Piemonte Share Festival is an annual event held in Torino-Italy, dedicated to contemporary art and culture in all its global dimensions and interconnections with the Internet and new media. Share Festival was founded in 2005 by Simona Lodi, artistic director of the event, and by Chiara Garibaldi, who supervises its general organisation. The festival is organised by the cultural association The Sharing.
Since 2007 the Festival has awarded the Share Prize, dedicated to major artistic installations. Every year an overarching theme, encapsulated in the title of the event, brings the festival alive with exhibitions, video screenings, indepth conferences, symposiums, workshops and performances.
Open Your City is the guiding theme for the Share Festival 2012. A theme that contains three key, simple and direct words, the pillars on which this year’s festival programme will be built. ‘Open Your City’ will also provide the blueprint for this year’s Share Prize.
Open is meant in the sense of being in the making, of being unfinished, experimental, transparent and boundless. ‘Open’ gives the idea of a starting point, the perspective from which we see things, an inclusive vision founded on digital communication and active democracy. It is a hallmark of the quality of an idea, a system, a group or an organization. It relinquishes copyright to give precedence to the sharing of knowledge, to open-source methodologies.
Your is meant as the direct participation of people who possess, own, use, occupy and command something that belongs to them. It identifies the person who plays a leading role in driving change-someone who takes action, steps in and gets involved; someone who makes plans, collaborates, transforms, brings together and acts as part of a community. ‘Your’ means grass-roots democracy.
City is meant as the venue or theatre of action; it is the common good, the backdrop to changes underway. An urban space abuzz with social and technological ferment, made up of streets and roads, squares and parks and everyday locations. The city has become populated with new sites of social media where communication flows thick and fast-in the form of control, through video surveillance or the mapping of social graphs, though also in the form of participatory democracy, through augmented reality, smart architectures and wearable computing.
What is the role of art today, in this time of social transformation towards the city of the future? Is this the city that we want, that we imagine, that we wish for? What’s your idea of the open city? What world we want to live?
Share Prize 2012
The words OPEN YOUR CITY have provided the thematic template for this year’s Share Prize exhibition. The objective of the prize is to promote and support the arts in the digital age. The selection of finalist works aims to showcase those artists who use innovation as a language for artistic expression, in all shapes and forms. This year the Share Prize attracted 290 entries from 22 different countries. Artists have been short-listed by an international jury, consisting of Simona Lodi, Carlo Ratti, Bruce Sterling and Mirjam Struppek, on the basis of the artistic value of their work and its relevance to the Share Prize theme.