[spectre] paraflows 09 - URBAN HACKING

[Office]

paraflows 09 – Festival for Digital Art and Cultures
10. - 20. September 2009
http://www.paraflows.at

Festival Opening / 10.09.2009, 7 pm
Container Installation, Karlsplatz/Resselpark,
Close-by Otto Wagner Pavillon, Straßenbahnhaltestelle Karlsplatz

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The city of Vienna has a long tradition of interventions and actions in
the public space. With this year’s topic URBAN HACKING, the fourth
paraflows festival continues this artistic investigation of the public and
urban space of living. What is more, paraflows 09 will shed light on the
role played by digital media when it comes to exploring, questioning, and
shaping the urban infrastructure.

Exhibition URBAN HACKING

A container village designed especially for paraflows at Karlsplatz will
provide the space for the exhibition URBAN HACKING, which will connect the
Künstlerhaus, the Karlskirche, and the project space, and thereby unite
the historic with the contemporary. More than 30 national and
international positions of digital art and cultures as well as the
artistic strategies connected therewith shed light on current and older
tendencies of interacting with the public space.What will be put on
display are projects on use and intervention, on hacking and setting up
the urban public. A focus will thereby be laid on the possibilities “urban
hacking” offers for the redesign of public space.

The net, as public infrastructure with its individual elements,
possibilities, and mechanisms, has become integral to social communication
and extended the public space via hyperspace. How these two parallel
layers of reality are organized and impact the individual’s freedom of
movement is one of the questions to be answered by paraflows 09 URBAN HACKING.

Symposium URBAN HACKING
Cultural Jamming Strategies in the Risky Spaces of Modernity.

The three-day program of the symposium corresponds to the thematic
priorities Urban, Hacking, and Risk. The panel Urban discusses the city as
cultural venue, whereas the second the panel, Hacking, investigates the
origin, structures, and evolutionary elements of the multi-faceted notion
“hacking.” The third and final day will be dedicated to questions of risk,
for instance when one – for artistic or philosophical reasons –
transgresses boundaries, as well as question pertaining to gender in the
given context. The symposium also will serve as a copula between the
exhibition and the workshops and will be accompanied by movie screenings
and theatre plays.