paraflows 09 - festival for digital arts and cultures
The topic of the fourth festival for digital arts and cultures in the city
of Vienna is URBAN HACKING.
URBAN HACKING
The city of Vienna has a long tradition of art performances and interventions in public spaces. This year's festival paraflows09 would like to connect these approaches to public and urban spaces while at the same time comment on the roles of digital media by exploring, challenging, and constructing urban infrastructure.
We are interested in projects that investigate the use of urban space for performances, the hacking of and intervention with urban publics. How can areas of freedom be created, discovered and be put to use? How do regulated spaces work as opposed to the unsupervised? Whom does the city/street/net and their infrastructure belong to? What role does technology play in the urban space? How can social structures be designed and remodelled? How can "urban hacking" redefine urban space, make us think about and live in it along different lines? To what extend can the redefinition of public spaces help to manifest protest against the establishment, advertisement, and consumerist societies?
The net, a public infrastructure with all its alcoves, possibilities and mechanisms, has now also become an important instrument for society to communicate. By adding hyper space into the equation internet has expanded the public real spaces. How these parallel levels of reality organise themselves and what freedom of movement they grant the individual person is one of the issues of paraflows09 URBAN HACKING.
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
