STRP Festival experiments with RFID and neuro-art. Broad program of art, installations, live cinema and experimental art-technology.
STRP Festival (Eindhoven, the Netherlands) is one of the largest art & technology (e-culture) festivals in Europe, that fuses music, art and technology. At STRP there are projects of young game designers next to major works from the international art circuit and experimental live cinema next to successful pop artists and DJs. During the next edition, STRP will experiment on a large scale with the use of RFID- and cognitive technologies to enhance the festival experience of the visitors by adding an extra technological layer. With this experiment, STRP Festival aims to explore new ways of organizing and experiencing art.
In addition, STRP features several neuro-art projects, an impressive retrospective of the Belgian artists Lawrence Malstaf, a conference on ‘internet of things’ and ‘cloud culture’, and mindblowing audio visual programme with Japanese animation, live cinema (Herman Kolgen, Puriform) and music artists such as Underworld, M.I.A., Bloody Beetroots, Soulwaxmus and Modeselektionen.
Tagging art in real life with RFID in the eSphere
STRP experiments on a large scale with RFID in the field trial ‘eSphere’. In addition, STRP features several neuro-artworks that blend art with neuroscience.
By virtue of the power of today’s Internet, you can get personalized recommendations, connect yourself to your friends and keep them and anyone you want updated on your life. STRP Festival brings that power to the festival. This has become the eSphere and is accessible for anyone who wishes to participate in this field trial. Visitors use RFID wristbands to “tag” art by which the virtual world and physical reality collide. STRP Festival will make the art installations ‘clickable’. Value and comment at the festival on the artwork, music and performances by ‘dashing’ with your personal chip. Dash in at the touch screen by the art work you like with this chip and cast your vote. By doing this you create a tagcloud of meaning, together with all other ‘dashers’. For the first time, a collective experience of visitors will be visible and a collective mind map is made from an art festival.
The eSphere is a new domain at the festival that will bring together the virtual world and the physical reality. STRP Festival enters the interactive world of the web, to create new meaning of art, music and performances and to create the world’s first mind map of a culture festival.
Neuro-art
At the expo, STRP Festival presents three spectacular art projects where neuroscience is the main focus. These three art projects are: Scale from Local Style (US), Staalhemel from Christoph de Boeck (BE) and Synapcity 2010 from Acclair (IL).
Visitors can connect their brains in the Acclair lounge to the EEG mindsets and monitor their brain activity while walking around the exhibition. What do you really think about the art you see on STRP? With Acclair no more secrets! In Staalhemel you can transfer your brain waves into a room filling concert of 80 plates of steel. And in Scale you can make music with the electronic signals that are emited by a chorus of real fish.
eSphere: Living in the Cloud
STRP Conference ‘eSphere: Living in the Cloud’ reflects on the cultural transformation to a new networked reality and explores the meaning of the new technological culture. What if all our operations can be instantly performed somewhere in the web? What are the cultural implications of this technological restructuring of our society? How do artists envision these technological developments and how do these technologies change our experience of art?
With inspirational keynotes and two sidetracks with in-depth discussions, STRP Conference ‘eSphere: Living in the Cloud’ maps the promises and pitfalls of our world as the web. It takes place in parallel with the STRP field trial of the eSphere, an exploration of a realm in which virtual and physical reality seamlessly blend.
Lawrence Malstaf
This year, STRP Festival proudly presents a major retrospective of the upcoming Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf. Central to the installations of Lawrence Malstaf (1972, Brugge) is the experience of ‘being in the middle’; the audience is able to experience concrete or abstract situations themselves. For example, visitors have the rare opportunity to experience the Shrink vacuum effect first-hand in a separate room. Together with the artist, STRP chose nine installations that provide a fantastic cross-section of his work, including many recent pieces—half of which have never been shown in the Netherlands.
Live cinema & Japanese Animation
Apart from the art expo, STRP Festival presents a mindblowing audiovisual program with live cinema from Herman Kolgen, Purform and TelcoSystems, a Japanese animeprogram, special performances, a media-art exhibition and Light Café.
Herman Kolgen presents Inject and Dust live. There´s no escape after falling into a gigantic water tank, and all means of space and time disappear. Witness the struggle and search for silence in Inject, a beautiful live performance. In Dust the smallest things get astronomic proportions and a whole new tangible microworld will be revealed. Which turns out to be more abstract then you’d imagine. In TelcoSystems’ Mortals Electric boundaries are blurring between man and machine. From slow moving clouds to an overwhelming abstract audiovisual experience. Purform from Canada present the closing show ABCD_Light. Powerfull music and luminous images melt together and take the fusion of audio and visuals to the next level.
STRP 2010 presents a selection of contemporary Japanese anime with dazzling music videos and motion graphics, poetic shorts and serene beauties. Strap in at November the 25th and drift away with adventures, rainbow colors en funny music. Later on we will screen Cowboy Bebop, a film about a group of bounty hunters who are trying to find the evil producer of biochemical weapons. An all American story so far but this film has a typical Japanese animation visual style with original US film noir colors, and an amazing soundtrack with Japanese interpretations of jazz, blues and techno. A very original mixture of genres and therefore a worldwide cult hit. A must-see!
STRP Festival
STRP Festival is one of the largest art & technology (e-culture) festivals in Europe which melts music, art & technology together. The multidisciplinary program is an accessible mix of 360 degrees experience and adventure, which appeals to a wide audience. More than 20.000 people visited the festival in 2009.