site.btaDa Fest Gathers Artists from Global Digital Scene in Sofia

The international festival for digital arts Da Fest will take place between October 24 and October 28 and feature new artistic practices and significant achievements in the field of digital arts, the organizers Da Lab Foundation and the National Academy of Art said.

The ninth edition of the festival includes performances, screenings, lectures, presentations, workshops, and exhibitions, which will take place in twelve locations in the capital.

SUBJECT

This year's theme is "Antibiosis: The Art of Struggle and Survival". Just as microorganisms fight for supremacy in their microscopic kingdoms, the authors in the festival programme delve into the intricacies of conflict, contrast and competition in human experience and the environment. The program is presented in a way that is accessible to the general public and is suitable both for different ages and for viewers with an interest in contemporary arts, the Da Fest organizers said.

SPECIAL GUEST

Orlan, one of the most significant French artists, is coming to Bulgaria for the first time during the festival. Orlan's internationally recognized distinct style uses sculpture, photography, performance, music, video, 3D, video games, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Always mixed with humor, sometimes parody or even grotesque, her work questions social phenomena.

On October 25, an exhibition of her selected projects will open in the Credo Bonum gallery. The next day, Orlan will give a lecture, titled  "Orlan: This is my body, this is my software" at the French Institute.

PERFORMANCES, INSTALLATIONS, EXHIBITIONS

The festival programme includes the world-famous Swiss artist Zimoun, who gained popularity with his impactful site-specific works. He will present a large-scale installation specially created for the Academia Gallery space. Interweaving simple and functional components, he builds architectural platforms of sound that express the tension between the orderly patterns of modernism and the chaotic forces of life, the organizers said.

ONE Gallery Sofia will host five works from the festival programme. Internationally recognized pioneers of interactive art Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau will present The Value of Art (Wild Boar), an interactive painting dealing with the economy of attention and the creation of value in the art world.

The same gallery will present the latest project of French artist Alizee Armet, created during her residency at EMAP, the European Media Art Platform  - an interdisciplinary installation in the field of technology and bioart, titled "Ghostly Plants of Damaged Worlds".

ONE Gallery will also feature US-based artist Yuge Zhou's four-part video installation The Humors, which explores connections, isolation and longing in natural and urban spaces as places of shared dreams. 

The fifth work featured at ONE gallery will be a video portrait by Bulgarian artist Kalin Serapionov, titled "Blonde woman in a red dress and bright lipstick talking on the phone and smoking a cigarette".

The Hungarian Binaura collective will present at the Liszt Institute in Sofia their Device for Future Memoirs, creating imaginary scenarios based on works of magical realism. Binaura is run by Agoston Nagy and Bence Samu, and they create algorithmic installations using free and open source tools.

TOPLOCENTRALA ART CENTRE

The Toplotsentrala Regional Centre for Contemporary Art will feature the Scenocosme collective, Gregory Lasserre and Anais met den Ancxt, whose interactive works exist thanks to contact with viewers. Scenocosme creates hybrids between technology and living or natural elements. In Sofia, viewers will have the opportunity to interact with their work Akousmaflore until October 28.

Three more performances will be presented in the halls of Toplocentrala. Flying Bodies across the Fields is a contemporary bok-o-bok dance performance for four performers and a swarm of drones exploring the disappearance of bees and the use of drones for pollination.

Immersion is a new form of live action, an interactive and engaging electro-performance in which the audience becomes both participant and spectator. The author of the project is the French musician Verlatour, who arrived in Sofia together with his team of multimedia, code, video and lighting engineers.

In the third performance of the festival, Amsterdam-based video artist Finn Borath examines death and infinity.

CINEMA

Da Fest's screening programme will present a selection of short films at the digital arts forum Ars Electronica. On October 27, the Welcome to Planet B and Electronic Theatre programmes will be hosted at the Goethe Institute.

The Goethe Institute will also host the interdisciplinary installation Blackbox AI which explores gender bias in artificial intelligence in the form of a maze. It was created as a collaboration between Anastasia Nefeli Vidaki, Lida Zaharopoulou, Michaela Dobreva, Tea Rukavina and Vivian Stamu, within Goethe Institute's regional project EthicAI=Labs.