cities that rim the Pacific in standardized containers to San Jose to be presented alongside each other; almost like a conference of containers. In an ironic reversal of the tendency of conventional traveling exhibitions to convert every new space into an empty container, this exhibition invites curators and artists from each of these diverse port cities to convert a container into a culturally specific space. The exhibition conceptually draws on and will explore some of the following notions:

* Ports are liminal nodes that have traditionally and still negotiate the relations between countries. Ports invoke a whole set of related concepts: commerce, exchange values, customs procedures, border anxieties, legal trade vs. illegal traffic, etc.
* Containers are “spaces” that mimic the white cube as an empty “container,” even while potentially enabling the subversion of the white cube's immobility by their portability; its transcendence by their quotidian-ness; its neutrality by their border crossings.
* Transportation of artworks traveling in space and time between countries enables culturally specific elements of one place to migrate to another. Related concepts of location, speed, logistics, proximity and distance can also be explored
* Networks. Transporting shipping containers from one port city to another maps a network of economic relationships. By specifically curating new media installations, Container Culture investigates the effect of virtual networks to create real cultural connections. The site for full information.

ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge & the Thirteenth International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA2006) AUGUST 7-13, 2006

For seven consecutive days this summer, nearly 200 juried artists from around the world will be converging on the Silicon Valley to showcase some of the most innovative, astounding art ever seen or experienced. It’s ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge and ISEA2006 Symposium. From August 7-13, ZeroOne San Jose will transform the entire city into the North American epicenter for the intersection of art and digital culture. It is a multi-dimensional, startling and brilliant event featuring exhibits, live cinema, performances, workshops, and youth activities. All are one-of-a-kind, many never-before, only-here experiences. See 01sj.org