The end of mistakes
November 17, 2010 5:39 pm
Dear Share Festival friends,
thank you for there being so many of you! Over 10,000 people entered the Regional Museum of Natural Science between 15th October and 7th November, 2010.
This goes to show that the Share Festival is continuing to attract an ever wider audience of people interested in digital, generative and expressive art!
Music, theatre, exhibitions, multimedia, conferences and workshops coloured the traditional exhibits of the Science Museum.
The 6° Share Festival – Smart Mistakes took the audience by surprise this year, treating them to 30 artists, 35 conferences, 2 exhibitions, 1 special project, 5 performances and 25 exclusive events in six consecutive festival days and 3 warm-up days.
Thanks also to the Youth Museum programme of events, organised in partnership with Club To Club and Musica 90, with the co-operation of Prospettiva2 – Teatro Stabile di Torino, the Regional Museum of Natural Science and Your Time Torino European Youth Capital, we were able to really appreciate the strength and prove the value of organising events on-line as a team. The result was that lots of people came together to share a truly unique experience in Turin.
A lot of people have asked us why we chose mistakes as the guiding thread for this year’s festival.
The decision has to do with the fact that we see the festival as a sort of narrative, a story to be told. In every story, there is always a narrative expedient, a trigger that makes the plot unfold. And then there are always the good guys and the bad guys. In our case, the heroes are the artists, and the villains are the mistakes and hiccups they come face to face with along the creative process.
Through their works, the artists tell the story of this encounter – with technological errors, biological mistakes or moments of serendipity – and how things pan out in the end. Some win, others are seduced and change sides, joining the forces of evil (such as glitch art), while others again stand firm and fight, bearing the bruises of battle.
Everyone found inspiration to be drawn. All our guests, artists and conference speakers stuck to the topic of Smart Mistakes with unwavering loyalty.
Mario Calabresi, editor in chief of the daily La Stampa, admitted the cultural mistake of Italian media outfits (stressing how UNsmart it was) that did not understand the importance of new media, paying little attention to on-line publications until the figures and statistics brutally forced them to think again. Today, a newspaper might sell an average of 300,000 copies, but its same website will have six million individual users and 85 million web pages visited per month.
In Italy’s art scene and museum system, this same cultural mistake of not appreciating the artistic import of new media is still dangerously committed to this day.
In a world first, Wu Ming 1 revealed the smart mistakes committed on the main character of the novel Q, Gerrit Boekbinder. As a result of a rather curious error in researching the historic figure, the character’s nickname was translated as “Gert from the Well” and a story was created to explain how he came to get that name. In reality the name is a mistranslation, and the real nickname of the historic figure was “Gert of the Cloister”. The mistake underpins a series of episodes involving a well, such as when during a brawl outside a tavern Gert falls into a well, only to re-emerge beating his adversary with a bucket.
The right to fail was also given institutional backing by Jurij Krpan in his address. He stressed how in the field of art, and in particular those forms of art that investigate, explore and experiment, offering new perspectives on art itself, the role of contemporary art in society today is not to create pretty objects to please audiences and the market, but to construct a temporal dimensional in which the artistic subject refers to the experimental culture that lies at the basis of contemporary art. A leading example was given Stelarc at the festival, who has made bio-artistic experimentation and research the focal point of his work.
The geneticist Edoardo Boncinelli clarified with absolute simplicity the substantial difference between evolution and progress, explaining the fundamental role that copy error plays in the evolutionary process.
Instead Sigfried Zielinski bridged the conference on the future in our present by Stelarc and Bruce Sterling’s completely out-of-time address, weaving his way between North Korean architecture, Alexander Graham Bell, Mark Twain and Thaddeus Cahill to bring the Share Festival to a close with a lesson on the scale of mistakes.
It was not only the in-depth theoretical discussions and interesting perspectives opened up by the conference that attracted you though. In fact the activist edge of the festival also attracted curiosity and interest.
The project RIOT by Les Liens Invisibles on the streets of central Turin brought together a large audience along an imaginary itinerary of discovery, to uncover the immaterial sculptures that the artists had inserted in town squares around Turin.
We hope that YOU too have be inspired, as mistakes mark the emergence of a problem, which calls for solutions, and it is solution that leads to innovation.
The time has also come to thank our guests and hear about what they – and you, friends of the Share Festival – found most intriguing at this year’s festival.
We invite you to download the Smart Mistakes catalogue here, in PDF
(http://www.toshare.it/press/SmartMistakes/Smart_Mistakes_ENG.zip )
and to give us your feedback on the Share Festival blog.
The leading, avant-garde quality of the contents and perspectives showcased by the Piemonte Share Festival was also reflected in the attention and interest shown in us by local and national media, which dedicated without exception flattering words and key space to the event.
La Repubblica on 26th October dedicated Share Festival a huge full-page article entitled “Culture in the Future,” Torino Sette reserved the festival its cover and three entire pages for its inauguration, and leading national papers of all fields (from Nova 24 and Sole 24 Ore to Arte Mondadori, XL, Glamour, Flair, Left and Wired) talked about the various forms that our smart mistakes take. The Festival was given visibility in a wonderful full-page interview with Stelarc (complete with cover photo) in the daily Il Manifesto on 6th November, as the festival was nearing its end.
Press review here:
http://www.toshare.it/press/rassegnastampa2010.zip
Conferences here:
http://www.toshare.it/?page_id=3537&lang=en
Festival photos on Flickr at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sharefestival
Our Facebook page at:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Piemonte-Share-Festival/99478885644
Updates on Twitter at:
http://twitter.com/ShareFestival
And De.li.cio.us bookmarks at
http://www.delicious.com/sharefestival
Stay tuned!