CIMATICS PLATFORM / Brussels

New Cities
Cimatics festival theme 2009

Cimatics is an audiovisual festival that is closely connected to contemporary digital and urban practice. The next edition of Cimatics festival aims at encouraging all projects that explicitly focus on the relation of both cultures.

This theme is not a statement but utters the question of how to approach digital and urban culture not as 2 separate layers, but as a single given.

The festival is an ongoing experiment with 'format'. What was initially a festival for VJing and soon after for Live Audiovisual Art has now become an ongoing curatorial experiment. With the extended scope on not only the selection of works of art around a specific theme, but with at least as much attention for the compositorial and conceptual aspects of the event as such, we aim at creating a Happening.

Cimatics festival 09 as Happing with this specific approach of 'the digital and the urban' as a central theme, will try to incorporate its survey into all aspects of the 'exhibition' as an audiovisual event exposing digital culture by attaching to the urban infrastructure // exposing urban culture by attaching to the digital infrastructure: transport, communication, marketing, accommodation, design, catering, economy, ecology...

These ideas are greatly inspired by the work of Nicolas Bourriaud (Relational Aesthetics) and Lev Manovich' latest book 'Software Culture'. The first states that 'the urban' has been penetrating all aspects of contemporary society (and especially art), while the latter gives 'software' the same authority.

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Artwork as social interstice

The possibility of a relational art (an art taking its theoretical horizon on the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space), points to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by modern art. To sketch a sociology, this evolution stems essentially from the birth of a world-wide urban culture, and from the extension of this city model to more or less all cultural phenomena. The general growth of towns and cities, which took off at the end of the Second World War, gave rise not only to an extraordinary upsurge of social exchanges, but also to a much greater individual mobility (through the development of networks and roads, and telecommunications, and the gradual freeing-up of isolated places, going with the opening up of attitudes). Because of the crampedness of dwelling spaces in this urban world, there was, in tandem, a scaling down of furniture and objects, now emphasising a greater manoeuvrability.

If, for a long period of time, the artwork has managed to come across as a luxury, lordly item in this urban setting (the dimensions of the work, as well as those of the apartment, helping to distinguish between their owner and the crowd), the development of the function of artworks and the way they are shown attest to a growing urbanisation of the artistic experiment. What is collapsing before our very eyes is nothing other than this falsely aristocratic conception of the arrangement of works of art, associated with the feeling of territorial acquisition. In other words, it is no longer possible to regard the contemporary work as a space to be walked through (the "owner's tour" is akin to the collector's). It is henceforth presented as a period of time to be lived through, like an opening to unlimited discussion. The city has ushered in and spread the hands-on experience: it is the tangible symbol and historical setting of the state of society, that "state of encounter imposed on people", to use Althusser's expression, contrasting with that dense and "trouble-free" jungle which the natural state once was, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a jungle hampering any lasting encounter. Once raised to the power of an absolute rule of civilisation, this system of intensive encounters has ended up producing linked artistic practices: an art form where the substrate is formed by inter-subjectivity, and which takes being-together as a central theme, the "encounter" between beholder and picture, and the collective elaboration of meaning. Let us leave the matter of the historicity of this phenomenon on one side: art has always been relational in varying degrees, i.e. a factor of sociability and a founding principle of dialogue. One of the virtual properties of the image is its power of linkage (Fr. reliance), to borrow Michel Maffesoli's term: flags, logos, icons, signs, all produce empathy and sharing, and all generate bond. Art (practices stemming from painting and sculpture which come across in the form of an exhibition) turns out to be particularly suitable when it comes to expressing this hands-on civilisation, because it tightens the space of relations, unlike TV and literature which refer each individual person to his or her space of private consumption, and also unlike theatre and cinema which bring small groups together before specific, unmistakable images.

Actually, there is no live comment made about what is seen (the discussion time is put off until after the show). At an exhibition, on the other hand, even when inert forms are involved, there is the possibility of an immediate discussion, in both senses of the term. I see and perceive, I comment, and I evolve in a unique space and time. Art is the place that produces a specific sociability. It remains to be seen what the status of this is in the set of "states of encounter" proposed by the City. How is an art focused on the production of such forms of conviviality capable of re-launching the modern emancipation plan, by complementing it? How does it permit the development of new political and cultural designs? [...]

[...] The school and the hospital, the military base and the scientific laboratory, the airport and the city—all social, economic, and cultural systems of modern society—run on software. Software is the invisible glue that ties it all together. While various systems of modern society speak in different languages and have different goals, they all share the syntaxes of software: control statements “if/then” and “while/do”, operators and data types including characters and floating point numbers, data structures such as lists, and interface conventions encompassing menus and dialog boxes.

If electricity and the combustion engine made industrial society possible, software similarly enables gllobal information society. The “knowledge workers”, the “symbol analysts”, the “creative industries”, and the “service industries” - all these key economic players of information society can’t exist without software. Data visualization software used by a scientist, spreadsheet software used a financial analyst, Web design software used by a designer working for a transnational advertising energy, reservation software used by an airline. Software is what also drives the process of globalization, allowing companies to distribute management nodes, production facilities, and storage and consumption outputs around the world. Regardless of which new dimension of contemporary existence a particular social theory of the last few decades has focused on—information society, knowledge society, or network society—all these new dimensions are enabled by software.

[...]

I think there are good reasons for supporting this perspective. I think of software as a layer that permeates all areas of contemporary societies. Therefore, if we want to understand contemporary techniques of control, communication, representation, simulation, analysis, decision-making, memory, vision, writing, and interaction, our analysis can't be complete until we consider this software layer. Which means that all disciplines which deal with contemporary society and culture – architecture, design, art criticism, sociology, political science, humanities, science and technology studies, and so on – need to account for the role of software and its effects in whatever subjects they investigate. [...]