Festival Opening / Sept 10, 2009, 7 pm
Container Installation, Karlsplatz/Resselpark

The city of Vienna has a long tradition of interventions and actions in the public space. With this year's topic URBAN HACKING, the fourth paraflows festival continues this artistic investigation of the public and urban space of living. What is more, paraflows 09 will shed light on the role played by digital media when it comes to exploring, questioning, and shaping the urban infrastructure.

Exhibition URBAN HACKING

A container village designed especially for paraflows at Karlsplatz will provide the space for the exhibition URBAN HACKING, which will connect the Künstlerhaus, the Karlskirche, and the project space, and thereby unite the historic with the contemporary. More than 30 national and international positions of digital art and cultures as well as the artistic strategies connected therewith shed light on current and older tendencies of interacting with the public space.What will be put on display are projects on use and intervention, on hacking and setting up the urban public. A focus will thereby be laid on the possibilities "urban hacking" offers for the redesign of public space.

The net, as public infrastructure with its individual elements, possibilities, and mechanisms, has become integral to social communication and extended the public space via hyperspace. How these two parallel layers of reality are organized and impact the individual's freedom of movement is one of the questions to be answered by paraflows 09 URBAN HACKING.

Symposium URBAN HACKING
Cultural Jamming Strategies in the Risky Spaces of Modernity.

The three-day program of the symposium corresponds to the thematic priorities Urban, Hacking, and Risk. The panel Urban discusses the city as cultural venue, whereas the second the panel, Hacking, investigates the origin, structures, and evolutionary elements of the multi-faceted notion "hacking." The third and final day will be dedicated to questions of risk, for instance when one – for artistic or philosophical reasons – transgresses boundaries, as well as question pertaining to gender in the given context. The symposium also will serve as a copula between the exhibition and the workshops and will be accompanied by movie screenings and theatre plays.