I / WE / THEY – Exploring the boundaries and nature of the modern social body
The special theme in this pilot trans-context, trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary collaborative programme of 2016 is ‘I / WE / THEY’. This theme is at the core of both the Space Media Festival taking place in Taipei in 18-28 August 2016 and the Modern Body Festival 2016 in The Hague. At the same time, the collaborative and explorative process led by teams of artist-architect will also span across both contexts. The concept of ‘I / WE / THEY’ is thus being subjected to diverse forms of engagement between the body, the space and the medium, as well as being embedded in specific cultural, social, technical and spatiotemporal conditions. We are exploring the effects of architecture, technology and digital communication, as they are fundamentally transforming the way we exist as a society, culture, species. Our focus is on the social body – identity, space, and community: how we interface with I/WE/THEY. Where do the limits of the self extend and where do the social bodies of group and community begin? How do we understand and position ourselves as individuals, while still feeling a sense of belonging and connection to an expanding global community? How do we exist, identify, and interact? Furthermore, we want to explore the role of architecture and technology as central social interfaces between the I and the world, the I and the group, the I and the self. How do they impact our behavior, confront our habits, alter our experience?
Festival Format
For this collaborative edition, we have developed a reciprocal format: a DEZACT/NTUST-led, MBF-infected, 11-day workshop-driven festival in Taiwan, with a final showcase on the last day, and an MBF-led, DEZACT/NTUST-infected, 5-day showcase-driven festival in The Hague, with accompanying workshops (3 days of thematic 1-day workshops and symposia, and 2 days of exhibitions and performances).
Background
Space Media Festival 2016 is an 11-day festival of multiple small- to large-scale activities focusing on avant-garde experimentations traversing fields of art, architecture and urbanism. It aims to involve public, educational, professional and inter-disciplinary participants and audience, as well as to engage with multiple locations and sites in Taipei and Taiwan as part of its agenda of in-situ making and direct intervention. In view of the significant World Design Capital 2016 Taipei, the festival responds actively to its exceptional agenda to offer an expanded platform of innovative and visionary ideas, design projects and public debates on the position of technology in art, architecture, city and culture.
Space Media Festival 2016 aims to poise Taiwan at the crux of the Asian creative network, as well as connecting to dialogues and collaborations on the international scene, in propelling imaginative ideas and visionary experimentations in the future of art, architecture, culture and city.
Agenda
Space Media Festival 2016 will explore:
– the ‘body’ redefined through the dissolution of corporeal boundaries and bio-technical augmentation
– the ‘self’ redefined through displaced, divided, duplicated/multiplied and prosthetic presences
– the ‘other’ redefined through relative, virtual and immersive interfaces
– the ‘space’ redefined through responsive and iterative process enabled by algorithm and agent-based tools
– the ‘public’ redefined through mobility, multilateral communication and distributed urban networks
– the ‘identity’ redefined through behavioural dynamics and telematic relations
and finally, altogether,
– the ‘city’ redefined through new notions of the previous six conceptual categories