DEAF07 Dutch Electronic Art Festival - Interact or Die!
In a world dominated by an omnipresence of media and telecommunications we are expected to act in and with the networks these systems create. Interactivity in this context becomes an intrinsic part of our societal, political and economic ideals creating new forms of cultural and social structures. Our positions as participating citizens, creative consumers or critical activists force us into the role of being co-author or determinant element of the landscape of (media)realities we live in, in this sense interactivity is mostly promoted to fulfill social, cultural and political ideals. But direct interaction with such systems and networks often leads to unexpected and unforeseen results inspiring diversity and variation instead of fulfilling one single social and political ideal at will.
Interaction
is a characteristic of every living being. Interaction is the formation
of connections and networks, and the bringing about of organisation,
structure and memory through interplay within them. Interaction changes
bodies and objects giving rise to variation. Interaction is not a
morphing of exsisting structures but adding information to them, and
therefore the formation of thoughts and structures.
To better
understand interaction within and between networks, and the social,
cultural and artistic forms it generates, we must analyze the
principles according to which it works. In biological networks,
structures arise spontaneously through self-organization on the basis
of interactions which affect each other. Technological networks, by
contrast, are formal and stringently controlled and permit hardly any
self-organization or spontaneity. Social and cultural interaction,
however, does not fit into this binary division: it is hybrid and
continually yields surprising outcomes, even though strict control
functions are at play at the same time. Flexibility and temporariness
are therefore key terms when we talk about interaction in fields such
as art, culture, architecture and other domains.
DEAF07 is about sloppy, messy interaction: interaction whose outcome is malleable and not definitive. Yet such forms last a surprisingly long time; they are robust because they are able to continually reorganize and adapt. Rigid blueprints, that mostly understand interaction within a cause and effect process, offer no solutions to today’s big social and ecological problems, such as global warming, immigration, multiculturalism, cultural dynamics and the effects of globalization. In these processes, interaction is unfolding messily, and in much more elusive ways than we ever suspected. DEAF07 thus will address the questions of how organization and structure arise through this kind of interaction, and how they become effective. These questions are being considered from artistic, architectural, social, political and cognitive perspectives.
DEAF07 will show us the results of this for art, culture and science, in theory and in practice. Projects vary from the tactical use of media and networks by artists and activists to sub-themes such as cultural dynamics. Topics include the design of networks and interaction in and between them; the relationship between power, control and self-organization in technological systems and in social networks; and the demand for diversity and variation in a globalization process whose hallmark is standardization.
Video's in this album: https://vimeo.com/album/1984835
Part of the text of the lecture by John McCormick for the Future Moves 3 workshop at DEAF00.
Seminar, part of the conference program of DEAF04.
Expert meeting about archives on new media art.
Public presentations of various archives, following an expert meeting earlier that day.
Rnul and V2_Lab have developed a tool for spatial visual installations: SpDi. In this workshop you ...
At V2_ we are thrilled to present you Spider, Spit and Broken Bells – the upcoming Haperende Mens ...
A lecture by Stephen Wilson (USA).
V2_ started 35 years ago as an artists initiative in Den Bosch. Now it's a 'Lab for Unstable Media' ...
A festival with installations, concerts, performances and sculptures. V2 presented an installation ...
Join us for a festive evening devoted to the book Machine Art in the Twentieth Century, written by ...