ACT Festival 2015

Huge stroboscopic datastreams, hypnotic human-machine choreographies, a cacophony of Korean, Japanese, English, German, and French – from November 25th to 28th 2015, an unlikely cross-cultural exchange took over the all new ACT Center in Gwangju, South Korea. More than a hundred artists, designers, curators, and educators – local, regional, international – had answered our invitation to add their work and voice to the inaugural edition of ACT Festival, a four-day opening celebration of the center’s monumental facilities and the first of many programming highlights to come. The goal: have the world’s best and brightest discuss the state of craft and creation in the digital age.

“Making begins in the mind’s eye – with the conception of an idea or a possibility. The references our imagination draws on, however, are not only defined by aesthetic preferences, cultural imprints, and historical precedents, but the technologies that underpin them; technologies that are evolving rapidly and exponentially increasing our creative power. We now control light and matter with equal measure, we program space, cultivate life, and have machines perform with a human touch. We hack, we code, we fabricate, and all the while tools and methodologies hum in a state of constant flux. Machine learning, mass-customization, synthetic biology – as we embrace a wave of new and unfamiliar paradigms, the lack of guiding principles looms large. Where are the fault lines between the digital and the physical? How does experimentation atop these unstable ‘tektonics’ alter how ideas are born and realized? “You can’t have art without resistance in the material,” nineteenth century craftsman William Morris observed. Now, what does that statement mean in the twenty-first century?”

Curated by HOLO - Filip Visnjic, Alexander Scholz, Greg J Smith, Sherry Kennedy