DEAF 07: Interact or Die

I’m at the DEAF07 Festival in the city of Rotterdam. First of all from an italian point of view it’s always amazing to realize how a good organizations of the fluxes of a city can generate a better life: less cars and more bicycle means less noise, the appropriation of the pubblic space by art sculpture means a space the citizens care of.

Now about DEAF07 i think it’s really well organized. First of all the exhibtion space at Las Palmas it’s inside a building that will be inaugurated next week, but also if you enter trough dust and working people, you don’t care at all as you get in. The space is really raw and trough cement column you can see a lot of interactive art pieces.
And many of these installation are really beautiful. This exhibition is really interesting particularly for his strong statement about interaction: interact or die. It’s a message to the media art scene, that in the last years floated with no clear direction, now the DEAF 07 exhibiton says it loud: interact or die, that’s the destiny for media art. All the pieces are in singular ways intercactive, from mouse to shadow, from fingers to a knife.hand.chop.bot, you can interact with all the part the of the body, from playful to amazing sensation, from surprise to emotions of pure fear.

What really interested me was the qualitative differences of the interaction, that floating trough different ranges provide a clear picture of interactive installations at our time.

The same interactive attitude is implemented in the seminars, that rather than a simple conference and discussion model, they’re structured more on different modules that even overlap eachother: for example the seminar Critical Ecosystem today was really interesting both for the content and for the structure of the seminar itself, that startd with a talk of Matthew Fuller about “art for animal”, that said that “what is suggested in this initial sketch of possible field is a myriadic ecology of perceptual cognitive
sets, some of which may overlap or share functions and capacities.”
Then another talk by Jan Willem Dol about the Greenpeace Campaign greenmyapple.org and after a game about the simulation of life by Rens Kortmann, that continued while Anthony Hall show on another stage his reasearch with wood crafted noise making machines and complex systems to make music with fishes inside a aquarium.
The exhibition is open till the 29th of april, so if you pass by Rotterdam, please go to.

Then the place to go is the Un-DEAF festival, where in a open and shared environment there’re talks, music, parties.