publication (pdf,de) ECAS WP 3 - Stage

»The Digital Now«
10.04. - 21.04.2013 / Brussels, Belgium

The Digital Now is an exhibition series which aims to look thematically at relevant artifacts within the current artistic context and media art related discourse.

The first edition entitled ‘Drones / Birds: Princes of Ubiquity’ is inspired by the way birds are reflecting our contemporary relation with technology. For this, inspiration is drawn from the New Aesthetic with a focus on the ways we experience our digital condition: always on, always there. Drones or UAV’s (Unmanned Arial Vehicles) have been related to this New Aesthetic debate ever since it started. The New Aesthetic has been a remarkable and often intense debate for about two years now, spread across platforms, groups, scenes, blogs, catalogues, sprint-books and festivals in off- and online worlds.

‘Drones / Birds: Princes of Ubiquity’ taps into this debate of autonomous technology, waving at machines, the post-human and machinic vision but started from an opposite angle, not by discovering a new next nature in digital artifacts but by spotting instances of the computational or digital in nature… spotting starlings producing Nokia ringtones as a birdcall. As the New Aesthetic is an ongoing debate the exhibition will not try to give an overview. Instead its statements and questions are taken as a thread to explore our digital and computational surroundings. Core to the exhibition are digital artifacts; intentional and unintentional critical objects reflecting our contemporary relation with technology.

The Digital Now is produced by Cimatics and featured in the off-program of Art Brussels, the international contemporary art fair (April 18 -21, 2013). This year’s edition “Drones / Birds: Princes of Ubiquity” relates to the theme “Ubiquitous Art and Music: Art and the everyday” organized within the European project ECAS, and connected to the International Cities of Advanced Sound (ICAS) network.