22/10/2008
Shift
Dreispitz area, Basel
Electronic arts festival
News 20.10.08: Our Festival blog is online! Students of media studies at the University Basel will be reporting directly from the festival with photos, videos and interviews. http://blog.shiftfestival.ch/
Shift continues:
following its successful launch last autumn, the Shift festival of electronic arts is kicking off for a second edition – as lively and relaxed as when it started, but with a few revisions and additions that experience has taught us are necessary. Shift offers insight into the distinctly dynamic field of international electronic arts: music, visual art, film & video screenings and, above all, ‘cross-over’ projects and productions that break the bounds of established disciplines. We don’t attempt to offer a more or less representative cross-section of contemporary production in the electronic arts spectrum, however. Shift is a festival that gives centre stage to a single theme that resonates throughout the whole programme. Following the theme of “access” last year comes now “record, record: to register, to store, to process”. The era’s obsession with recording and storing data will be explored and challenged in a range of profound and funny, surprising and serious, analytical, discursive, playful artistic positions, in conferences and talks with prominent guests.
The music programme brings together live acts from internationally renowned musicians such as Plaid, Fennesz, Vicki Bennett, DJ Q-Bert or Birdy Nam Nam alongside fascinating positions from Basle-based and other Swiss sound artists such as Goldfinger Brothers, Junction sm and Larytta.
In the exhibition ‘art company’ Etoy.CORPORATION presents amongst other things a model for a virtual life in the post-physical after-life whilst Alejo Duque and Lorenz Schori use special equipment to examine the festival site for signs of normal and paranormal apparitions and waves. US-American David Troy demonstrates in real-time how, given the constantly growing Flickr photo databank the image of universal everyday experience is constantly changing; and Swiss artist Flo Kaufmann makes available his disk-o-mat, with which people can cut an analogue slice of vinyl featuring their very own voice.
A video programme compiled by four Swiss and German curators respectively curator teams will incorporate as an added bonus a retrospective and a special presentation of an artist. The festival theme “record, record” sets the parameters here and also for Shift in Progress, a presentation of recent work produced in Swiss universities of fine arts.
A conference entitled “Cultural Storage. Recording Systems in an Age of Digital Archives” and organised in cooperation with the University of Basle’s Institute for Media Studies will consider the festival theme “record, record” in the light of current media discourse.
The Shift festival has once again had recourse to the
generous support of numerous institutions and individuals.
Our very heartfelt thanks are due to the Christoph Merian Foundation, to the Basel City and Basel-Landschaft Lottery Funds, the Swiss Federal Ministry of Culture, the Migros Culture Percentage, the GGG, the Ernst Goehner Foundation, the Pro Helvetia, the Alfred Richterich Foundation, the IWB, the supporters who wish to remain anonymous and the many others who afforded us moral, financial and practical support. A very special thank you is due also to Georg Christoph Tholen and his colleagues at the University of Basle’s Institute of Media Studies, with whom we organised this year’s conference; and also to the various Swiss universities of fine arts represented at the festival by student projects. Our heartfelt thanks are due also to the Dreispitz site administration for its good will and cooperation throughout preparations for the festival, to the many people who volunteered a helping hand and, naturally, to all the artists who make such a fantastic contribution.
You can buy presale tickets at Fnac in Basel.
Dreispitz area
Helsinkistrasse 9 - Basel