Technology has made one thing clear: it’s not going anywhere. As we increasingly depend on the Internet, smart phones and other gadgets to stay connected and get through the day, it’s apparent how much digital fingerprints are embedded into our culture.
As Michigan's only multimedia art festival, SMart Festival 2010 — hosted by Open Concept Gallery (50 Louis St. NW, Grand Rapids) — brings together various artists whose work centers around technology's centrifugal force. Its mission is to exemplify collaboration, diversity and accessibility in a multi-genre series of events.
The festival started as a curated exhibition titled Simbio at Galerie Vaclava Spaly in Prague, Czech Republic. Curator Zora Carrier brought the festival stateside to Open Concept Gallery in 2006. This year, however, it offers something new.
"Although this year's festival will follow the same traditions as years past, this year we have decided to involve the public through an interactive project," Carrier said. "This project will not be revealed until the week of the festival."
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2010 SMart Festival
Open Concept Gallery, Grand Rapids April 12-16 smart.openconceptgallery.org, (616) 233-9722
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Along with the interactive project, SMart Festival features work by artists from around the globe, including Andrew Johnson, Eleanna Anagnos, Aljoscha, Joseph Farbrook, Al Wildey and Joao Simoes. Each artist has explored technology through a certain medium, including graphic digital animation, digital composites and motion videos.
Festival visitors can see Otherspace (2009), a video installation by Anagnos in collaboration with David Kant. The videos were recorded on a cell phone in New York City in negative exposure. Highlighting other space — the space we usually don't pay mind to — the videos were taped during daily commutes via subways, taxis and buses. Anagnos and Kant zeroed in on the absence of the familiar, taking away what we see every day and focusing on what lies between."Within the monotonous routines that occupy our everyday experience, there is a space that surrounds our being, that exists between people and things," Anagnos said. "It affects our awareness, our actions and reactions, even though we are not mindful of it. My investigation begins here."
Other SMart Festival 2010 venues include the UICA, Kendall College of Art & Design and the Arts Council of Greater Grand Rapids. The galleries of each venue will provide a technology-related exhibition in collaboration with SMart Festival 2010.
Kendall College of Art & Design's (17 Fountain St. NW, Grand Rapids) gallery exhibition will feature drawings and video by artist Ethan Murrow. Often working as a duo with his wife, filmmaker Vita Weinstein Murrow, Ethan's work is a collaboration of short videos and still life graphite drawings.
At the UICA (41 Sheldon Boulevard SE, Grand Rapids), visitors can see work by Nicola Vruwink and Casey McGuire. Vruwink's installation, titled To You. From Me. Love, Nicola, focuses on the constant fascination with outdoing ourselves in terms of technological advances and incorporates crocheted cassette tape that takes different forms, including song lyrics.
The Arts Council of Greater Grand Rapids (532 Ottawa Ave. NW, Grand Rapids) will also feature a free exhibition for the duration of SMart Festival 2010.
