Open Your City was the guiding theme for the Share Festival 2012. A theme that contains three key, simple and direct words, the pillars on which this year’s festival programme will be built. ‘Open Your City’ will also provide the blueprint for this year’s Share Prize.

Open is meant in the sense of being in the making, of being unfinished, experimental, transparent and boundless. ‘Open’ gives the idea of a starting point, the perspective from which we see things, an inclusive vision founded on digital communication and active democracy. It is a hallmark of the quality of an idea, a system, a group or an organization. It relinquishes copyright to give precedence to the sharing of knowledge, to open-source methodologies.

Your is meant as the direct participation of people who possess, own, use, occupy and command something that belongs to them. It identifies the person who plays a leading role in driving change-someone who takes action, steps in and gets involved; someone who makes plans, collaborates, transforms, brings together and acts as part of a community. ‘Your’ means grass-roots democracy.

City is meant as the venue or theatre of action; it is the common good, the backdrop to changes underway. An urban space abuzz with social and technological ferment, made up of streets and roads, squares and parks and everyday locations. The city has become populated with new sites of social media where communication flows thick and fast-in the form of control, through video surveillance or the mapping of social graphs, though also in the form of participatory democracy, through augmented reality, smart architectures and wearable computing.

What is the role of art today, in this time of social transformation towards the city of the future?
Is this the city that we want, that we imagine, that we wish for?
What’s your idea of the open city?
What world we want to live?

Share Festival was from the 30 October till the 11th November 2012 at the Regional Museum of Natural Science of Turin.
The Share Festival continues to be a one and only event in Italy that is enjoying growing popularity with an ever wider public attracted by art in the digital age. Over 11,000 of you came in person to take part in events.
The 8th Share Festival—OPEN YOUR CITY—engaged and captured audiences’ interest, featuring this year 20 artists, 25 panellists, 2 exhibitions, 1 special project, 3 performances, and 25 events in 12 consecutive festival days.
Through their works, the artists explored a number of possible worlds to open our cities. At the conferences, panellists presented their points of view from different perspectives, converging on the fundamental need to empower people and culture to play a leading role in the innovative transformation of the society, communities and territories we live in.

Key words shaping the topics and debates addressed by our international guests included the commons, knowledge, tactical media, new media art, interaction design, mobility, connectivity, the green economy, awareness, interfaces, responsibility, the open city, ubiquity, community, data flows, citizenship, sustainability, and urban screens.

The festival was an inspiration for all—for guests, artists, panellists and the public. A project was officially opened to draw up a Smart City Manifesto, which over the course of the Share Festival was transformed into the Open City Manifesto.
The aim of the Open City Manifesto is to shed critical light on the dynamics that emerge in the intersection of social practices, urban architecture, open technologies and approaches to contemporary art. The idea is show how the growing importance of information systems situated in cities needs to be focused on enhancing not only production capacity but above all our social and environmental capital.
Is this the city that we want, imagine and hope for?
We hope that YOU will be inspired too!
Here we would also like to thank all the guests and artists who participated, but what we would like most is to hear from them and from you, the Share Festival friends, what inspired you all most at this year’s festival, by posting your comments on the Share Festival website.

We invite you to download the OPEN YOUR CITY catalogue here in PDF.
See the pics on Flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/sharefestival
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