Open Call: Toolkit Festival

Camille Scherrer, Courtesy of Toolkit Festival

In anticipation of next year’s edition entitled Contemplative Pathways, Toolkit Festival is hosting an open call for artists aged between 20-35 working in interactive new media art. The festival is both a communicative platform for young artists experimenting with interactive art, and also an educational forum that exposes these new media practices to the public through exhibitions and participatory workshops. With a focus on artist-observer-artwork interaction and applied technological innovation, the open call accepts acoustic, visual, plastic and performative submissions.

Yap Nam Weng, Courtesy of Toolkit Festival

Founded by Italian artist Martin Romeo, Toolkit Festival has, in only two previous editions, established an important meeting point for interactive art in Italy. The event has since managed to attract the attention of various art institutions and professionals engaged in the field of new media art. Contemplative Pathways looks to address global perspectives within the interactive art arena.

Only works that explore and realize holistic interaction with the aid of technology will be admitted into the festival. The objectives of the contest as stated by the Toolkit media release are as follows:

“The observer is invited to create with his own presence, to inhibit his view on the comprehension of singular elements. Often the artist finds himself becoming the observer in front of the fulfillment of the opera. The inquiry we ask to explore is to keep in consideration all these landscapes, re-elaborating a further stage of the space “in execution” to create once again an image, a kind of observer of itself.”

The deadline for submission is 21 January 2013. Toolkit Festival’s Contemplative Pathways will be held in Venice from 9-11 May 2013.

Karina Smigla Bobisnki, Courtesy of Toolkit Festival
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