Immaterial is an experimental festival focused on exploring new digital paradigmmes.
IMMATERIAL is an experimental festival focused on exploring new digital paradigms. Through a varied showing of artistic expressions, the current moment with its technologies and their uses will be addressed along with its aesthetic, social, and political aspects. Through programming comprised of conversations, presentations, talks, podcasts, and concerts, the festival’s aim is to involve diverse benchmark communities to create a space for artistic experimentation and cultural practice in the digital realm. This edition will count on the collaboration of the Dabadaba music hall to create a programme of experimental performances of electronic music and audiovisuals that will take place both in Dabadaba and Tabakalera.
This fourth edition of IMMATERIAL will continue the exploration of an increasingly hybrid world, where physical and digital horizons merge, interact, and influence each other, analysing intermediate spaces and the logics that operate within them. To achieve this, IMMATERIAL is proposing the creation of an environment where the physical and virtual, theoretic and creative practice, leisure and politics, intermix and mutually affect each other.
Living the Uncanny dwells in the unusual or uncomfortable aesthetic of Uncanny Valley, a hypothesis formulated by Masahiro Mori. It considers that the moment in which anthropomorphic replicas come excessively close to human behaviours and appearances, they illicit a strange response or outright rejection from observers. In this moment, we can also extrapolate the new aesthetics derived from the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), where the observer perceives something uncomfortable in visual creations for some reason while, at the same time, their proliferation is resulting in a new landscape and aesthetic moment that is installed into our collective imagination, perhaps offering us an opportunity to embrace the beauty of error.
Incorporating what is mysterious, ominous, or sinister? Crossing it, or letting ourselves be crossed by it?
*Virtual Tabakalera: Part of the digital initiative of this project takes place in this virtual version of Tabakalera created on the Mozilla hubs platform, where exhibitions, initiatives and other projects can be found.
