Digital Acts #3

Thursday 17 and Friday 18 March

Espace municipal Georges Conchon, Rue Léo Lagrange, Clermont-Ferrand

Live broadcast on Youtube and Facebook. Simultaneous English / French translation.

Free admission with registration | Open to professionals and the general public.

The Digital Acts #3, professional meetings, will be based on presentations by curators, artists and researchers, punctuated by short panel discussions related to digital arts. Free access and open to everyone, and especially all digital and art professionals: artists, curators, producers, distributors, trainers, teachers, students… with, as a highlight, a conference organised by the SCAM (Société Civile des Auteurs Multimédia).
The Digital Acts #3 consist of 3 meetings organised around Focus screenings, panel discussions and artist presentations.

PROJECTIONS FOCUS

Introduced by their curator, the FOCUS video programmes are “carte blanche” given to curators, international festival directors or dissemination organisations. They may focus on an artist, a country’s production or a label.
VIDEOFORMES 2022 Digital Acts#3 introduce: MADATAC, Heure Exquise ! and SAFPEM.

PRÉSENTATIONS D’ARTISTES

Following the Focus screenings, 2 artists will present and illustrate their work in 10 minutes each. This is followed by a 40-minute panel discussion in which the curator’s view of the work of the two artists is presented.
VIDEOFORMES 2022 Digital Acts#3 introduce: Nikzad Arabshahi, Golnaz Behrouznia, Mihai Grecu, Vincent Ciciliato, Gabriela Golder and Jeanne Susplugas.
Moderator: Élise Aspord, PhD in Art History (Art and Intelligence, artificial life and robotics, Paris X, 2007).

LA SCAM INVITE #8 : « Ice Art »

La SCAM Invite is a format of meetings organised by the Scam (Société Civile des Auteurs Multimédias) in partnership with festivals they support. It offers the opportunity to share creative and contemporary points of view, each time initiating an unexpected dialogue between two personalities working in fields that are a priori remote (authors, artists, scientists, philosophers, engineers, musicians, visual artists, landscape artists, video artists, mathematicians)… brought together for a public discussion.

Thursday, March 17
Friday, March 18

2 pm > 4:30 pm ::: Digital Acts #3 - Part 1

Sequence dedicated to Iury Lech, curator and director of MADATAC (Festival of New Digital Media Arts, Madrid, Spain), Mihai Grecu (artist, Romania) and Vincent Ciciliato (artist, France)

Moderator : Élise Aspord

2 pm: General presentation of the Digital Acts #3
2:10 pm: Presentation - Iury Lech
2:20 pm: Screening - FOCUS #1 : MADATAC (curator Iury Lech)
3:05 pm: Exchange between Iury Lech and Elise Aspord
3:25 pm: Presentation - Mihai Grecu
3:35 pm: Presentation - Vincent Ciciliato
3:45 pm: Round-Table

Round-Table: Virtual reality (VR), land of exploration of a more immersive art, more interactive, more ... more what!?

As in ancient times, the 2022 edition of VIDEOFORMES reflects on the importance given to divinatory powers. What will our world be like tomorrow? This is the question that virtual reality, the new technical Sybil of modern times, promises to answer.

According to the two augurs-creators present - Mihai Grecu and Vincent Ciciliato -, the future does not seem to be the most joyful, at least as far as human perspectives are concerned... Both draw from the entrails of the masterpieces of the past - Goya and the possessed god Saturn for one; Dante and the terrible harpies of the forest of the suicides for the other - to immerse us through VR in the horrific beauties of a post-apocalyptic no-man's land... This gloomy vision is fortunately counterbalanced by the pleasure they derive from creating an illusion, from putting us physically "in the game" of these suddenly animated imaginary worlds, embodied by VR.

Does the use of these devices at the interface between dream and reality result in a new language? What does it say about the artistic world to come? The answer is perhaps more "sibylline", more confused, and richer than it may seem...

