This edition of the Festival brings new trends in tech art to Turin with exhibitions, conferences and performances.

David Bowen's plant drone is selected for the Share Prize.
A drone’s movements are determined by real-time variable resistance data collected from a live on-board plant. Data from each of the plant’s leaves determines the drone's left to right, forward to reverse and altitude movements. Essentially the plant is the pilot of the drone. An ultra-bright LED is mounted to the plant piloted drone. Using a camera with an open shutter on the ground to document the flight path enables the plant pilot to create long exposure drawings in the night sky.

Share Prize and Festival

Composers Annelies Van Parys, Aftab Darvishi and Calliope Tsoupaki create new, contemporary sounds for three women who have had to wait in the wings of the great Greek myths far too long. They shine a new light on these women’s stories, add a new nuance to them and infuse them with new power. Is Medea a revengeful monster or a mother consumed with compassion? Is Circe an evil witch or a heroine filled with great humanity? And what about Penelope’s so-called helpless waiting? 

Author Gaea Schoeters found the words that do these women justice: moving yet liberating. Soprano Katharine Dain sings them to life. Three colourful soloists enter into an intense dialogue on clarinet, duduk and qanun. British stand-up classicist and captivating storyteller Natalie Haynes provides an introduction for the three characters.

Oranjewoud Festival - Tickets

In ACT, Kris Verdonck explores various aspects of the relation between the human on the verge of disappearing in the work of Samuel Beckett. ACT approaches Beckett in three ways: with a monologue with Beckett texts (Stories and texts for nothing), performed by Johan Leysen, with a scientist, invited to react to Beckett and with an autonomous scenography, a possible landscape for a Beckett text. 

The variety and multidisciplinary approach reflect the complexity of Beckett’s work and are at the same time an attempt to literally take apart this complexity. The triptych of Science, theatre and high-tech show, as in three acts, each a different facet of the diamond ‘Beckett’. They deepen each other’s experience: a particular way of performing brings a scientific insight to life and vice versa, a performative scenography zooms in on the underlying world of or perhaps after the actor and offers a more contemplative experience.

ACT was selected for Het TheaterFestival 2020. From the jury’s report:
“In ACT Johan Leysen shapes one of Beckett's most elusive characters in an inimitable way. For an hour you hang on the lips of a man who gets hopelessly entangled in his attempt to define himself and the world around him. A moving portrait of Western human beings in search of sense and meaning.”

English spoken 
NL & FR surtitles

TICKETS

PELLET - In the semi-darkness lies a huge sphere. It is not immediately clear what material it is made of, or how heavy it would be. Or is it a projection after all? This ambiguity makes it something mysterious and alienating. As a spectator you are standing next to an object with a life of its own that is not easily understood.
The basis of this installation, PELLET, is the short story 'The Cares of a Family Man' (1919) by Franz Kafka. In this story, the family man tells about Odradek, a mysterious creature that regularly lives with him at the bottom of the stairs. Odradek consists of a star-shaped bobbin with tangled yarn around it, to which a crossbar with a kind of rod is attached. Odradek can talk and move around, but is otherwise a 'useless' object. As with Odradek, it is pleasant to be in the company of PELLET, and at the same time it is a disturbing figure that makes one reflect on the hidden life of objects. Both PELLET and Odradek are an example of how crossing the boundaries that separate subject and object can lead to an uncanny experience. 'Living objects' with human characteristics are literally impossible to identify, and they get something oppressive and uncomfortable. The alienation caused by objects was a way for Kafka to talk about how modern man becomes alienated in a world of new technologies, violence and bureaucracy. This is another feeling that PELLET evokes on the viewer: if objects and systems continue without needing humans anymore, what is our place?

 PELLET was part of the installation trail 'K, a society' (2010), a series of ten installations for which the work of Kafka was the starting point. As a 'performative object' it is characteristic for Kris Verdonck's work in which objects and machines are as performative as human dancers and actors.

HISK
A Two Dogs Company / Kris Verdonck

Laura Colmenares Guerra is working on RE/VERSE, the 3rd chapter of the Ríos Trilogy.
RE/VERSE is a Virtual Reality (VR) piece that deepens into the complex situation of Amazonia: The ancestral indigenous populations and the biome of the Rainforest are endangered by the extractive practices operating in the region and the commercialisation of commodities distributed to the rest of the world.

RE/VERSE is conceived to generate a VR experience that underlines the tensions present in the territory by the pressure between the local and global perspectives. Where human, cultural and environmental aspects rub with power, economics and multinational interests in a context of climate stress in which the importance of preserving this unique ecosystem is vital for the survival of the current life on Earth.

Ríos Trilogy 
- Chapter I: RIVERS // AMAZONIA geo-linguistics online application
- Chapter II: RÍOS // sculpture series based on the nineteen major sub-basins of the amazons
-  Chapter III: RE/VERSE - VR

With plant bot (working title), David Bowen is creating a time based interactive art installation where the fates, a living plant and a computer are interdependent. Essentially the plant will train a computer using image recognition. Through this process the computer will learn to recognize when the plant needs water, light and food based on images it takes of the plant. If the plant appears healthy, the computer will maintain a regular water/food/light regiment. If the plant does not appear healthy to the computer it will attempt to aid the plant by adjusting to what it “thinks” the plant needs based on the images gathered. As the computer becomes more intelligent and hence more adept at caring for the plant, the plant will conceivably thrive and grow in proportion. If the computer is unsuccessful, conceivably the opposite will occur.

Commissioned by the Hamsunsenteret in Norway, Lawrence Malstaf integrated an adapted version of NEVEL 02004/10.

A new version of NEVEL is now permanently installed in the award winning museum designed by the American architect Steven Holl. 

On this occasion we are launching a limited edition of the scale model 1/66 of NEVEL. 

NEVEL 1/66 
Hand polished aluminium 
20 x 20 x 6 cm 
Edition of 5 copies + 1 A.P 
Price on request: ischa@artoffice.be

Hamsunsenteret
Lawrence Malstaf