The New Media Festival 07 focuses on hardcore themes, understood as “art towards a new activism” (Jerome Sans, Hardcore Art, 2003, Palais de Tokio, Paris, France). Hardcore art is a new aesthetic category in Contemporary Art that questions cultural statements, and breaks through social stereotypes and fossilized art forms. The New Media Festival 07 presents new media material, digital photography, and video-performance that spotlight critical axes on cultural politics as well as registers on personal mythologies.

The scope of this festival has grown larger this year including artists from Greece, Taiwan, Korea, Russia, Switzerland, Israel, Germany, France, Spain, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Afghanistan, United States, and Latin America. New practices and technologies are presented such as 3D digital animation, Radio Channels and TV projects, compelling the audience to deeply get involved into the digital material. There are three projection rooms with large scale screening and seats to accommodate the audience. There are also individual presentations on TV monitors. Two main new projects that go beyond the boundaries of the visual arts are: Art Channel by Milan Atanaskovic, a hot radio presentation from Paris France; and TV Lata Project by Monica Hernandez, based on updated TV themes as outdoor installation.



This year the festival has included accomplished video works and films such as Yves Netzhammer’s The Subjectivisation of Repetition, which is currently being presented at the Venice Biennial, Swiss Pavilion. In a sharp 3D animated digital video, the artist reflects on the precarious human race and its fragile survival at our current times. Bjorn Melhus’s film Auto Center Drive features a schizoid character in a strange journey through an American city in philosophical dialogue with his imaginary Cartesian alter ego. Hans Op de Beeck’s film Tables is a penetrating work recently presented at Art Basel 07, Switzerland, in which he proposes a human masquerade, and its lies, filmed at a performance during a dinner party.

Catherine Chalmers’ films American Cockroach series depict the most shocking humanization of these animals,- the Planetaria type,- interacting in staged domestic interiors. In Wang Ya-Hui’s video Visitor, a mysterious little cloud passes through old houses in Taipei, recollecting intimate memories and ways of lives, showing their interior details and their daily life objects, as a keen reflection of our lost memories. The video Yo No Quiero Ver Mas A Mis Vecinos by Carlos Garaicoa is an incisive film about the hateful political and geographical boundaries set by walls in the world, - such as the Berlin Wall, the one of Ramallah, the wall in Tijuana, México, the one at the Malecón in Havana, Cuba, the Great Chinese Wall, - that creates coercive human clashes and political divisions. Both videos were winners this year at Loop 07 Barcelona. Victor Alimpiev’s film What’s the Name of this Square? investigates the human expression in intimate assembles he films in theatrical stages, bringing up their sharp and crucial subtleties. He explores the unstable/impotent relationship between the individual and society in Russia. Jenny Marketou‘s video De_Lete, 2001-2006 shows the ordeals and misadventures of immigrants in the Mexico border, through the metallic wall that sadly separates families. The artistic duo McCallum & Tarry will present their video Topsy Turvy in a surrealistic scenario and as a reflection on race, showing two ghosts like humans, he, white, she, black, in poetic encounters. Grimanesa Amoros’ film La Procesion shows, through moving images, a forceful reflection on life and death as an elegiac passage. Andres Michelena’s video Shit Happens proposes a blunt recreation of two murderer mothers that in their mental illness assassinated their children. Clare Langan’s video Metamorphosis depicts suspended-in-time images, strange and gelid scenarios of a world already destroyed, frozen by the natural elements. Maria Antelman’s video taH pagh taHbe presents a perceptive questioning of identity. It proposes a version of Shakespeare’s “to be or not to be” in Klingo idiom, an artificial language invented for the Start Trek series. Cuban artist David Palacios’s Infografias, brings to the table a satirical stanza, using optical effects related to kinetic artist Carlos Cruz Diez’s Physychromies, acutely reflecting on the violation of the Human Rights,- October, 1999-September 2004, during the President Chavez’s presidential period. Hye Rim Lee’s work Lash is a 3D animation video that introduces Toki, her doll-like cyborg through which her sensuality and her robotic femininity lures the audience (males) to a virtual sexual encounter. Her “plasticized” beauty and her surgical body, reminds us of the transformation of love in the digital era.

Dr. Muu’s video Alien Woman shows a fixed and distorted image of an imaginary digital woman in a highly decomposing stress. Sandy White & Ivan Örkény’s work in animation On False Domesticity profiles a robotic individual struggling in his industrial cubicle, made out with retro images over gloomy industrial scenarios, as a metaphor of our overwhelming communication technology system.

In this second edition of the New Media Festival there are dazzling images in delirious and mixed texts of intense resonances and allures. The curatorial approach deconstructs linear pre-conceptions, and deliberately intercrosses poetic, formal and philosophical elements in complex structural narratives.

The audience confronts diverse and juxtaposed layers of expressions; sometimes atypical, very distinctive or poles apart. The spectators are invited to take their time to absorb the multiple languages and digital techniques with which they will be confronted. It is an invitation to comfortably sit in the video projections spaces, leaving time to access the complexity of digital art nowadays.

Photography will be represented by two important contemporary photographers: Jordi Bernado and Dr. Muu. Other participating artists are Asya Reznikov, Peter Eudenbach, Els Opsomer, Gabriela Morawetz, Sabrina Montiel-Soto, Boaz Kaizman, Rodolfo Peraza, Johanna Domke, Juan-Sí González , Jason Mena, Chus Garcia-Fraile, Beatriz Caravaggio, Laura Erber, Aisen Chacin, Iris Cegarra, Ignacio Goitia, Richard Garet, Matilde Marin, among others.

During the festival there will be a panel discussion titled New Media: A contemporary production. A Survey with the participation of digital artists and curators. This year, The New Media Festival takes place from September 8th through October 20th at Hardcore Art Contemporary Space in Wynwood Art District in Miami.

Hardcore Art Contemporary Space
3326 North Miami Avenue
Miami, FL 33127
305.576.1645
www.hardcoreartcontemporary.com