manifesto

The 1st edition of the festival was a fascinating investigation into the relationship between human beings and the machine; in the 2nd the challenge/conflict of the possibilities software gives us today was evaluated at its most anthropocentric; during the 3rd edition of roBOt Festival its definitive landing place was found: the hybridization of styles, genre and dimensions. Now that it has come to a full circle, the evolution complete, it’s only left for us to understand where this ‘new man’ of the technology era will go, what the possible scenarios of this new stateless and digitalized society are, what the revolutions and the changes awaiting us will be. What we can be sure of is that there will be an inescapable change and unforeseeable consequences, because it’ll be born from the people, in its most noble sense, and will have the potential to mould a new model of society.
A movement that starts from the road, the road of information, and will become the afterbirth of a new global awareness. A revolution.

Do It Yourself : Revolution now!

A new scenario, a sum of biotechnological and interconnected people, where innovation is for everyone, that detaches from the control of the single person and, with a common interface, becomes the board where humanity draws its own existence. If our generation is able to grasp if only just the potential of this change, for the digital natives, it will portray its logic consequence.

Revolution, a word which in the world of art means breaking with the traditional model of production and distribution connected with profit, in other contexts there could be even more important social implications. Producing an opera is no longer just a product of a single individual, but the sum of joint actions, the construction of an opera using more than one pair of hands. If the brain is a social organ and responds to environmental stimulus then it’s not only about Hybridization between different subjects.

This revolution will guide us to the formation of new artistic trends and societies worldwide.
roBOt04 wants to imagine new possible worlds, a horizontal structure, where  inequalities of our society will exist no more : dimensions in which life of every single person will become part of a collective experience.
If Brian Eno can launch an application for the iphone so that its users globally are able to compose music on the screen by drawing melodies using their fingers, then we can just imagine the revolution that’s already under way!
Thanks to new media, an artist’s horizon is wider, abandoning the intellectual and  giving way to a more creative and massive collective process. A world wide DIY, where everyone can gain knowledge and put themselves and their work  ‘out there’ in the community; but in a world of creators and artificers, where does the copyright finish and the shared  knowledge start?

And where will this revolution lead to? How will the “digital homo habili” live in this sci-fi cyber soviet? Will a new “Metropolis” be built in which technology, falsely liberated from a sole owner, conserving the power  of man over man, of its body and thought? Or will a new golden rule be created, meaning that the rules the way we know them now won’t exist anymore? Which new inventions will mark this story?
It’s difficult to know, considering the fact that the creators of change aren’t aware themselves of how destructive their actions can or will be. In fact, whether or not an opera is considered useful to the community often depends on where it ends up and not on its creator, as the web has demonstrated on many an occasion.
Once again art and culture are instruments capable of foreseeing future developments in this ‘resurgence’, a panoptical tower from where one can observe the change, the creative process, using its prophetic gaze to synthesize prisms of the revolution and imagine future scenarios.
This is the revolution, the inspiration for roBOt04:  the technological process that changes the individual and the individual that changes society.
This is the synthesis of a journey that began 4 years ago.