This events is heading for a frontal collision with all the rules that make up a good festival. It feels more like an academical conference on second life. Without the sex that is.
Anyway: a highly laudable and interesting experiment. I'll try to not watch it from home but go to the Balie in Amstedam, still hoping to meet some new people over a beer and maybe dance a bit:-) For a full list of participating orgs, see their web site.
Further text quoted from the Electrosmog website
The ElectroSmog festival is a critique of the worldwide explosion of mobility, and an exploration of the new forms of connectedness with others offered to us by network and communication technologies.
The question is if these new forms of connectedness can help us to develop a viable new lifestyle less determined by speed and constant mobility, which is both ecologically and socially more sustainable.
Bringing together a broad coalition
The ElectroSmog festival brings together a broad coalition of designers, environmentalists, urban and spatial planners, technologists, artists, theorists, and engaged and concerned citizens, to explore and ‘design’ sustainable immobility.
Zero travel
ElectroSmog is a truly international festival, with everything you might expect: international debates and discussions, performances, art projects, exhibits, site specific projects, screenings, a design competition, and more.
ElectroSmog stakes its claim for a radical break with the current systems of hyper-mobility not simply by discussing the issue, but by actually implementing it.
A few basic ground rules apply for all the festival events listed there:
• No presenter will travel beyond their local or regional boundaries to participate in this event.
• All festival events will always take place in at least two locations connected in real-time.
• A crucial dimension of the festival will be its on-line presence, where audiences from basically anywhere with an internet connection can follow events on-line, join in discussions and debates, visit virtual theatres in metaverses such as second life, and contribute to the program.
Going beyond the broadband enclaves
ElectroSmog acknowledges from the start that bandwidth is not equally distributed across and within societies. Therefore remote connection to lower bandwidth spaces, do-it-yourself telematics, and information technologies for the majority world will be central concerns the festival will address.
Thematic discussions, presentations and connected debates
The ElectroSmog festival-program is organised around a series of interlocking thematic programs, connected discussions and debates all transmitted live over the internet.
Themes covered by these events include:
• Global views on the crisis of mobility
• Witnessed Presence
• Hyper-mobility and the urban condition
• City & regional branding debate
• e-mobility versus immobility
• Designing for (im)mobility
• Public media art projects and sustainability
• Energy and information
• ElectroSmog is Good for You!
• Food and global mobility
• Deep local and remote technologies
