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 5th 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 forthcoming Festival is 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.

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This year’s Share Festival in Torino has been postponed. You will have to wait a little longer for this year’s Share Festival in Torino: “Market Forces” has turned out to be the theme of Share 2009 in more ways than we expected. This means that Share will not be held as planned in March 2009 but will now take place at 4th/8th of November 2009.

In recent months we have campaigned untiringly to prevent spending cuts to art and culture due to the economic recession. In the interview published at http://www.interviewingthecrisis.org/?p=32, Simona Lodi soughts to explain what is going on here in Torino. In support of culture and to protest the government’s spending cuts, a demonstration was held in Torino on 14th February. We were making our voices heard together with artists, directors, actors and DJs at Villa Capriglio during “Love Share”. Our efforts are already achieving important results, in the form of greater visibility in the media, sharper attention from institutions, and a broader audience.

The global difficulties of the moment have prompted us to stop and think profoundly. Together with our guest curator Andy Cameron, we have asked ourselves what we really want and do not want to do in the future. This pause for reflection has brought us to the decision to re-design the Share Festival in terms of its contents, and tie the initiative more closely to other events in Torino connected with music, entertainment and drama in the hi-tech field. We also hope to establish a closer dialogue with the local mainstream art system, as we believe that such a dialogue can only strengthen our activities and boost our ability to stage a more creative Share Festival of greater interest and appeal. For these reasons we have decided to postpone the Share Festival to 4th-8th November, 2009 – a month dedicated to contemporary art in Torino – so as to work on refreshing the project and building closer ties with our colleagues from other festivals.

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MARKET FORCES

The market is the place where commerce and culture meet. The market is an arena, a battle ground where questions of value and chaos, of meaning and randomness, politics and economics, collide and clash. The market, and the dynamics of the market, constitutes the theme of Share 2009 - Market Forces.

Art practice is becoming increasingly relational - like the market - and less representational. This move towards the transaction as the privileged form of communication is having profound effects on culture in material, symbolic and strategic  ways. Exchange is everything.

The informatic dream promoted by neo-liberals and techno-libertarians considers that the world is flat, that flows of money, energy and culture can move without hindrance, that there is no friction, no discontinuity, no disruption. At the heart of this dream is the idea that there is nothing beyond the free flow of information,  nothing external to it, that connection is everything and that everything is connected. This dream of a world without friction clashes with our experience of a more complicated reality, with its uneven patterns of distribution, difficult meetings and local tensions.

The world is not flat, it’s complex. And it is complexity, rather than informatics, which characterises our reality - different things connected in different ways, self organising, emergent, open and adaptive, born locally, but with global reach, always unstable and therefore always evolving.

It is within this context that Share Festival 2009 addresses the specific relationship between artistic innovation and corporate communication. Creative innovation is a vital corporate strategy for breaking through ever denser flows of information and reaching the customer/spectator. At the same time, market forces themselves are helping us to define critical approaches to media art.

‘No theory today is outside the market’ Theodor Adorno

Andy Cameron