CYBERFEST 2012 COMPILATION
Digital only. This compilation is an excerpt from the sound-art program of 2012’s CYBERFEST in St. Petersburg, Russia – curated by Sergey Komarov. Published December 2012, CAA#1. Includes an excerpt of my Choking Disklavier works – free download on Bandcamp.
CYBERFEST is the first and only annual Russian International Media Arts festival founded in 2007 by artists and curators Anna Frants and Marina Koldobskaya. Since 2007 the festival is held in Saint-Petersburg (Russia) on the basis of Media Art Laboratory CYLAND. The festival’s partners include the leading art institutions and museums, such as the Hermitage Youth Education Center, Saint-Petersburg State University, the Association of Contemporary Art Galleries, Creative Space TKACHI and others.
CYBERFEST program includes:
— an exhibition (of media objects and media installations);
— live performances;
— sound and video art programs;
— an educational program (with lectures, workshops, master classes);
— an Internet conference;
— a concert.
Each year the festival gathers more than 80 artists and art professionals from more than 20 countries. CYBERFEST’s map covers the globe from the U.S. to the Philippines, from Germany to Japan, from Canada to Brazil, from Finland to Italy.
CYBERFEST is a democratic festival, where newcomers participate on a par with the stars from media art world. The festival aims to develop the Russian media art scene by creating a network of professional contacts around the world and engaging new participants in it.
This compilation is an excerpt from sound-art program curated by Sergey Komarov, released 12 December 2012.
“The modern Homo sapiens cannot be amazed by anything from yesterday. He saw everything and knows everything. Media fiercely struggle every day for every millimeter of the spiritual response and withdraw from the occupied territories only after having trice verified that they had depleted them all the way. The ingenuity of media art reaches fantastic proportions. Artists are compelled to grow the longest legs for their works in order to carefully thread the scorched earth. With every passing day, they construct most complex neural networks for an abstract presentation of their thought. In retrospect, one can notice that the naiveté and simplicity of the past came to its contemporaries only through hard work, advanced thinking and remarkable ingenuity. Nowadays, it is still the same. The cutting edge of avant-garde, the frontline where brainstorms would never cease, lies on some other territories. Our program has two poles – at the one, there are pioneers of electronic sound, trailblazers in the use of computers and algorithms in a new and unusual role, fiercely connecting computers with analog synthesizers, and at the other, there are contemporary sound designers who deliberately abandoned the result of the modern computerization of studios and instruments; they only use the simplest and, at times, even primitive equipment. It should be noted that, as often as not, these are computer programmers, which emphasizes the irony of this round of evolution. The space between these two poles is, in fact, the content of our program "Unprecedented Worlds" that are created by the artists who look at one another through time.”
Sergey Komarov,
CYLAND, curator of sound art archive