At Share Festival, it is our custom to anticipate future trends. Our theme for Share 2016 is “House Guests.”
We believe that our favorite forms of art at Share Festival: electronic art, new media art, device art, digital and electronic art — will all become house guests some day.
These art forms will become part of tomorrow’s daily life. They will domesticated. They will become private and personal, as intimate as a toothbrush. As “House Guests,” tomorrow’s artistic interventions will have new roles and functions throughout the house: on the screens of the living room (because that is the traditional media center of a household), but also in the kitchen, the bedroom, the terrace, the children’s nursery, and even the bathroom.
As networking permeates the house of the future, the arts of the network will also permeate it. When the past offered Internet net.art (and we know, because we were there) the future offers Internet-of-Things art, and we will be there too. As usual, some elements will be decorative, while others will be more useful. Some artful house guests will be large and dramatic. Others will be subtle, poetic, half-hidden and sly. Our intent in 2016 is to offer you hints of how this will come to be. Share Festival itself is a House Guest for 2016, because our hostess, the new site of our art festival, is “Casa Jasmina.” Casa Jasmina is the Arduino “House of the Future”, where inventive people from open-source electronics and the Maker Movement work to re-invent daily life.
In honor of our Share cultural event, Casa Jasmina transforms herself into “Museo Jasmina” during ten days in May 2016. Share Festival has re-imagined this Arduino “house of the future” as the house of a future technology-art collector. We had superb help in doing this. Our expert Share Festival jury for 2016 included Paola Antonelli, the design curator of the New York Museum of Modern Art, and Captain Samantha Cristoforetti, an Italian astronaut who has lived in outer space longer than any other woman. Our Share jury met inside Casa Jasmina, where we decided on the exhibits you will see this year. It was centrally important to us that — although we are certainly a Turinese and Piedmontese festival — our art festival should be about life inside one house in that city and that region.
We imagined “Museo Jasmina” as the house of some future Turinese woman of refined taste. This Piedmontese lady of the future is keen to brighten her home and make her family happy with 3DPrinted artworks, radical dinner-ware, interactive musical instruments, remarkable lamps and some remarkably personal media. Our Museo Jasmina hostess also collects and exhibits work from “SeditionArt”, a website that is also a commercial digital art gallery.In the past, it has been difficult for fans and private collectors to own, collect and display the work of artists who appeared at Share Festival. Our friends at SeditionArt have transformed that situation. There is no more need to wait for tomorrow. If you want to become the patron or patroness of exciting and inventive digital artists, you can do that today.
A house can only awaken and enjoy life when it is open to friends. Share Festival has made new friends this year: our allies are the Toolbox Coworking design space, the Arduino Office, the Torino Fab Lab and Casa Jasmina.
In 2016, Share Festival is closer to the means of production, of manufacturing and distribution, than we have ever been before. We are an art festival from Torino, a city of art, but we also hear the saws and smell the laser-cutters of a city of production. Torino was, is and will be a laboratory for the daily life of tomorrow. At Share Festival we declare, as our principle, that Torino writes the future, builds it, and also lives there. We learn from these new ways that we live — and we share what we know.
Everyone who attends Share Festival in 2016 is one of our honored “house guests”. Let us invite you to bring the family, the grandparents and the children, and sit on our open-source furniture, relax, even eat something. Fill a wine glass with tomorrow.
Our house is your house.
Bruce Sterling, Artistic Director Share Festival XI Edition
