Piemonte Share Festival: Manufacturing - Guest Curator: Bruce Sterling :: March 1-16, 2008 :: Torino, Italy.

The theme for the 2008 edition, which will dominate the contents of the conferences, round tables, workshops and performances, is the new materiality of digital arts. In the 90s the net art phenomenon addressed a need to reach beyond its own limits, drawing immateriality into the equation and threatening the real. Nowadays, society relates to technologies in a natural way by allowing the immaterial to become real. By exploring new, intelligent interaction between man and machine, this relationship has been completely integrated into everyday life. In the new millennium man and machine interact on the same level, shaping and changing the surrounding environment as they see fit. The Piemonte Share Festival is an international cultural event that probes the vast panorama of new technologies and investigates their applications in art and design.

Because of recent advances in digital fabrication technology, manufacturing is becoming a digital art and culture enterprise. The exciting advent of 3-D printing, rapid prototyping, and rapid manufacturing is of profound importance to SHARE, for it bring the power to create physical objects to the techno-artist’s lab-bench, studio and atelier. It means that digital artists, whose work was once mostly virtual, can create in the actual.

SHARE has chosen the theme Manufacturing for its 2008 event for two compelling reasons. First, we want to demonstrate digital manufacturing to our core audience, who are very technically adept people, but not used to the idea that they can create real objects with CAD, fabricators and the Internet. The second reason is that Torino is the World Capital of Design 2008. Torino is a strong manufacturing center. SHARE is very international in its outlook and audience, but in 2008 this Torino festival should and will emphasize the fact that it is from Torino.