REALITIES – Patchlab_Festival 2019, designed by Behzad Shahravan and NONSTOPKOLOR
What will we find on the other side of the mirror?
The 8th edition of Patchlab Digital Art Festival will take place between 24 – 27 October in Krakow, Poland. During the 4-day festival, its participants will immerse themselves in virtual and augmented reality, interactive films and 360° audiovisual shows. The festival programme contains exhibitions, performances, DJ/VJ sets, workshops, meet-ups, and even a possibility to create one’s own avatar.
The theme of the 8th edition is REALITIES. Parallelly to the increasingly polarised and threatened reality, we create our digital worlds. What they are and what functions they perform will be explored during the festival.
“The key question we focus on this year is whether digital spaces isolate us from the physical world or rather broaden our perception and functioning in our reality,” says Elwira Wojtunik, the Artistic Director of Patchlab Festival. “The artworks presented during the festival make us reflect on contemporary problems such as the modern refugee crisis (VitRails by Collectif Continuum), the self-creation of digital identity in the social media (Faced2faced by Natalia Alfutova) or functioning in a world where physical and virtual realities overlap (Hyper-Reality by Keiichi Matsuda).”
The Lacuna Shifts, a poetic VR experience inspired by Alice in Wonderland immerses spectators in the world on the other side of the mirror, where nothing is as it seems. There will also be a unique opportunity to explore the contaminated Chernobyl area immersing into the Chernobyl VR Project. Participants can enter the world of @Sufferosa, the world’s first interactive Instagram movie directed by The Kissinger Twins. This cutting-edge thriller and satire on the cult of youth will be shown for the first time as an interactive installation. The Warsaw-based group PanGenerator – the winners of the Polityka Passport Award in the category of Digital Culture in 2019 – will present an interactive, kinetic audiovisual sculpture, inspired by the character of Mickey Mouse.
These are only a few tips out of the entire selection of the installations exhibited in the Małopolska Garden of Arts and the Contemporary Art Gallery Bunkier Sztuki.
Thomas Köner (DE), a well-recognised musician, whose works were commissioned by the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay in Paris, as well as Franck Vigroux (FR), Nicholas Carn (UK) and Robert B. Lisek (PL) will perform their audiovisual, immersive 360° projects.
Thanks to the collaboration with the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, viewers will watch a wide selection of the best animations awarded by this world-class event.
Moreover, during the workshops led by Olga Wroniewicz from the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw the participants will have a chance to create and design their own AR projects.
A great variety of presented art pieces will enable the spectators to experience with many senses, in line with Marshall McLuhan’s statement that “not biased perception to one sense, but the recognised perception along with all senses is the real perception’ (M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (MIT Press, 1994), page 46.)
During this year’s edition, the festival will host 40 artists from Austria, Brazil, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Hungary, United Kingdom, Italy, Russia and Japan.
Patchlab Digital Art Festival is an annual event for art, based on the latest technologies and new media. In 2019 Patchlab Festival received the ‘EFFE Label 2019-2020’ – a quality stamp of European Festivals Association (EFA) awarded to remarkable art festivals for their engagement in the field of art, community involvement and international openness.