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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 Festival in 2009 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.
Share Festival emerged from the Piemonte Share Cluster which deals with multimedia productions through the projects Action Sharing and Share Crossing.
