Share Festival

“Piemonte Share Festival is an annual event held in Torino-Italy, dedicated to contemporary art and culture in all its global dimensions and interconnections with the Internet and new media.”

Share Festival was founded in 2005 by Chiara Garibaldi and by Simona Lodi. The festival is produced and organised by the cultural association The Sharing.

Every year a main theme, which gives the title to the exhibition, lead the entire event with exhibitions, video reviews, in-depth lectures, symposia, workshops, performance.

Share Festival Editions

House Guest (2015-2016)

What happens when net.art leaves the desktop screens, kiosks, and gallery installations, and becomes domestic art? How can this provocative guest escape cyberspace and join the family? When Internet art becomes “Internet-of-Things art,” how can it flourish in the kitchen, the bedroom, the nursery and the terrace?

As computing becomes more and more distributed, humans are no longer the only agents of analysis and action.

Subjects become profiles, filed and categorised in a vast system designed to extrapolate our actions andWhere does the growth in potential stop and a technological circuit begin, in which our choices are increasingly driven by “emergent” considerations that act autonomously?

Computers interact with us at the microsensory and microtemporal levels, which are invisible to conscious perception.

Mediation is achieved through forms of virtual assistants or artificial intelligence systems that undermine a Cartesian egocentric approach in favour of incorporating the mind and body in the world.

How does the way humans interact with society change when we become a “cursor”?

Open is meant in the sense of being in the making, of being unfinished, experimental, transparent and boundless.

Your is meant as the direct participation of people who possess, own, use, occupy and command something that belongs to them.

City is meant as the venue or theatre of action; it is the common good, the backdrop to changes underway.

Cops and robbers, the innocent and the guilty, legalitarians and subversives, law-abiding citizens and revolutionaries.

The impression is that there is always somebody stealing something and somebody else chasing them down, but the good guys today are often on the wrong side of the law.

It is a fine line that separates the legal and the illegal when it comes to freedom of speech, news leaks, activism, copyleft, activism, appropriationism and interventionism.

Error represents the uncovering of an issue that demands attention, which in turn elicits controversy, while it is controversy that generates solutions and innovation.

Art practice is becoming increasingly relational – like the market – and less representational. This move towards the transaction as the privileged form of communication is having profound effects on culture in material, symbolic and strategic ways. Exchange is everything.

In 2008, the year Turin celebrated its nomination as the first World Design Capital, the science-fiction writer and journalist Bruce Sterling was invited to be guest curator of the Share Festival, exploring the theme of ManufacTURINg.

The year 2007 saw the launch of the Share Prize, an international award dedicated to major art installations, which focused on the theme of Digital Affinity/Communities Now, a way of being and of living, a collective project bringing together millions of people, united by cultural, ideological and political affinities.

Network communications, virtual reality, intelligent environments, open-source code and the copyright/copyleft distinction are all technological and legal arrangements designed to overcome the limits of space-time, the limits of the physical, the limits of the body, and the limits of the digital divide.

The first ever Share Festival marked the beginning of an ongoing exploration of the impact that globalisation and innovation technology has had on art and on contemporary society.

The theme of the event focused on the cultural repercussions of the Internet and its use, and the new wave of activity in art, culture and communications.