DEAF04 - Affective Turbulence
DEAF04 Dutch Electronic Art Festival - Affective Turbulence: The Art of Open Systems
Affective Turbulence:
The Art of Open Systems
Under this title, the theme of DEAF04 focuses on the functioning of open and closed systems and what structures are emerging from them. One of the important subthemes in this event is the role of feelings as being the essence of actions that affect and influence these systems.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Cold War was no longer the defining element in our view of the world, euphoria about an open Europe and an open society was widespread. However, increasing globalization has demonstrated that the world as an open system entails more than being an open market. After 9/11, openness has become associated primarily with feelings of insecurity and is regarded as a threat to our own surrounding and identity.
During DEAF04, a number of
provocative art projects will address current social, technological, political and cultural
issues revolving around both open and closed systems. Within this thematic framework, DEAF04 presents interactive
art as an open system continuously creating new relationships as a basic concept of interactive arts.
DEAF04 aims at an exchange between various disciplines such as art and science, and poses the questions as to how systems function, how they are designed, and how they are employed in art and culture, social settings, the economy and computer science.
DEAF04 will show projects
concerning an interactive art that functions as an open affective
system, as a means of calling forth feelings and making them visible,
from the individual to the global level. During the festival, this
interactive artistic approach will be expanded to other disciplines,
towards a better understanding of the basic principles of
interacting-on-feeling.
Feeling is the engine of our actions. It has recently been demonstrated
that we never do anything purely rationally. This is true of almost
every human action - we cannot make a decision without relying on
feeling or intuition. Interactive art - art the viewer must do
something to in order to make something out of it or have an experience
- is an art of feeling. Every interactive work tries to entice its user
to perform certain actions, in the hope that the work will thereby
reorganize itself into an unforeseen coherence. Interactive art is by
definition non-autonomous and organizes itself as an open system, which
functions via the exchange of matter, energy and/or information with
the environment (i.e. the visitor).
