CIMATICS PLATFORM / Brussels

Goals and Activities

Cimatics was set up in 2003 for a first audiovisual festival explicitly grounded in electronic subculture. Soon after, this was expanded into a festival for 'Live Audiovisual Art & VJing'. We now see Cimatics as a large-scale citywide event open to a broad and diverse audience, embracing all aspects of today's urban and digital culture.

Festival for Digital Culture with a people's focus

Cimatics is a festival for digital culture with the focus on people more than technology. The importance of the digital (r)evolution is shifting more and more away from specialised areas such as art and technology towards the common social sphere. Cimatics is inspired by this shift and has the critical ambition to be a cultural event with the focus on experience, celebration, participation and discovery of contemporary digital culture in the broadest sense. Cimatics is inclusive and empowering.

Brussels, Capital of Digital Culture

Cimatics is a citywide event in Brussels. The latest Cimatics edition was spread out all over the city with more than 150 artists, 17 venues, 10 days and nights and over 10.000 visitors. In our attempt to involve everyone in our celebration, our aims for the next edition are not less. From 22-30 April 2011 we need your participation to make Brussels again - for 1 week - the worldwide capital of digital culture.

Sharing: Particpatory and Collaborative

 

CIMATICS FESTIVAL

Cimatics aims at a rigorous approach to its own field of interest and therefor concentrates on the interchange between the wide variety of existing culture segments. In this way, the festival has always been intended to be an event with a meta-narrative, a node where grass-roots, underground and pop or art become mixed. In short, a contemporary happening with a capital 'H'.

Since the beginning, a great many artists of all sorts have formed part of this collage, this cultural mash-up. In addition, but crucial, is that the artists are challenged to leave their familiar position on a stage in a concert hall and enter the public or semi-public domain with, for example, interactive audio-visual installation and audio-visual concerts.

CIMATICS PLATFORM

Cimatics\AV\Platform was born out of this Cimatics festival, bringing rapidly expanding goals and activities.

On the one hand there has been a broadening of vision: Cimatics now looks at a wider field of experimental audiovisual performances, but at the same time continues to all it can to tighten the links between audiovisual art, media art and the broader, more popular digital and audiovisual culture. In this way it attempts to contribute to the development both of the arts and of culture in a wider sense.
On the other hand, on the basis of this activity it is building a platform not only for the organisation of the Cimatics festival but also focusing on the production of new audiovisual performances and installations, holding workshops and creating publications as well as initiating a great number of other events.

Cimatics\AV\Platform is an organisation that focuses on audio-visual performances, with the emphasis on those that have grown out of VJ culture and cyber culture. Most of the projects revolve around the interaction (live or otherwise) between sound and image: live cinema, visual music, expanded cinema or DJ/VJ. Next to that there is also a continuous attention for audio-visual installations, experimental cinema, music video and motion graphics.