Festival @rt Outsiders 2005

Version française

Maison Européenne
de la Photographie

82, rue François Miron.
75004 Paris

September 28 > October 16, 2005.

Henry CHAPIER | President of the @rt Outsiders Festival

2005 is the Year of Brazil in France and the @rt Outsiders Festival is dedicating its 6th edition to Brazilian digital art, from 28 September to 16 October 2005. This will take place simultaneously with Brazilian photography exhibitions in the other half of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie.
The sole connection between these Brazilian artists, most of whom are presenting their work for the first time in France, is the originality of their approach. Nonetheless, their work and interactive installations, aside from displaying the virtuosity of digital equipment, offer a leap into the imaginary that reflects all ongoing mutations concerning our way of thinking and our new desires, whether they relate to daily life or to the radical changes in our society’s values.
In other words, Brazilian digital art is not limited to experimentation. Behind telepresence art, enhanced reality, digital holography, 2D/3D computer graphics and bio-art, windows are opening onto the eternal dream of the artist as a demi-god, able to change our life and transform our world.
Furthermore, a catalogue will underline the importance of these new artistic experiences, which are at a crossroad between scientific, social, aesthetic and political challenges and which provide a source of inspiration for this generation of pioneering Brazilian artists.

Jean-Luc SORET | curator of the @rt Outsiders Festival

Although the posters blooming in France for the Year of Brazil emphasise the ten borders that Brazil shares with the rest of the South American continent, there are some borders that have escaped the list – namely those that Brazilian artists are opening up with intermediary worlds.
Explorers of fabulous lands, ambassadors of a rich imaginary world that is largely unknown to the european public, these builders of universes give to the interfaces they create, the language they reinvent, and the interaction they incite, the role of initiation rituals; like cybernetic shamans they offer us access to previously unencountered transcendental experiences.
Whether they deal with cyberspace, autonomous digital worlds, enhanced or virtual reality, dreamed places, immersive or interactive spaces, the artists invited to this 6th @rt Outsiders Festival, which is dedicated to new media art in Brazil, are therefore acting as ideal gobetweens.
The shortcuts that they take question our relationship to the world, body and life, and we can therefore see, through the pregnance of the subjects that inspire these inventive pioneers, how far their action is linked with formal research and a quest for meaning that goes far beyond the colourful clichés to which they are usually confined.
It is heartening then, when we discover their work, to feel the jubilation with which these artists appropriate the latest scientific researches and technological innovations, not to detract from the sacredness of the world but, on the contrary, to "refill it with enchantment".