Only Connect: Cairotronica’s 1st Edition

Only Connect”, the imperative that governs the development of digital art, cultural convention, and the evolution of social media, has implications for education, urban planning, and human relations that are shared across the world. In exploring these issues, whether in celebratory, ideological or aesthetic mode, we recognise that artists and thinkers must push their practice beyond the conventions of habit into unknown territories of mind and matter.

As the novelist E. M. Forster famously asserted: Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest.

The prosaic and the passionate define the great divide between the brute excess of corporate culture, and the collective need for beauty and meaning. In art as in life, the breadth of our connectivity defines the depth of our humanity. We reach across cultures, across disciplines, across ancient myths and modern methodologies. Above all, we each seek to connect our true self with the authentic needs and desires of others, in a field of creative endeavor that knows no boundaries and reaches beyond the limits of horizon.

Roy Ascott, February 2016

The proposed theme Connect is a reference to connecting the dots: connecting disciplines, people, artists, designers, ideas and nations.

Cairotronica will serve as a catalyst through which connections can happen. The past will connect with the future, history will connect with the present, art will connect with technology and new media, tradition will connect with modernity, and Cairo will connect with the world.

Cairotronica will bring together groundbreaking artists, pioneering engineers, ingenious designers,academics, international digital communities, students, art lovers, and more from across Egypt, Africa, the Middle East, and the world. It will offer a meeting of the minds where participants will share, discuss, learn, talk, and work. In essence, they will truly connect.

Event

Following the third round of Cairotronica titled Data Fiction, we return to you with a 10-day event during which we feature 3 different artwork one of which hasn’t been on display before.
The talks program aims to start a mutual dialogue between the audience and artists. It gives the space for artists participating in the festival to share their ideas and concepts with the audience to better understand the different practices of artists using new technologies in their work. All events are free but registration is mandatory. English is the language used for all of the talks.
Mia Zabelka transfers quantum noise which is a product of fluctuations in optical fiber communication, which usually interrupts music performances, into sound art. The acoustic Quantum Noize is correlated with optical visions, played by Epitaten — Quantum Cinema imagery, where the scattered grid of the Higgs field meets the Platonic world of ideas, in 5 dimensions & beyond.
Cairotronica’s 3rd edition showcases artworks and projects from Egyptian, regional and international artists who outline the complexities of dealing with new technologies and explore the
Looking at existing datasets through algorithmic and analogue methods, participants can interrogate how data, and by extension datasets, work – how it can be warped and manipulated and ignored and lost, how it can be both individual and human and vast and conceptual – and by doing so, offer critical and conceptual ways of engaging with this methodology that is made and constructed from the ground up.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

PHOTO DOCUMENTATION

VIDEO DOCUMENTATION

IN THE PRESS

FESTIVAL CATALOGUES

PARTNERS AND SPONSORS