A festival is a place where energy accumulates. People come together from all directions to experience together: to expand their horizons, to see, hear and learn something new. To dive in together, to let oneself go. Networking, meeting old friends, finding new ones. A festival is a metaphor for our social life, for our good life. It’s a safe space to try out things. It builds on the past, shows the present, looks into the future. This is where society takes place.
Within the last three months our life has been turned upside down. Nothing will ever be like before. This circumstance makes fear and at the same time inspires. It leads to precarious situations, fears, stress, loneliness, uncertainty. Within a short time, “rethinking” has become the slogan of the present day, encompassing all areas of life: Rethinking mobility, rethinking the public sphere, rethinking the working world, rethinking relationships, rethinking theater, rethinking funding models – ourselves, life, yes: Rethinking the world.
CIVA sees itself as a living part of these public thought and negotiation processes.
And in doing so, we are building on what our homebase Vienna – as a city of digital humanism – already has to offer. In 2020 the world has made a huge leap forward in development: digital tools and virtual solutions have suddenly become an integral part of our reality – more or less voluntarily. Accordingly, in the first year of the festival we want to question what has emerged from the practices of “social distancing”, whether a counter-movement, a kind of “digital bonding” has developed on the virtual level.
Will we be able to stay connected in the virtual? What new options for communication and networking have opened up? How does art deal with those questions?
Der Standard: “Wien bekommt ein neues Medienkunstfestival mit nonbinären Avataren”, Article Link (German)
CIVA. Contemporary Immersive Virtual Art
coming up in 2021
Realised by sound:frame
Funded by Wien Kultur
