CYLAND Media Art Lab presents the 13th International Festival of Media Art CYFEST.
Welcome to the festival’s website – www.cyberfest.ru (schedule, news, exhibitions, artists, press accreditation)
Festival theme: Cosmos and Chaos
Dates: November, 2021
About festival
CYFEST is one of the biggest international festivals of media art in Eastern Europe, founded by a group of independent artists and curators in Saint Petersburg in 2007. CYFEST unites art professionals, programmers, engineers and media activists all over the world, expands territories and possibilities of contemporary art, intertwining it with various disciplines of science and technology.
CYFEST is an exceptional international project. In 2019, the festival projects were presented at the leading cultural institutions in New York, Rome, Venice, Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Saint Petersburg CYFEST will engage largest city’s art spaces, including Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, Annenkirche (Lutheran Church of Saint Ann), and the State Hermitage Youth Educational Center.
CYFEST 12 also includes a broad exhibition, video, sound and educational programs.
COSMOS and CHAOS
Concept of the International Media Art Festival CYFEST-13
The Greek CHAOS means “void”, “chasm”, “abyss”. This mythical time preceded the empirical (profane) one. CHAOS is a god of engendering. For ancient Greeks, Earth, Sky, Love, Abyss and Gloom were born of CHAOS.
By COSMOS, the Greeks meant an aesthetically adorned order. COSMOS has always been secondary in relation to CHAOS. It would emerge by way of replenishment and clarification of its properties.
Darkness transforms into light, void — into filling, amorphy — into order. And it was precisely the human being whom Plato proposed as a prototype of COSMOS.
What do we have in mind today by reaching out to those philosophic notions? Is it not strange that we ever more frequently refer to our human life as chaotic and to the immeasurable abyss of the Universe as Cosmos?
Every style in art has strived to give birth to its own cosmos — an aesthetic structure and a formal solution. But what is taking place when the aesthetic and formal lose their meaning in the process of determining what art is? Abyss gives birth to abyss? What could be engendered by the “immeasurableness” of information? Or soon the new technologies will completely engulf the aesthetical and our old cosmos of meanings will be of absolutely no interest to a new generation of artists?
— Elena Gubanova (Curator)
CYFEST is one of the largest international media art festivals, it was founded in St. Petersburg in 2007 by independent artists and curators. The festival promotes the emergence of new forms of art and high technology interactions, developing professional connections between artists, curators, engineers and programmers around the world and exposing wide audiences to the works in the field of robotics, video art, sound art and net art.
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