FIBER Festival 2023: Fragments
Fragments explores new modes of listening: from mycelium networks to algorithmic systems.
For its 2023 festival edition, FIBER explores the theme of Fragments. Carrying a duality between something falling apart while simultaneously offering a chance to rearrange and explore new compositions. Fragments invites you to reassemble a new understanding of our surroundings and identities, using different acts of listening, music, sound, sonic speculation, and magical worldbuilding as inspiring and critical media. The theme acts as a collection of lenses, frequencies, vectors, and objects through which we explore contemporary developments in art, music, technology, and ecology – all in relation to a technologically-disorientated human mind and precarious state of the world due to climate collapse.
Fragments can be perceived in multiple ways; from millions of parts that make up a whole, the collection of different voices, algorithmically mediated spaces, and metaverses, to the cutting-up of music, stories, memories, and identities to form new constellations of meaning. Doing so, it explores the relationship between sound and listening more broadly, including the body's capacity to ‘listen’ through touch or other senses. Or to expand our sensing capacities through planetary-scale computation and tracing non-human flows of life and matter that make up the earth's dimensions.
Fragments makes space for a series of fragmented questions: What new languages and thoughts arise from amplifying and listening to non-human forms of communication, from AI to animal entities? As we see the cartesian way of classifying the worlds around us fall short, what new realities should we, and can we, still construct? What voices have been pushed into the background while shaping a dominant view of history and the present? In times of crisis, can (not) listening create a resilient state or move us to act?
FIBER invites you to join the 8th festival edition, fast-forward, skip through, or slow down with a programme of audiovisual art, sonic encounters, digital creativity, and daring conversations. To meet a generation of artistic makers and thinkers who help ground us in the realities of our present and futures.