ArtFutura 2014
La Promesa Digital
November 6th / CCCB, Barcelona
FuturaCircuit: Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Copenhaguen, Granada, Madrid, México DF, Montevideo, Murcia, Palma de Mallorca, Sao Paulo, Saint-Brieuc, Tenerife, Torino, Vigo
José Manuel Pinillo (The Digital Promise), Montxo Algora and Jonny Wilson (Eclectic Method)
The theme of 2014, “The Digital Promise,” is also the title of the documentary directed by José Manuel Pinillo for TVE’s channel 2, in which ArtFutura actively participates.
A documentary about the impact of digital culture and its parallelism with the development of ArtFutura. Featuring: William Gibson, Nicholas Negroponte, Clay Shirky, Rebecca Allen, Sherry Turkle, Tiffany Shlain, Montxo Algora, Marcel.lí Antúnez, and others.
It’s been 25 years since the cybernetic revolution promised a new world and an alternative reality of infinite possibilities. But what have been the real changes over these years, and in which direction are we heading now?
The audiovisual program of ArtFutura 2014 presents The Creators Project, a project that supports visionary artists who use technology innovatively to explore the limits of creativity. The project sponsors over 500 artists from around the world.
Creators working in disciplines such as music, film, art and design, fashion, or video games, whose work is inspired and produced thanks to new technologies. With segments on the works of Amon Tobin, Ai Weiwei, PixMob, Olafur Eliasson and United Visual Artists.
The sections 3D Futura Show, Feeding the Web, and Futura Graphics feature works such as Portrait (Donato Sansone), The Crew (Bèrelle, Boidin & Kozyra), Paper World (László Ruska, Dávid Ringeisen), Dark Noir (Red Knuckles), Floating Metal Key (Dan Kokotajlo), Black Gold (PES), Aubade (Mauro Carraro), Llapse (Julien Vanhoenacker), Equateur (François Grumelin-Sohn), and others.
For the inauguration of the edition in Barcelona, Jonny Wilson, the driving force behind Eclectic Method, is featured. Eclectic Method’s remixes have appeared on CNN and the Jimmy Fallon show. And musicians like U2, Fatboy Slim, and Phish have asked him to create official mixes of their videos.
In 1990, if you wanted to find out about something, you went to the library. There was no remote access, and as Montxo Algora recalls, in the first edition of the ArtFutura festival, they didn’t even have a fax machine. Technology wasn’t a part of our lives.
However, there was a promise in the air, the idea that something was going to change thanks to computers. A promise of freedom, of an alternative life, of collaboration and exchange without limits or borders, of many possibilities, most of which were still to be discovered.
Now that technology has become invisible, the starting question of this documentary is: What remains of the “Digital Promise”? What has it brought us, and above all, what has it taken away?
José Manuel Pinillo