9 am > 11:30 am ::: Digital Acts #3 - Part 2

Sequence dedicated to Thierry Destriez, curator and distributor of Heure Exquise! (Centre International pour les arts vidéo, France), Gabriela Golder (artist, Argentina) and Jean Susplugas (artist, France).

Moderator : Élise Aspord

9 am: Home
9:05 am: Presentation - Thierry Destriez
9:15 am: Screnning - FOCUS #2 : Heure Exquise ! (curator Thierry Destriez)
10:00 am: Exchange between Thierry Destriez and Elise Aspord
10:15 am: Presentation - Gabriela Golder
10:25 am: Presentation - Jeanne Susplugas
10:45 am: Round-Table

Round-Table: Exquisite women! And a question: does media art, like angels, have a sex?

The "grumpy gentleman", the actor-author Jean-Pierre Bacri would surely have taken offense at the question, as if women or men were an entity in itself! Nonetheless, and in view of the under-representation of women in certain sectors, including the hybrid arts, the question of the place occupied or not by women remains unanswered. It appeared to us all the more relevant following the suggestion of the 100% female focus of Heure exquise!

How do our two guest artists, Gabriela Golder and Jeanne Susplugas, view the issue? Have they been confronted with the "stereotype threat"? The Matilda effect? Is there a "feminine" way - or not - to approach their work? Their subjects? Like the memory dear to their hearts (neuro-portraits for Jeanne or collective memory of workers for Gabriela).

The group of these women artists have this desire to leave a mark: a memory of the body, of the Earth, of a place, of joy as well as of violence... Is this mark engraved in contemporary art that of a woman or just that of a fully-fledged and unique individual?

2 pm > 4:20 pm ::: Digital Acts #3 - Part 3

Sequence dedicated to Saeed Khavar Nejad, curator and director of SAFPEM-FMICA (Institute of Contemporary Art, Iran), Golnaz Behrouznia (artist, Iran) and Nikzad Arabshahi (artist, Iran)

Moderator : Élise Aspord

2 pm: Presentation - Saeed Khavar Nejad
2:10 pm: Screening - FOCUS #3 : SAFPEM-FMICA (curator Sadd Khavar Nejad)
2:55 pm: Exchange between Saeed Khavar Nejad and Elise Aspord
3:10 pm: Presentation - Golnaz Behrouznia
3:20 pm: Presentation - Nikzad Arabshahi
3:40 pm: Round-Table

Round-Table: Insp-IRAN!: art - a language without borders

This third part of the digital acts opens on one of the strong bilateral relations of the festival, which has been established for more than ten years with the Iranian artistic scene. It pays tribute to Persian culture by providing us with local and committed content.

The guests present decided at a quite young age to abstract themselves from borders, whether they be geographical, formal, or technical. Nikzad Arabshahi and Golnaz Behrouznia are, like a stone that with time is affected by erosion, not broken but shaped. This has led them to reinterpret their practice of graphic arts and sculpture to address themes related to nature in germination or related to the generative dynamics of living and the pencil lead.

"Can the one who leaves flourish far from their native land?", asks the writer Parisa Reza. We will leave it to the artists to answer, they who live in a form of exile, but the beginning of this communion past/present, East/West, art/science and the poetic sensibility with which they express themselves to the point of becoming ours, reinforces the idea that art is undoubtedly the language that surpasses all others and makes us breathe as a single humanity.

4:25 pm > 6 pm ::: La Scam Invite #8 - Ice Art

With the glaciologist Luc Moreau and the artist Anne-Sophie Emard.

The Scam Invite is prepared and hosted by Gilles Coudert, writer-director, member of the Scam, partner of VIDEOFORMES 2022.

REBROADCAST

The Digital Acts #3, professional days, are organized in partnership with the Service Université Culture de l’Université Clermont Auvergne, le Damier, the association Clermont Massif Central 2028, Comme 1 Image and the SCAM.