Festival as a Lab

This May has been a month of away games for intolight. We have been invited to two festivals, both aiming to foster media and media arts but very different in their approach.

 

The first was Future Everything in Manchester, a festival with a history of 15 years, a quite large budget and international impact. Equipped with national sponsoring the festival tries to establish a media habitat in the former industry metropolis. Art and networking are to bring fresh impulses to the city. Within the framework of the ECAS-grant we won earlier this year we were invited to present our latest work, the Switchboy.

 

Hundreds of other delegates from theory and practice came to discuss networked urbanity, mobility and of course open data. These intellectual debates were complemented by an exhibition and a handful of workshops. The evening program was distributed all over the city, first class concerts and performances were open to participants without fees and queues. The whole event was organised very professionally (thanks to Drew Hemment and Joanna Szlauterbach) in order to deliver as much input to as much interested people. In fact we had the opportunity to showcase our work to a broad audience. The aspiration to be a "Festival as a Lab" did hardly manifest, however.

 

The opposite was the small Art On Wires. Oslo is a pulsing and rich city, the festival took place for a second time without a greater commission than to allow for exchange and knowledge transfer outside the usual academical context. Two enthusiastic Germans (Alexander Eichhorn and Ulli Dibowski) hand-picked invitees in the fields of computer science and contemporary dance, computer graphics and media research, music to forge a lucid but nevertheless diverse core of people. Everybody was asked to pass on knowledge and experiences in talks, workshops and performances. There was plenty of time to experiment with new technics and of course to socialise.

 

This way Art on Wires lefthandedly managed to manifest, what Future Everything tried to accomplish: The festival became a lab, became living improvisation. Musicians and dancers used hacked kinects, children built small robots from electronic scrap, network admins got their hands dirty with soldering lamps with inherent swarm intelligence, and we were able to play around with polarised light. At the end of the festival a partnership with this years NIME conference broadened the horizon of the festival even further.

 

Our resume is clear: when a festival wants to act as a lab, it needs a certain intimacy. It must feel like a summer camp rather then a trade fair. This needs Time and a small group of specialised people, that are open to interdisciplinary work. 

Huge events such as Future Everything have a much harder stand to create such a situation. Its format is much more appropriate for showcasing existing works and exchange of theoretical thought, rather than changing the leopards spots in a hands-on kinda way.