New realities
It’s great to be the festival curator of Noorderlicht this year, a pleasant reunion for me with the city of Groningen, where I graduated from the Minerva Art Academy in the early 1990s. The department was called New Media and the World Wide Web had just been launched.
When we were writing our call to artists last December for ‘The Makeable Mind’ – the festival’s theme for 2021 – the plan was to open with the quote by the famous Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland: “I’m not crazy, my reality is just different than yours.” But a quick fact check by the editor revealed that this quote only exists online. It can be found in the grapevine of the ever-self-copying internet, on mugs and T-shirts – everywhere but in Lewis Carroll’s original book. Funnily enough, this confusion touched on exactly the topic we want to address with ‘The Makeable Mind’: what new realities are emerging under the influence of the internet and digital technologies such as deep fakes, machine learning and VR?
By invitation and open call, hundreds of submissions came in, with countless mind-blowing variations on the theme. At this very moment, we are puzzling over a list of around forty artists and a wide variety of works: from digital photography to images from Google Earth, game engines, point clouds and barite prints, but also (generative) videos, VR performances, workshops, AI curators, and immersive visual and soundscapes. From the beginning of August, individual sub-themes of ‘The Makeable Mind’ will emerge at around ten locations in Groningen and Friesland: science fiction, activism, humans and technology, speculative realities, identity and diaspora, new nature, journalism and the search for truth. Meanwhile the Young Curators of this edition, Rawad Baaklini and Tuii Meiner, will be working on the festival theme in the Noorderlicht Studio.
And that quote from the Cheshire Cat? Well, we’ve managed to solve that one: Cheshire Cat is not the author of the quote, but of the Cheshire Cat internet meme. No big difference, but now it makes sense for the meticulous reader. Long live the internet and see you at Noorderlicht!
Paulien Dresscher works as an independent curator and researcher in the field of culture and digital media. Click here for more information about the festival.
