10.10.06 AV festival 2006, LifeLike.
The AV festival one of the major British festival dealing with electronic art, digital music, games and new media in general, is still running in NewcastleGateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough. The main theme of this second edition is one of the main discussed and controversial one of the last years: 'LifeLike'. But they're not talking about a life in itself, but life as a result of a different audio and visual experiences' mix manipulated by the invited artists. The parameters of the event are biotechnology, genetic engineering, nanotechnologies, or rather utopia that become fascinating and threatening realities, populated by the humanoid robots as the Fuminori Yamazaki's one able to fully reproduce the human gestures. The mission is venturing and exploring the boundaries between the natural and the synthetic (in other words the real and the virtual), showing also "how life is shifting, evolving and mutating" as the director Honor Hager stated. This is the selected path, that lead the festival research, trying to explore (for example in Sensory Circus, the first effort to create animated customizable spaces to interact with) how new technologies are able to modify the human perceptions.
Francesca Tomassini