ArtFutura 1995
Virtual Communities
18 – 22 October / Centro Cultural de la Villa, Madrid
Future Sound of London, Industrial Light&Magic, Mark Frauenfelder, Carl Loeffler, Roy Ascott, J.C. Herz, Carla Sinclair, Alexander
For its 1995 edition, given the necessity for a larger auditorium, the festival moved to Centro Cultural de la Villa.
It was the year in which Internet started to become popular thanks to the generalized use of the World Wide Web and electronic mail. ArtFutura covered this phenomenon from the point of view of the “Virtual Communities” and was presented with the subheading “Art on the Net”.
The roundtables of that year included, among others, Mark Frauenfelder, Roy Ascott, Carla Sinclair and J.C. Herz.
And there was a new manifesto that, this time, declared: “Cyberspace is the key. Internet is the key. Being connected is the key to being able to access the virtual paradises that only exists on the other side of the computer screen. By doing no more than tapping a few keys, the cybernaut finds himself surfing on a planet from science fiction on which he finds unfathomable quantities of texts, images, feelings, frustrations and virtual vertigo”.
The conferences were complemented with the participation of artists such as Alexander, Alex Antich and Virtual Graphics.
And in the audiovisual program the new work from Chris Landreth, the Canadian artist who presented “The End”, a completely revolutionary piece that was clearly different in style and contents to other digital animations of its time, stood out.
An outstanding moment of that year’s ArtFutura was the ISDN connection with the musical group Future Sound of London which “sent” its concert from London.
Images and sounds arrived at Madrid in a unique experience that took place during the activities of the Estación Futura celebration, in an old beer factory next to Plaza de Legazpi. The event also included projections (Skudi Optics), installations, holographs, performances and the presentation in Madrid of “Epizoo” by Marcel.lí Antúnez.
“Every fiber, every node, every server on the Net is a part of me. It’s a phase space I’m in, a sort of telepotentiality. As I interact with the net, I reconfigure myself. My net-extent defines me just as my body defined me in the old biological culture. I am weightless and dimensionless in any exact sense. I am the reach of my connectivity“.
Roy Ascott
“The rapid development of art on the Internet is one more demonstration that artists are among the first to use new media and make them perceptible as environments open to a more than functional and utilitarian use. In times of great structural changes in the collective mind, the artist’s job is to make people aware of such changes and to create the new sets and sensitive experiences that they allow”.
Derrick de Kerckhove
“This thing, this beautiful, sprawling, crackling mammoth spiderweb thing, is now in the hands of basement dwellers, insomniacs, and teens with bedroom lights off and computers on. And it rocks”.
J.C. Herz
