Transnumériques has closed on December 12th 2015 along Mons, European Capital of Culture, but their good waves are still with us. This fifth edition of this festival of digital cultures featured more than 60 artists in the Digital Emergences exhibition in the beautiful and ample spaces of the freshly renovated Manege de Sury, and dozens of others were also involved in collaborative projects with connected works .
Comforted by the positive feed back of the public, media, visitors and professionals, Transnumériques will continue to pay particular attention to the emergent forms, projects, ideas, artists, researchers…of today and tomorrow.
What we have tried to develop with this “manifest-action” vehemently denies “ready to wear design” and the various digital “wallpapers” to prepare him the long-term complicity mesh, escapes very deliberately to the conformity of the “great digital entertainment” that can impress by its crushing devices but often say too little to our taste, on our current disrupted lives. Hopefully we can also feel a growing demand, for a real critical debate and the need of poetic horizons.
Transnumériques was and is also about connecting human networks, creative communities and oddities. Those collaborative meetings produced most of the content of the Digital Emergences exhibition as well as the performances and critical exchanges – for us as important as the creative works, the thinking being as part of the creative process of cross-cultural activism. We’ll also remember the various inputs of the participants to the forum From Digital to Culture, which was, at the opening of the festival, a real exchange without jargon replacing the artistic peculiarity and the research at the heart of the debate on creative and cultural industries, and also the ArtComTec lectures, which have connected us to Honk Kong, Sao Paulo, Paris, Geneva and Nice with inspiring pioneers, activists and thinkers of the digital arts.
The internationalist media sociologist/philosopher Derrick de Kerkhove retracing 30 years of digital arts reminded us the quote ‘Everything is now’ by his mentor Marshall McLuhan. Everything is immediate, happing in “real time” in our “global village”, the techno-artistic artefacts are both potentially global and fortunately for those we are interested in, irreducible to the weight of globalized standards and planned obsolescence, with which digital cultures have also to deal with.
It is up to us to connect actively, otherwise. Carpe Diem! This is the call of these emerging whirlpool which made this edition Transnumériques @ Mons2015 a very special moment occurred in a context of terror in France and Belgium, which allowed the title of the Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique published on the day of the opening when Brussels was on the highest alert level as authorities warn terrorist attacks: “The festival Transnumériques remains alert level 5! ”
We promise you, we will remain creatively alert, working to Transnumériques#6 in other contexts and with other discoveries while also continuing to nurture inter-trans-regional / national and indisciplinary partnerships, as well as developing new ones; thanks again to all participants who commit us to continue this adventure. See you soon!
Philippe Franck
Artistic director
For the Transcultures’ staff
January 2016
