Summer Sessions are short-term residencies for young and emerging artists, organized by an international network of cultural organizations. Each summer the partners in this network for talent development collaborate to offer professional production support and expert feedback to artists in the realization of a new artwork or design. Local talents from each partner’s geographic region are scouted and selected for a residency abroad, where they are offered highly productive atmospheres and specific kinds of expertise at one of the international partners in the international network. This collaboration not only results in the development of a large number of new projects in a relatively short period, but also provides the participating emerging artists with international experience that helps them jumpstart their art and design practice.
The Summer Sessions pop-up exhibition at the Festival Ars Electronica shows a selection of outcomes realized through this international exchange of emerging talents. While the pop-up exhibition illustrates the kind of results that this pressure-cooker residency format results in, a live event will highlight the participants’ experiences abroad and the effects these had on their early careers. In doing so, V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media, the initiating partner of the Summer Sessions network, intends to inform ambitious early-career artist about the opportunities that the international network for talent development offers and is reaching out to other cultural organizations with an invitation to join the network. Furthermore, the pop-up exhibition introduces the Ars Electronica Festival audience to a selection of promising emerging Dutch artists who participated in the network. The event will close with an informal drink to continue the conversation on the opportunities for young artists and cultural organizations within the Summer Sessions network for talent development.
This event will also form a meeting point to discuss how to strategically further develop these international opportunities for emerging and young professionals with the network’s past and present partners. The partners in the 2016 edition of the Summer Sessions include Chronus Art Center (China), the National University of Tres de Febrero (Argentina), the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), PNEK (Norway), iMAL (Belgium), Arquivo 237 (Portugal), Kitchen Budapest (Hungary), Metamedia Association (Croatia), Interactive Media Design Lab, NAIST (Japan) and V2_ Institut for the Unstable Media (The Netherlands). This program is made possible by the generous support of the Creative Industries Fund (NL).
A Hipster Bar
Max Dovey (UK)
A Hipster Bar uses a customer image-recognition application to only admit people who are recognized as hipsters by a computer algorithm. The doors to this bar will only open if you are at least 90 percent hipster, making it the world’s first automated hipster bar. By sourcing thousands of images of hipsters (from Instagram) Max Dovey has attempted to train an algorithm to recognize the visual characteristics of a hipster.
Union Scope
Fako Berkers (NL)
Union Scope finds iconic images on the Internet from different European cultures, about topics that concern Europeans today. It displays these images by country inside a map of the European Union, revealing the cultural differences and similarities that exist within Europe around topics that concern European citizens. Searching for images online it is easy to forget that the images one finds are significantly informed by the culture one was raised in. Union Scope provides the opportunity to explore this cultural bias in image searches, revealing different cultural views on European topics.
Woof & Wow
Gaspard Bos (NL), Charlot Boonekamp (NL)
Woof & Wow develops techniques for transforming plastic bottles into woven products to be used by arts and crafts people or industrial designers. The aim of Woof & Wow is to include the world’s most disadvantaged communities in the process of design and production of products from waste, as they are moreover the ones that pick up the rest of the world’s trash. At the Festival Ars Electronica, Woof & Wow will exhibit a stool designed by Icelandic designer Marta Sif in collaboration with an arts and crafts community in Peru. The exhibition will include the custom-made tools that were used to produce it, as well as a swing made from the same material.
The Physical Mind
Teun Vonk (NL)
The Physical Mind is Vonk’s attempt to let participants experience the relation between their physical and mental states by applying physical pressure to the body. The installation consists of two inflatable objects between which a participant lies down, then to be lifted up and gently squeezed between the curves of the two objects. While the lifting creates an unstable feeling, this stressful sensation then soon contrasts with the secure feeling of being gently squeezed between two soft objects. Besides this experience for the participants, the installation also evokes feelings of empathy among bystanders who watch participants undergoing the experience.
