As the 21st century expands human experience into the digital realm, fundamental transformations spread rapidly and unchecked through incremental changes to the everyday. Wired into invisible networks and new economies, critical reflection might only occur with an interruption of the ordinary at a large scale. Grand in ambition, scope, and size, ACT Festival presents a world-class exhibition, symposium, performance and workshop program that creatively reconfigures and recontextualizes advanced technologies and lets us experience the digital anew.
Loosely organized around the theme of Tektonics, ACT Festival will examine methods of “new making”—in projects, practices, educational platforms, and creative ecosystems. As rapidly evolving paradigms like machine learning, mass customization, and synthetic biology force us to rethink how and what we create, broader shifts register across forward-thinking contemporary art and design. The 19th-century craftsman William Morris observed that “You can’t have art without resistance in the material.” To explore what this statement means in the post-digital age, ACT Festival is gathering more than 75 artists, designers, engineers, educators, theorists, curators, and critics from the region and around the world.
The first edition of ACT Festival takes place at ACT Center in Gwangju, South Korea and will feature:
Ryoji Ikeda, Anthony Dunne (Dunne & Raby), Ivan Poupyrev (Google ATAP), United Visual Artists, Régine Debatty, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi (Rhizomatiks), Elevenplay, Kimchi and Chips, Hearyun Shim, Yuri Suzuki, Juerg Lehni, Joachim Sauter (ART+COM), Golan Levin, Byungjun Kwon, Exonemo, TACIT Group, Zach Lieberman, Carsten Nicolai, and many others.
ACC Creation will also be hosting two additional exhibitions that run concurrent with the festival: New Eurasia Project and Interrupted Survey: Fractured Modern Mythologies. Visitors to the ACC can also take in the Children’s Performing Arts Festival 2015, as well as other exhibitions and performances within the ACC.