TAFKAV by Francesco Monico :: AMBER’07: Body-Process Art Festival :: Istanbul, Turkey :: until November 17, 2007. TAFKAV is an installation that could be considered a ‘moist medium’; it was conceived to explore a poetic communication process between a vegetable organism and man. The scheme used can be described thus: Sensors able to detect bioenergetic fields – electric conductivity, photosynthesis and other properties – that plants produce are applied around Vanda, an epiphytic orchid with a monopodial growth habit that likes to live on the branches of trees.

First Conclusions from TAFKAV: 1. If plants are sensitive living things, then they are not molecular machines that can be patented like chemical formulas; 2. If plants are living things then they are sensitive and can a pragmatic communicative relationship with humans can be defined (this communication will be only man oriented); 3. Articulating this pragmatic approach ought to allow man to define a poetic “self” through the punctuation form created while communicating with plants. This poetic self should allow man to formulate an original interpretation of himself in an era of profound anthropological mutation. You can hear the sound emitted and see the video:

Thanks for this version at Massimo Banzi (Interaction Design - Arduino), Steve Piccolo (Music and sounds), Emanuele Lomello (Max MSP).

amber’07: body-process arts festival

amber’07 will be the largest event in the field of Arts and Technology to be held in Turkey. It will take place in 9-17 November, 2007 in a variety of venues in Istanbul. amber’07 is organized by amber Body-Process Arts, an interdisciplinary association that focuses on artistic performance and technology. The concept Body-Process Arts points to the artistic possibilities at the conjunction of bodily performance and technological processes and constitutes amber’s artistic program and foci.

The festival will house a variety of performances, interactive installations, seminars and workshops by an international group of artists and thinkers. The participating artists and researchers will come from various parts of the World. amber’07 will act as a ground of artistic exchange and cooperation as well as constitute an opportunity for Istanbul art audiences to view and experience a novel art form as executed by artists from different cultural backgrounds. In addition to the audiences who are already involved and interested in the digital art form, the festival seeks to attract a larger public that includes the general art audiences, students in diverse artistic and technological fields and children.

The primary objective of amber’07 is to promote the idea of an Art that is inseparable from technology and the human body. The incessant commodification of life, of technology and indeed of Art in the World today makes it difficult if not impossible to differentiate Art, Commodity, Technology and even the Body as autonomous spheres and ideas. Yet, the inseparability that we like to invoke is suspicious of this modern market logic. We advance an idea of Art that traces and retraces this logic and produces an artistic novelty out of this effort. We believe that the potential for artistic novelty remains and that the Art of today should respond to its own conjuncture with the help of technology and the body. The Festival aims to be one such response. In this respect, our objective is as much to explore and present an artistic novelty as to promote alternative, uncommon uses of common technology and the body.

amber’07 seeks to attract all lovers of art and technology in Istanbul. This includes the established contemporary arts audience, technology and design professionals, students of arts, design and technology, artists and technicians from various fields and the youth. Moreover, the festival will be an opportunity for people who work in purely technical fields such as robotics to connect their fields with art. Beyond arbitrary classifications of audiences, the festival’s combination of art, technology and the body seeks to create and attract its own public. As our lives are saturated with ever more digital technology, everyone is a potential viewer of this emerging art form.

“Voice and Survival”

Digital technologies that store process and send all types of data efficiently and quickly are becoming crucial elements of our lives. We are happy and comfortable thanks to the tools that employ such technologies and the latter are fast becoming the determinants and signs of a good life. However, we are simultaneously living through the risks that are created and mediated by digital technologies, which are used in circuits of global finance, advertising, entertainment, health and weapons systems as well as in everyday tools such as cell phones and computers. Such technologies affect each and all of us. They articulate and redefine our ways of communication, our speech, writing, visual and aural practices and even our sensory capabilities. Increasingly for individuals and groups, institutions and even states, the capability to be heard, to have a legitimate voice has come to depend on the use of digital technologies. We all feel the need to institute a technological presence. In today’s World, we are always already present as data, a sign, number, image or voice thanks to the generative capacities of digital technology. Yet, as the subject of a collectivity we all too readily assume that we are capable of producing a voice, and hence a worthwhile presence in the scenes and spheres that matter to our lives and to our future. Rather than being a given the capability to produce a voice that will embody our plight, our stance in art, thought, love or politics has become a crucial question that faces all of us.

In light of the above, amber’07 takes up the theme of Voice and Survival in a World where digital technology has become instrumentalized to generate the mundane as well as the sublime. What happens to Voice, in its artistic, personal, social or visceral incarnations as digital technology increasingly mediates human and systems’ interrelationships? What is the voice by which we survive as individuals and societies in and through contemporary technology as the boundaries between Art and Technology transform? amber’07 aims to pose these and similar questions and seek possible answers.