SIGHT & SOUND 2017
Organized by Eastern Bloc, since 2009, Sight & Sound Festival seeks out the best and most provocative and outstanding work of digital art currently being made by international and local emerging artists. It embraces the fringe of contemporary digital art and culture through installations, performances, workshops, interventions, and discussions. Sight & Sound is seeing the unseen and hearing the unheard. It’s experiencing the indescribable. It is where contemporary digital art meets its political agenda. It’s a festival that invites the possibility of social change through art, music, and all-night dancing.
This year’s edition is supported by Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre.
NON-COMPLIANT FUTURES
Under the theme [Non-Compliant Futures], Sight + Sound festival 2017 will perform an autopsy of the grand narrative of innovation, the very one which promised us a radiant future dependent upon hyperconsumption, techno-positivism, digital colonialism, and the myth of infinite growth. With over thirty international guests, the festival program, curated by Disnovation.org, will question the standardized imaginaries of the future and highlight intersecting paths and strategies that aim to reveal, perturb, and pervert the cult of innovation.
Following on from the gospel of progress, evolution, and growth from centuries past, today’s vocabulary of innovation and disruption are rhetorical instruments par excellence. They flood the dominant discourse of our times, flowing from the political arena into the fields of labour, education, and art. Meanwhile, in periphery to the daily onslaught of techno-solutionist propaganda, numerous critical, alternative, deviant, and speculative practices are (re)emerging globally. They pave the way to a critical and grassroots reappropriation of the possibilities envisioned by our technological society.
Sight + Sound 2017 calls to break free from a linear notion of progress and, rather, re-introduce concepts such as degrowth and maintainability to the core of our vision of the future. It is also an invitation to embrace our alien-becoming, which we are already collectively enduring with the whole of human and non-human life.
Together with artists, activists, performers, and theorists, NON-COMPLIANT FUTURES inhabits this tsunami of capitalism and human action by populating it with a host of artistic alternatives — rather unlikely but preferable possibilities that will act as the basis to broader debate and critical projections into the future.
CURATORS
DISNOVATION.ORG is a working group based in Paris, initiated by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska. At the crossroads between contemporary art, research and hacking, the collective develops situations of disturbance, speculation, and debate, challenging the ideology of innovation and stimulating the emergence of alternative narratives. They recently edited The Pirate Book, an anthology on media piracy.
Schedule and Tickets
September 27-October 1, 2017
https://easternbloc.ca/en/sight-sound-festival/tickets-schedule
Venues
Eastern Bloc
7240 Clark Street, 2nd floor
Montréal, QC, H2R 2Y3
514 284-2106
Never Apart
7049 Saint-Urbain Street
Montréal, QC, H2S 3H4
514 284-2106
