CYFEST-14: Ferment, Yerevan, Armenia

CYLAND MediaArtLab presents the CYFEST-14 International Media Art Festival (Yerevan, Armenia, 10 — 25.10.2022)

CYFEST, one of the biggest international media art festivals in Eastern Europe, was founded by a group of independent artists and curators in 2007. Since its inception, CYFEST’s main concerns have been to examine the dialogue between new and traditional visual languages and to show technological achievements via artistic transformation. CYFEST unites art professionals, artists, curators, educators and thinkers, programmers, engineers, and media activists all over the world, and expands contemporary art, intertwining it with various disciplines of science and technology.

CYFEST is one of the world’s few nomadic cultural events: in 2022 festival projects will be shown in Yerevan, Armenia, Dartington, UK, and Arizona and New York, USA. Both classical and experimental institutes are partners of the festival. The program includes an exhibition project, a video art display, a series of performances and educational meetings.

The theme of the festival in 2022 is Ferment.

“Fermentation in the conventional sense is a technological process in the food industry. However, if we give it some thought, practically everything that happens over time to animate, inanimate and even strictly material objects falls under this definition. Wine undergoes a long process of change of state from ripe grapes to beverages of various degree of sweetness and strength. Human relationships also ‘ferment’ over the years, acquiring various degrees of intensity and transforming from young and raw to mellowed and mature.”

— Anna Frants, founder of CYLAND MediaArtLab, artist, curator.

The authors of works presented at CYFEST-14 study the diversity of fermentation both as a biological process, and in the broader metaphorical sense. The works in the program demonstrate a wide range of cultural, scientific, ethical and aesthetic concepts of fermentation as a process of change for the living and the dead, color and smell, sounds and impressions.

CYFEST-14 gathers over 30 participants from 7 countries in one space. They include Anne Marie Maes, artist, biotechnologist, author of a series of techno-organic objects on the basis of bacteria, algae and plants, Marin Kasimir, multidisciplinary artist and researcher into photographic vision, Mariateresa Sartori, an artist who combines neurobiology, music and sound in her works, the Where Dogs Run group, pioneers of science art, William Latham, artist, professor of computer art and game development at Goldsmith College, and Luca Forcucci, artist, composer and researcher into the relationships between sound, consciousness, perception, memory and the body.

The central venue of the festival in Yerevan will be the HayArt Cultural Center— a multifunctional space that features the entire spectrum of contemporary culture – from visual, performance and digital art and photography to architecture, experimental film, electronic and classical music.

The partner of the “Digital Fermentation” video program will be ACCEA/NPAK, one of the oldest centers of contemporary experimental art in the Caucasus.

Curators: Anna, Frants, Elena Gubanova, Victoria Ilyushkina, Sergei Komarov, Natalia Kolodzei.

CYFEST is organized by the CYLAND MediaArtLab and One Market Data Yerevan.