9-21 November 2004
Central Festival Location: Van Nelle Ontwerpfabriek (Rotterdam)

This year V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media, will present the seventh edition of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival. DEAF04 takes place from 9 until 21 November 2004 in Rotterdam. The theme of this year’s edition is Affective Turbulence: The Art of Open Systems.

Each of the festivals has a specific theme, which structures the contents of the event as a whole.

Under the title Affective Turbulence: The Art of Open Systems, the theme of DEAF04 focuses on the instability of open systems and the instinctivity and irrationality that are necessary to act within these systems.

Feeling is the engine of our actions. It has recently been demonstrated that we never do anything purely rationally. This is true of almost every human action – we cannot make a decision without relying on feeling or intuition.

Interactive art – art the viewer must do something to in order to make something out of it or have an experience – is an art of feeling. Every interactive work tries to entice its user to perform certain actions, in the hope that the work will thereby reorganize itself into an unforeseen coherence.

Interactive art is by definition non-autonomous and organizes itself as an open system, which functions via the exchange of matter, energy and/or information with the environment (i.e. the visitor).

DEAF04 will show projects concerning an interactive art that functions as an open affective system, as a means of calling forth feelings and making them visible, from the individual to the global level.

During DEAF04, this interactive artistic approach will be expanded to other disciplines, towards a better understanding of the basic principles of interacting-on-feeling.

Some of the subthemes are:

* open society (the influence of globalization on political and economic structures);
* open mind (the question of free flow of knowledge, e.g. the issue of copyrights and Creative Commons license);
* open networks (the organization and participation of open networks);
* open sky (how do we make use of ‘floating’ radio frequencies and electro-magnetic fields);
* open desire (how does our imagination work and how do we build feelings into computer programs).

More info at http://deaf.v2.nl