TECHNOLOGY and its impact on humans is the focus of a three-day online festival this week featuring artists who specialise in digital creativity.
Present Futures will highlight Scottish and international artists whose work operates between performance, film, visual art and sound.
Highlights include Feel My Metaverse, a gaming-engine CGI film about the world following a climate apocalypse by Keiken, a Berlin-London based collaborative practice known for their installations and film work merging the physical and digital.
Drawing on queer and bicultural ancestral mythologies, Australian artist Justin Shoulder will present Carrion, exploring what it means to be human in an era of destructive influence over the planet, while Tim Murray-Browne and Panagiotis Tigas’ world premiere of Sonified Body will be accompanied by a conversation about the new use of AI seen in the piece.
In a timely look at ideas of consent and ownership, a live Zoom performance Be Arielle F will see videographer and visual artist Simon Senn share his experience of buying a digital replica of a female body online and his journey to find the woman whose body he was virtually inhabiting.
Meanwhile Scottish artists Alicia Matthews and Robbie Thompson will present AR (augmented reality) piece Standstill Of The Moon In The North – Part 1, which takes its inspiration from the culture of the Western Isles.
Samir Kennedy’s Death Drill will be available throughout the weekend. The 25-minute piece requires the audience to listen with headphones in a dark room and is meant to be an intermediate military training procedure with all those taking part playing junior military personnel preparing for deployment.
Discussions will be led by a range of creatives looking at the issues thrown at the creative industries in 2020. Dr Laura Bissell and Lucy Weir will lead a discussion on the evolving situation for live arts in Performance In A Pandemic: Subverting The Dataset, an artist-to-artist discussion looking at AI bias with Jake Elwes and Libby Odai.
Rejecting the Species Binary, chaired by Bissell, will look into both humans’ connection and separation from nature.
Glasgow-based Black will present 500NM, a film which documents the application of Moore’s Law as it reaches its exponential limits, the speed at which tech works and responds and its availability to users, while Hong Kong-born Glasgow-based Clarinda Tse will show Textures Gestures Meshes Measures, a video collage looking at movement, dance and body along street-nature-scapes. The piece is in development for a future live performance.
The festival will take place from February 5-7, presentfutures.org.
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