What have we achieved? What are we going to keep? What should we leave behind? And how will it go on? We ask these questions in retrospect, after five years of cooperation under the EU-funded project "Networking Tomorrow's art for an unknown future", which carried out nine festivals of the Festival network ECAS / ICAS the European and International Cities of Advanced Sound between 2010 - 2015, one of them is the ORF musikprotokoll in the Styrian Autumn.

A farewell party with a fresh start

Last week we were in Dresden, where our partners Festival CYNETART is at home, to celebrate the conclusion with a festival of festivals - with sound installations, a symposium, a film night, a Hacklab, workshops and many concerts. But this festival marked not only an end but also a beginning. In last year's December together with fifteen other festivals from our Festival Network we launched the also EU funded platform SHAPE, to exchange exciting current projects in the field of music and audiovisual art. There are 48 artists in the pool and many of them could have been experienced live during the ICAS Festival in Dresden.

Dense programme

We had always a full programme in the ICAS radio shows, but this time we had even much more than before: It is a mix of recordings, interviews and concert recordings that we have made in the past days in Dresden and events we experienced in the past five years as part of ICAS Radio - especially bright moments we keep in mind.

Ela Kagel will think with us about festivals as laboratories; Norbert Math of alien productions will report on the launching of the third phase of the project "metamusic" end of May at the Linz Höhenrausch; we will meet Teun Verkerk and Joris Hoogenboom who came to Dresden with their Buqs; Heimo Lattner and Judith told us of the development of their project "El Silbo"; Our new ICAS colleague Chico Dub told of its festival Novas Frequencias in Rio de Janeiro; you can listen to the Acuo mix of Michal Seba and Stanislav Abraham and present excerpts from the concerts of Assimilation Process, Mr. Incognito and Cooptrol. And Nathan Budzinski was asked about what he has discovered in the course of production of the film "Nine futures. Sounds Fragmenting" about us - the ECAS festivals. Together with cinematographer Theo Cook he traveled from September 2014 to February 2015 the nine festivals which have jointly carried out the project "Networking Tomorrow's art for an unknown future" in order to make an artistic documentation that now premiered during ICAS festival.

Concert of Environmental Auditors

And the Environmental Auditors visited us again. The Environmental Auditors invite you to listen very carefully when they join in the orchestra of the surrounding environmental noise with their instruments, freely improvising, the instantaneous listening experience comes to the center of attention. After sonic exploration of the Grazer Schlossberg and an abandoned brewery in northern Norway city of Tromso within the musikprotokoll and the Insomnia Festival in 2013, the musicians explored the grounds surrounding the Festspielhaus Hellerau in Dresden during the ICAS Festival - with a trip to the Festspielhaus. From the concert recordings they have again made a radio piece afterwards.

Multifaceted cooperation

The ICAS Festival was organized and produced of DISK and the Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau, those two organizations that stand behind the CTM Festival and the CYNETART Festival, in co-operation with 22 festivals from our Festival Network and Hellerau - the European Center for the Arts which is also based in Hellerau.

At this point a big thank you to the so sympathetic and dedicated people of the Dresden Music DAVE platform with who we have organized some program points of the ICAS festival 2015. DAVE is short for Dresden Audio Visual Experience.