MIRA turns fifteen: eleven art works, two days at Fira Montjuïc
MIRA turns fifteen this year. Fifteen editions of putting digital art on the same bill as contemporary music, in a city that watched the medium grow up.
The fifteenth runs 6 and 7 November at Fira Montjuïc. The art programme went public in late September: eleven installations and performances, sharing two days with a 27 act music lineup.
The theme this edition reads clearly enough. Post-human ecosystems. Perception handed over to machines. What happens when the thing being looked at looks back.
Pinar Yoldas brings An Ecosystem of Excess, a speculative ecology built to survive inside the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Sarabiotic's Evolutionary Signals is a procedural environment drawn from the ocean floor, and it shifts when people walk near it. Andreas Lutz built a system that learns from the faces it meets, turning the act of looking into raw material. Three works in a row about eyes that are not ours.
Then the body goes into the interface. AEDOSSYNTH, by Marc Arnela with I AM JAS, gives three artificial heads a voice through real-time vocal synthesis. Óldo Érreve's IMAGO Teōsinte ties technology to ancestral memory. Onionlab turns the main stage into a light surface with Resonant Field, reacting to sound, spilling onto the dancefloor.
Local studios hold real weight here. KINETIC RIOT, Laia Tarragó with Pol Martín, Manel Quintana with Flowers by Bornay. Students from EINA, ELISAVA, IED Barcelona and La Salle Universitat Ramon Llull show work too, and La Salle brings a performance called Inspiria. Fifteen years of this has built a pipeline from the design schools onto the festival floor. The future of the medium gets settled in rooms like that one, not on a stage.
The music is Arca, Shygirl, Tortoise, Helena Hauff, Max Cooper, Nicola Cruz, Machine Girl, Nosaj Thing with Daito Manabe. Ferran Belmon will run visuals for Nicola Cruz, VJ Roc for Tutu, VPM for DATAPUNK presented by Anthony Rother.
MIRA Week opens earlier at Sala Apolo. MIRA x SYNCRA on 3 November, free. MIRA.exe on 4 November, free. Mouse on Mars play on 5 November for 17 euros.
A full pass for both days is 117 euros plus fees. Single days run 63. The programme and the ticket page are at mirafestival.com, and the art announcement listing every work is here.
■ Filed from The Observatory: the skyward wing of the city.