Per Capita: Opening at Sight and Sound 2016

An important event in the digital underground scene, the Sight and Sound festival annually welcomes nationally and internationally recognized artists for a series of cultural activities. The Per Capita edition brought together nearly 80 artists who took part in performances, conferences, festive evenings and even a hackathon held from September 28 to

October 2, 2016. Per Capita: on digital

issues. With their many conveniences, technologies also raise many questions and sometimes anxieties, and art remains a major vehicle for expressing these issues. A handful of artists explored them and presented their work at Eastern Bloc during an installation opening on the evening of September 28. Infused with a dose of conceptual art, these works did not necessarily aim to express an emotion or tell a story, but rather to manifest a phenomenon the artist had noticed. Here is a look at three personal favourites. Craig Fahner

– Pure Water Touching Clear Sky. Placed in

a dark room, the community garden installation was filmed and the signal was streamed on twitch.tv. Through a chat interface, Internet users and visitors could participate in the interactive installation and send commands to change lights, humidity levels and more. Fluorescent LED lights cast an electric tint over plants in a garden that seemed to live by itself, manifesting the liminal zone between ecology and technology, as well as the contrast between the Zen patience of cultivating a garden and web culture’s taste for instant pleasure. Michael Mandiberg – Printing Wikipedia. On

and columns were printed in

black ink, as if forming a vast library. In this Library of Babel would be found the entire content of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Wearing a white shirt and a thick red beard, the artist calmly explained that printing the whole of Wikipedia would cost US$300,000. However, the printing would take a month, and the content would already be out of date. The artist observes that it is impossible to give fixed form to this accumulation of human knowledge. A striking work. Stéphanie Rothenburg and Jeff Crouse

LOL. This was undoubtedly one of the evening’s most provocative

projects: a website that allows users to order a pseudo-erotic video online. You choose three keywords, for example potato, young and pretty, and eroticism, and in exchange for a tiny amount of money, an Internet worker finds videos in which this fantasy is performed. The final product is a video mashup in which every suggestive image is blurred by Photoshop filters. The irony is layered. In an obvious allusion to prostitution, the laborers of love are instead the new workers performing tasks online. Their output, erotic images hidden under a lo-fi aesthetic, does not satisfy the person who placed the order. An audiovisual performance wasalso presented during the September 28 opening. For a report, click the link. Web link to the festival page. Photo credit: Geoffroy DBK. For full details, consult the related page,event

page, exhibition page and partner links

provided here.