festival

Nacht van de Poëzie [The Night of Poetry] is the biggest poetry festival of the Netherlands. The annual event takes place in TivoliVredenburg (Utrecht) and shows a relay of established and new poets reading their work between 8PM and 3AM, which intermissions of music and theatrical performances.  Outside the theater hall, there is a book market and presentations of small publishers, literary journals and literary organisations.

Zomerparkfeest Venlo is an annual cultural festival, mainly focused on music. In addition there are performances related to dance, theatre, fashion, film, literature, visual arts, and science.

The Ha!wangarda Festival is geared towards promotion and presentation of avant-garde, experimental trends in global and Polish literature. Digital art presentations introducing the most significant works of electronic literature, generative literature workshops, exhibitions of video games based on literature and meetings with authors are the main features of the festival. It presents the diverse genres of digital literature, original approaches towards the book as a medium, and visual literature; it prioritizes writers who have freshly emerged onto the literary scene. On one hand, it maps current trends in experimental writing, and on the other it explores the question of the future of literature in the digital world.

(Source: festival website)

Piksel is an annual event for artists and developers working with free and open source software, hardware and art. Part workshop, part festival, it is organised in Bergen, Norway, and involves participants from more than a dozen countries exchanging ideas, coding, presenting art and software projects, doing workshops, performances and discussions on the aesthetics and politics of free and open source software.

The development, and therefore use, of digital technology today is mainly controlled by multinational corporations. Despite the prospects of technology expanding the means of artistic expression, the commercial demands of the software industries severely limit them instead. Piksel is focusing on the open source movement as a strategy for regaining artistic control of the technology, but also a means to bring attention to the close connections between art, politics, technology and economy.

The first Piksel event was arranged in november 2003, and gathered around 30 artists/developers from all parts of the world. It consisted of artistic/technical presentations, coding workshops and live performances. All activities were documented in a daily blog: http://www.piksel.no/log.html

One of the results of the event was the initiation of the Piksel Technologies for ‘interoperability between various free software applications dealing with video manipulation techniques’ – piksel.org

Piksel is a member of the Pixelache network of electronic art festivals – network.pixelache.ac – and one of the nodes in the Production Network for Electronic Art in Norway – PNEK

(source: http://14.piksel.no/info/piksel)

Pride Toronto is the not-for-profit organization that hosts an annual festival in downtown Toronto, which takes place each year during the last week of June.

Pride Week celebrates our diverse sexual and gender identities, histories, cultures, creativities, families, friends and lives. It includes a three-day street festival with over eight stages of live entertainment, an extensive street fair (including community booths, vendors, food stalls), a special Family Pride program, a politically charged Dyke March, a Trans March and the famous Pride Parade.

A ten day event, Pride Week is one of the premier arts and cultural festivals in Canada and one of the largest Pride celebrations in the world with an estimated attendance of over 1.2 million people. An award winning festival, Pride Week is one of only eight officially designated City of Toronto “Signature Events”, is recognized as one of the “Top 50 Festivals in Ontario” by Festivals and Events Ontario, was awarded the “Best Festival in Canada” award by the Canadian Special Event Industry two years in a row and received the “Best Arts & Culture Event” award for 2011.

(source: http://www.pridetoronto.com/about/)

Studio XX's 2nd annual international festival of web art by women. Eleven women artists from Canada (Montréal, Toronto, Calgary), New York, Australia, England, Scotland, and Estonia will present web art projects in the festival.

Web art treats the Internet as a specific medium for creation and expression - a medium which is a relatively new one for art.

During the festival, visitors are invited to view the various web art projects at their leisure on a fast Internet connection. Documentation about the projects and the artists will be available.

&NOW is a biennial traveling festival/conference that celebrates writing as a contemporary art form: literary art as it is practiced today by authors who consciously treat their work as a process that is aware of its own literary and extra-literary history, that is as much about its form and materials, language, communities, and practice as it is about its subject matter.

&NOW brings together a wide range of writers who are interested in exploring the possibilities of form and the limits of language and other literary modes and who are interested in literature that emphasizes text as a medium, that investigates the essential emptiness of language, and that articulates an assumption that literary form both reflects and emerges from its location in time, forming multiple associations within competing matrices of power and value.

The &NOW Festival of New Writing remains invested in the idea that aesthetics are political, cultural, and interpersonal, articulating convictions about how the world works, including the literary world. Unlike much literature sold for mass appeal, this is a type of literature that by its nature tends to keep generic and even disciplinary definitions unresolved.

Sometimes called experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, freaky, hybrid, surfiction, inaccessible, radical, slip-stream, neo-baroque, hyperfeminine, afro-futurist, postmodern, self-conscious, paradiscursive, gimmicky, and most especially at this moment in history "innovative," literary art is writing (most often made of words), whose aesthetic often shares an ethos with contemporary concerns and modes of both resistance and exhaustion. This is a literature that often takes its own medium as part of its subject matter and sometimes works against the dominant/dominating assumptions about what literature is and does by employing a variety of linguistic games, slippages, puzzles, parodies, annihilations, needs, historical disjunctions, discursive juxtapositions, visuals, appropriations, spatial play, extra-diagetic codes, and other rhetorical strategies and constraints. Literary art may draw attention to modes of performance, distribution, and reception—from the visual coding of the book and page—to other aspects of literary staging, including the author's identity matrices, as this influences how (and if) a text is perceived and received. Contemporary literary art is as invested in its own medium, materials, practices, and engagement with others as it is engaged with the rest of the world.

By bringing together all kinds of writers who are interested in literature as a contemporary art form, &NOW fosters friendships, love affairs, arguments, new writing projects, collaborations, fabulousness, (sometimes all of these at once), the polar opposite of these previous terms, and of course, the means of its own undoing.

(Source: conference website)