MF Programme

Media Art Parties

Best of Transmediale, PIKSEL, PRIX Ars Electronica, Japan Media Art Festival.

20 June, Sunday

The Solyanka Club:

21:30 — Media art party, the best from Japan Media Art Festival and Transmediale Berlin festival in the club format

The Transmediale international festival for contemporary art and digital culture takes place annually in Berlin. It presents a variety of artistic viewpoints on the problem of socio-cultural influence of new technology to its audience. This year’s programme is a selection of outstanding works on this festival’s theme “Futurity Now!” It is dedicated to the year 2010 as a date that used to be synonymous with distant future. We remember how the writers and analysts of the XXth century strived to present its bright futuristic image of technological progress and social harmony. But the closer we got to the actual year 2010 the clearer it appeared that the global society is neither a utopia nor a dystopia as in the futuristic fiction, architectural projects and theories. We can even say that the future is having an identity crisis! –that’s what the authors’ of Transmediale selection eight works contemplate.

 Best works selection screening The Japan Media Arts Festival has been an annual event since 1997. Its aim is to promote the creation and development of media arts. The Festival highlights creative works of art, entertainment, animation, and manga in the new experimental variations, able to satisfy the curiosity of the Russian anime-makers. Everywhere we see the forms of the popular culture, what is then the independent and unconventional art in the land of the Rising Sun?
JMAF curators special video selection can probably answer this question. The screening will include award-winning works and jury-recommended works of art, animations, films, games, web works and others selected from among 2,592 entries from 54 nations and regions.

21 June, Monday

The Solyanka Club:

21:30 — Best of the PRIX Ars Electronica (Austria)

Ars Electronica is one of the most influential media art festivals in Europe. It establishes new trends in computer animation, digital art and sound art. It transforms the Austrian Linz into a Mecca for all those using computer technology in their art projects. And these, incidentally, are artists from seventy countries all over the world. It is this festival that pays Media Forum a friendly visit while its curator Bianca Petscher will describe what is now happening in contemporary art, how to valuate and understand it and how to organize a festival of this caliber at all. Of course there will be a screening of PRIX Ars Electronica best works selections: the first award-winning Glenn Marshall, the National Film Board of Canada group, Jeremy Clapin, Jean-François Sarazin and other media artists. For some the work shown will provide an incentive to go to Linz this autumn, for others to broaden their knowledge on the progressive tendencies in digital art.

22 June, Tuesday

The Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design:

21:30 — PIKSEL festival (Norway) presentation with the comments by Gisle Frøysland, the festival director

Art should control computer technology – the Bergen multimedia festival unites everyone of this opinion, not only artists but developers working with free and open source software, that is all the geeks absolutely sure that it’s necessary to break free form the commercial corporations control and make web technology open for creativity, whether for building operating systems or creating digital art projects. That’s why PIXEL presents a kind of most extraordinary, extra technological art that is not the art of tomorrow, but the art, say, of two weeks in advance. The goals declared by its organizers – to lay bare the connections between art, politics, economics and technology – turn into extremely borderline projects between digital art and design, animation and media architecture, performance and software engineering. The festival’s director, Gisle Frøysland plans to explain how it all works out and show the projects of the last festival f[re](e){op}[en]able he thinks of as most interesting. His attention is focused on the artistic practices based on technological freedom, and the free-open-able pun in the 2009 theme chosen by the organizers is empowered by the PIXEL «Free as in Art» regular motto.

23 June, Wednesday 

The Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design:

21:30 — PRIX Ars Electronica presentation with the comments by curator Bianca Patcher