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Piksel 20. The future narrow, where you don’t want to go.

The 18th edition of the Piksel Festival for Electronic Art and Free Technologies, November 19-21 2020 in Bergen (NO)

We are proud to be presenting more than 85 local and international artists in this edition. Works challenging the pandemic times, where artists have explored strategies to overcome frustration. Projects made in the Quarantine 10 residencies produced by Piksel to be able to bring some artists to the city whilst they have some time to be together and create under better conditions. Manifestations of the power of the networks: the cultural Nordnes, a collaboration among the cultural organizations in the Nordnes neighborhood in Bergen, the TransPiksel Abya Yala artists network from South America, and APO33 from France. The virtual space Piksel Cyber Salon, where we can meet with our avatars and see the festival exhibition. And at last, we rely on the power of the hybridization through 2 Piksel TV channels: Pikselfliks, presenting the astonishing video program and Pikselfliks LIVE, following the online program of concerts, artists presentations, workshops, interviews, and a 72 hours live AV performance.

Piksel Festival highlights

* 87artists presenting 67projects, 10 artists presentations, 4 online workshops, 18 live concerts, 6 online venues.

* 4 Quarantine residencies happening in Bergen from 8th to 19th of November.

* A 3D game made in and about Bergen developed during one of the QUARANTINE 10 residencies with the emotional texts contributions from Bergen citizens.

* DIME ENSEMBLE, a Live AV performance from Nantes (FR) going on during the 3 festival days.

* Piksel Cyber Salon, a virtual salon where people can engage in the concerts, artists presentations, workshops and the virtual exhibition with 53 artistic projects.

* Pikselfliks, a 12 hours at day video channel with the creations of 9 artists. 3 hours video art continued.

* Pikselfliks LIVE, 14 hours live channel with artists interviews, live concerts from all over the world, artists presentations and workshops!

* In Real Life exhibition at Studio 207 and Lygalleriet from 19th to 22nd of November.

Piksel 20. The future narrow, where you don’t want to go.

But wait…there’s more?

2020 is the year of the strategies, where the goal is how to escape the situation. The question is to which new situation to escape? Leandro Pisano points out the “Rural Futurism” as a possible strategy to explore. “Rural futurism” addresses the complex dynamics between rural territory and urban space through technoculture, encompassing a range of issues such as “generation” and “time” within local communities (depopulation, movement, resilience, and cultural heritage) and the peculiar geophysical characteristics of the place (remoteness, wind, energy, infrastructure and/or lack thereof ).

The phrase ‘Think Global, Act Local’, first used in the context of environmental challenges, appears as another possible strategy to follow. The GLOCAL term seems now to get a new meaning. Artists, cultural workers, organizations, museums, and now millions of people are working from their homes to keep their activities alive using the world wide web as a local space of exchange.

Pisano, together with Beatrice Ferrara, has written a Manifesto of Rural Futurism. He states that “it’s clear that in the Anthropocene, in the era of conflicting coexistences, it doesn’t make much sense to raise the question of the distinction between urban and rural dimensions in a topographical, geographical or territorial sense.

Making parallelepiped analogies, we believe we can translate Pisano’s ideas to the online and offline spaces and the local and international arenas. The “Rural futurism” aims that “Rurality” today cannot be seen merely as a geographical space; rather, it has to be seen as an expression of “positionality”, in terms of an actual political position.

Piksel20. The future narrow, suggest that the “online” can not be seen as a tool but as an agora, and the local can not be seen as the contrary of global. We expand the concept of “rurality” to contextualize the peripheral, the suburbia from where to create new narratives of resistance.

We appropriate and hack Leandro Pisano’s words: We need to understand rural/online/local areas as complex spaces actively immersed in the dynamism of encounters, flows and fluxes of contemporary geographies, and critically question modern discourses of capitalism and metropolitanism in which rural/online/local territories are marginalized and considered as doomed to oblivion.

The festival has been exploring these different strategies and we are presenting Piksel 20. The future narrow, as the result of this ongoing search.

Piksel 20 The future narrow, where you don’t want to go.

** This text contains extracts of the interview “The Manifesto of Rural Futurism”  to Leandro Pisano, published on February 3, 2020, by Régine Debatty at the online art magazine We Make Money Not Art; It is based in the “Rural Futurism Manifesto” written by Leandro Pisano and Beatrice Ferrara.

We Make Money Not Art

Rural Manifesto

Leandro Pisano

Beatriz Ferrara