Eastern Bloc presents its 11th edition of SIGHT + SOUND FESTIVAL virtually this summer.
Some Universe : Internet Spaces in a Postdigital World
June 29 to August 31st, 2021
At the forefront of the experimental digital art scene in Quebec since 2007, Eastern Bloc presents the 11th edition of the SIGHT + SOUND International Digital Art Festival this summer. Titled Some Universe : Internet Spaces in a Postdigital World, this year’s festival will be held completely online between June 29th and August 31st. Running for two months, the audience will have the opportunity to participate in Eastern Bloc’s main annual event and join the reflections of 16 artists from Canada and abroad.
The online exhibition will take place on the purpose build website [www.sightandsound.online] and access will be free, however the audience will be encouraged to make a suggested donation to support Eastern Bloc’s mandate of promoting emerging artists - with all proceeds going towards funding the artist fee’s of the next edition of SIGHT + SOUND Festival, in 2022.
The 2021 edition of SIGHT + SOUND Festival takes advantage of the immobility we have all been forced into to propose a reflection about the aesthetics and politics of space and representation. Curated by Erandy Vergara and Tina Sauerlaender, the artworks help us imagine and speculate on what “space” really means in a post-internet and post-pandemic world. The exhibition invites online users to delve into the worlds produced by contemporary artists, provoking us to think about what kind of spaces we want to inhabit in the years to come. The curators selected net art, videos, and videogames exploring spaces beyond perspective and cartesian referentes. The artists move away from realism, or engage with it critically. They ask questions, not attempting to provide linear solutions. Most of all, they virtually hold the visitors’ hands during immersive, multidimensional experiences to reconfigure the “fourth wall” to which we are mostly submitted to during our day to day lives facing flat screens.
The title of the 11th edition of SIGHT + SOUND Festival paraphrases Olia Lialina’s Some Universe (2002), a link-free site inspired by the popular star backgrounds on the early web. Like many of Lialina’s works, this net art piece functions as an archive of the aesthetics and vernacular roots of the internet. I like the vagueness and unpretentiousness implied in the title of Lialina’s piece. But I admire it even more for its archival impulse: to create it the artist extracted as many outer space backgrounds she could find on the web in 2002. The evocation of the infinite universe and the stars, which often stand for the future also resonates with this curatorship.
Participating Artists: AAA Collective (AU; AR; РФ/; DE; US; FR); Banz & Bowinkel (DE); Ronnie Clarke (CA); Mara Eagle (US/CA); Anna Eyler – Nicolas Lapointe (CA); Philippe Pasquier and Miles Thorogood (CA), Jiwon Ham (KR/ US); JakyuNG Lee (KR/ US); Olia Lialina (РФ/DE); Frances Adair McKenzie and Alisha Piercy (CA); Fallon Simard – Amery Sandford (CA); Timothy Thomasson
More information: sightandsound.online