NATIONAL CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS
CYLAND MEDIA LABORATORY
Cyland Foundation Inc.
present
V festival of cybernetic art CYBERFEST 2011
which will be held in St. Petersburg on November 18-25.
We accept suggestions from artists, curators, culture personalities, who want to take part in 5th Cyberfest – send your applications for participation through the festival website www.cyfest.art.
SHOW US YOUR TONGUE
Tongues could be simple or complex, archaic or modern, alive and dead, one’s own and somebody else’s. One’s own, native tongue, is, as a rule, but one. We acquire it practically at birth and lose it together with life.
If the tongue is lost, everything collapses. Many tongues are not better than one – even builders of the Tower of Babel realized that.
The contemporary art is similar to that great construction – tongues got mixed. It has been a few generations already, starting with Pop Art, that artists have been using the language of mass culture and politics, sociology and psychoanalysis, journalism and advertisement, glossy photo and traditional painting, design and graffiti, theater and film, street activism and academic studies, business and outsiderism.
A word emerges when a phenomenon emerges; a statement – when there is something to say; a tongue – when there is a community.
The international art crown today is not unlike the population of Diaspora: people talk each in their own way, each does his own thing and each lives in his own conditions – and it is no longer really clear what characteristics and what common belief make people recognize their own kind.
For how long will art preserve itself without its own speech? And what is capable of giving new vocabulary, syntax and grammar to the contemporary art that has been for several generations already leading the unenviable life of mocker, parodist, doppelganger of the “real life”?
New technologies that change the civilization before our own eyes is a challenge that will have to be met; a reality that is worthy of discussion; unlimited possibilities that are impossible not to use.
One should answer the question: will the art remain the mocker that would everlastingly stick out its tongue to the “big boys” or will it acquire its own tongue, on which it will say most important words – to itself and to everyone.
Marina Koldobskaya,
curator of the Cyberfest