About

Here at Share Festival, we feel the need for a new weblog for the new situation.

Recent events have had major effects on our customary tech-art activities, so we need to assess what is going on and try to outguess events. That’s the reason for our new “Artmaker” where we’re going to intensify our media activities.

We think this will be a simple clearinghouse, a kind of newsletter weblog. We will write some of it ourselves — Bruce Sterling had a WIRED magazine blog for seventeen years, so he’s used to the labor — but most of it will be news on Share Festival’s favorite topics.

Our intent in doing this is to help the maker of technology art to understand the post-pandemic post-Internet situation, and also to help them make art. At Share Festival we’re particularly interested in the means of production of technology art — we always want to know how it’s made, and the best ways to make it.

There will likely be a lot of attention paid to open-source and artisanal electronics and software, especially if they’re Italian. Kinetic art and device art is of a lot of interest to us.

We’ll be copiously quoting news we receive where colleagues of ours in other events and festivals are trying to describe what’s going on.

There will be some announcements here about residencies, events, grants, and so on, because the pandemic has disrupted all that and artists need to hear these things. These worthy announcements are pretty dull, so just to cheer things up we’ll probably toss in some colorful memes and peculiar tech-art videos.

We like technology art manifestos. We don’t have to agree with them in order to like them. Because Italy has a long heritage of technology art, we like really old manifestos. The future is a kind of history that hasn’t happened yet.

There will be some shakeout problems with our new blog, as there is with any tech effort, but if we can get it off the ground, we may be at this effort for quite a long time. As you can see from the rest of our website here, we’ve been at it for fifteen years. We’re very Turinese in that way: we may not always prevail, but we always persist.