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Piemonte Share Festival is an event dedicated to the awareness and promotion of art and digital culture, developing the creativity fuelling the new expressive possibilities offered by new media and technological innovation in general.
The initiative is sponsored by cultural association The Sharing. Consisting of Chiara Garibaldi (General Director), Simona Lodi (Artistic Director), and Luca Barbeni (Curator), The Sharing has been engaged for years in the promotion and dissemination of art and digital culture, the international exchange of knowledge, interdisciplinary contacts, cross-media platforms, and multimedia projects.
Now in its 6th year, the Festival gives a perspective on the network and expansion initiatives shared with the local territory (working with festivals such as Club to Club, View, Netmage, Malafestival, Elettrowave) and with centres for artistic research and technological innovation (such as Ars Electronica in Linz, Sonar in Barcelona, Transmediale in Berlin, and DEAF in Rotterdam).
Every year a cross-cutting theme is chosen for the content of the Festival, which ranges from conferences and performances, to a selection of the creative expressions applied to digital technologies (art, music, performances, installations, database cinema, software art, etc).
For the first Festival in 2005 the driving theme chosen was cultural flow, or Wave, which is generated through the use of digital technology and the Internet. The digital flow is also understood as a reference point for virtual communities that shape the web while generating new forms of interactivity and new waves of experimentation in art, culture and communication.
The theme of the 2006 Festival, held on occasion of the Torino 2006 XX Winter Olympics, during the Paralympic Games, was the idea of the Limitless, or the crossing of the ultimate limit. In the information technology society, this theme is the subject of an engaging intellectual debate animating research into technology. Network communications, virtual reality, intelligent environments, but also open source code, the copyright/copyleft distinction, and the Creative Commons license are the new technological and legal contexts in which we are now learning to live together, designed as they are to overcome the space-time dimension, overcome physicality, overcome the constraints of the body, and overcome the digital divide.
In 2007, which also saw the launch the Share Prize (an international award dedicated to art and digital culture), the theme was Digital Affinity/Communities Now. Great consideration was given to the processes and protocols that govern the community through creative, thoughtful, and innovative technology. Communities are not only new forms of aggregation, but a way of being and living, a collective project and a culture that today combines almost two billion people into more than just geographical clusters or families but into communities inspired by cultural, ideological and political affinities.
For the 2008 Festival, while Turin celebrated its nomination as the first World Design Capital, the science fiction writer and journalist Bruce Sterling was invited to spend 6 months in Turin to work as guest curator for the event and lend his intellectual presence to the city. The theme of the Festival was Manufacturing. Information, digital design and product design are gradually converging, anticipating the dynamic approach and interpenetration between the real world and virtual world. The focus of the event was on the dynamics that are leading us towards an integrated approach where the transition between digital and analogue is a natural and two-way one.
The sweeping theme of the last Festival was Market Forces. With the agreement of our guest curator Andy Cameron (creative director of Fabrica’s Interactive Design department) we have chosen this theme for the correspondences and conflicts that arise from market forces and culture. The market is an arena, a battle ground where questions of value and chaos, of meaning and randomness, politics and economics, collide and clash.
Art in practice is becoming increasingly relational - like the market - and less representational. This move towards the transactional as a privileged form of communication is having profound effects on culture in material, symbolic and strategic ways. Exchange is everything.
SMART MISTAKES is the title of the next edition that will be from the 2nd till the 7th of November at the Regional Museum of Natural Science of Torino.
This year, the VI Piemonte Share Festival will be focusing on the artistic and cultural significance of error, in all its broader senses. The creative potential of analysing and looking into what lies behind an error is truly great, as it represents the uncovering of an issue. Which is of particular interest in this year of global emergencies. The issue uncovered then demands attention, which in turn elicits controversy, while it is controversy that generates solutions and innovation.
In the art and culture of our digital age, does error still play the role of instigating change and activating value?
Share Festival emerged from the Piemonte Share Cluster which deals with multimedia productions through the projects Action Sharing and Share Crossing.
