Backpack 4.0 on our shoulders, senses, perceptions, and communications enhanced, we enter the largest residence in the world to visit CYFEST, the traveling festival of Art and Technology that takes place annually in prestigious museum venues in St. Petersburg, New York, and around the globe. Founded in 2007 by Marina Koldobskaya and Anna Frants of the CYLAND MediaArtLab, the event promotes the emergence of new art forms and high-tech interactions, building professional connections among artists, curators, engineers, and programmers from all over the world. It showcases works in robotics, video art, sound art, and net art to a broad public. Since 2013, the festival has opened to the global innovation community, involving 236 artists and 37 curators from across the globe over 11 years.
After stops in Moscow, New York, Beijing, and Brighton, CYFEST 11 arrives in Italy, using the relationship between Art and Technology as a device for a “weather forecast” of the day. The internet becomes the key that directs our gaze and opens all doors. It signals: “Digital cloudiness.” “The exhibition is conceived as a journey through major contemporary changes. Whether it’s climate, society, communication, or the foundations of human identity, the digital shift has affected every aspect of reality, reshaping its representation through technology,” explains Isabella Indolfi, co-curator of the Italian edition.
The English Gardens of the Royal Palace of Caserta immerse us at the threshold of today’s liquid society: with their statues, pools, and fountains, they guide us into a sense of disorientation, just as from the apparent chaos of flowing water, melodies emerge in “Anime”, a site-specific sound composition by Maurizio Chiantone, one of the works on display in the halls of the 18th-century neoclassical palace. CYFEST 11 is a multisensory journey into ourselves, emerging renewed and universal. After six centuries of storms, of divided knowledge and labor, our consciousness/knowledge aspires to a unified mind and thought across science, engineering, technology, and mathematics: the genius of Leonardo da Vinci. A new Renaissance—this time a Digital Renaissance—is leading society to create and reinvent itself.
In “Dialog” (2018, Russia) by Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov, man usurps the functions of the Creator. The hands from Michelangelo’s fresco The Creation of Adam become robotic, yet the subject remains unchanged: threat, despair, or humility? The robot initiates creation, the man responds—both controlled by the same electric socket, as if to remind us that creation threatens and forgets itself.
Mauro Nemesio Rossi, director of the Dynamic Museum of Technology in Caserta, curates a section on Italian media archaeology with five early Olivetti typewriters—icons of design history and writing systems. He tells how Arduino, which appears in many CYFEST 11 artworks, was developed by members of the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, in the former Olivetti building in Castellamonte. Named after a local bar in Ivrea, Arduino is now used worldwide by experimenters, artists, and designers and is a key tool in STEAM Education.
An evolution of the interdisciplinary STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) method created in the U.S. around the 2000s, STEAM includes Art as a catalyst for scientific and technological innovation. It’s no coincidence that Europe is currently the most fertile ground for this educational model.
CYFEST explores the dialogue between traditional and new visual languages, showcasing the successes and impacts—both positive and negative—of technological development through artistic transformation. Artists’ and programmers’ interventions act as a switch between real and digital coexistence, forming artistic statements that help us observe the everyday world.
In the first exhibition room, we find ourselves on an Italian coastline, but our condition, expanded by new technologies, becomes more perceptible. “Caelum”, a video installation by Daniele Spanò (Italy, 2018), alternates schizophrenic skies—natural and artificial, controlled and assembled—from images based on the searches “change” and “climate.” It tells of the dichotomy between technological progress and climate change driven by human exploitation. In “Dark Sea” by Licia Galizia, an adaptive musical sculpture, human migration flows intertwine with electronic data flows and audience sensory flows, producing a somber, tragic sound.
Even sand doesn’t escape the expanded dimension of space (from micro to macro) and time (a synthesis of past, present, and future): each grain’s noise is recorded on magnetic tape as it falls from an hourglass in “Quantum” (Russia, 2018) by Aleksey Grachev and Sergey Komarov, becoming a regenerated stereophonic vocalized sound. “Digital reality has come so close to traditional culture that it’s hard to tell whether simple human interactions and real-world sounds are enough for us anymore, or whether we now need their digital decoding.” – [E. Gubanova]
The artists’ and programmers’ interventions act as a lens on the coexistence of the real and the digital, forming artistic declarations that help us observe, understand, and shape our daily lives. For example, seen upside down, we realize it’s not what we see that matters, but where we see it from: “Thinking the Unthinkable” (Italy, 2018) by Donato Piccolo—a table with four legs, one robotic head and arm, a surreal setup including a monkey and a whirlpool in a glass—dances with the viewer in an exploration of the human mind’s divisions: reason, instinct, and nature.
In the second gallery room, Anna Frants explores the self in “No. 0” (Russia–USA, 2016), a modular 3D installation resembling a computer grid inhabited by objects, videos, eyes, and movements. The visitor’s gaze is free to get lost in this Babel of virtual images, sounds, words, and actions.
The robotic eyes in “Living Tapestry” (Russia, 2018) follow us, recording us in real time, transforming us into a tapestry of video fragments—like textile pixels—mirroring the tapestries displayed by Alexandra Dementieva. The artist has developed an augmented reality system allowing future generations, after our civilization has vanished, to discover the stories behind these tapestries, like in a futuristic gallery.
Despite all the changes art underwent in the 20th century, “Danae” (Russia, 2014) by Elena Gubanova & Ivan Govorkov shows the lasting influence of classical heritage on contemporary artists. A kinetic multimedia object of golden round mirrors that appear to live and vibrate under reflected light, it whispers of the silent pressure of traditional art—another trait CYFEST, as conceived in St. Petersburg, shares with Italian art.
From the “cold” of digital media in the early rooms, the journey ends with the “heat” of sensuality and eroticism. We hear white noise from the motorized “mating” of a shell and a shoe in “Possessive Shoemaker” (Anna Frants, 2017, Russia–USA), before entering the dark room of the web in “Lipstick” (Italy, 2018) by Franz Cerami, where sensuality consumed behind online cameras is translated into binary code—0s and 1s.
In many countries, from kindergarten through secondary school, children are learning coding and interdisciplinary thinking—skills that artists in CYFEST 11 often discovered only in adolescence or adulthood. “I’m giving you a choice: either put on these glasses or start eatin’ that trash” (John Carpenter, They Live, 1988). Today’s “super glasses” are built by artists using new technologies—essential not just for revealing the techniques and mechanics of language, but for exposing their effects on the well-being of society as a whole.
A special acknowledgment goes to Mauro Felicori, Director of the Royal Palace of Caserta, for his openness to innovation in the arts. CYFEST is an example of how to preserve memory and cultural heritage—especially crucial in southern Italy, where youth unemployment remains among the highest in the country despite a wealth of history. We hope that, like its St. Petersburg edition, the festival may find a permanent home in Caserta and launch an annual cycle of itinerant editions in other southern cities, cultivating fertile and secure ground for future generations.
Digicult July 10, 2018