DEAF98 - The Unreliability of Accidents
Rotterdam, 17 - 29 November 1998

DEAF, the Dutch Electronic Art Festival, is a bi-annual event that deals
with the inter-relations between art, technology and society. Through
its presentation of independent and interdisciplinary artistic and
scientific projects, DEAF seeks to stimulate a critical discussion about
social, political and aesthetic developments in new media.

Theme: The Unreliability of Accidents

DEAF98 deals with concepts of time and space, and with their
significance for the organisation of virtual environments. The festival
investigates the material, the design and the artistic realisation of
the linkage between digital spaces and network environments on the one
hand, and our actual living environments on the other. DEAF98 approaches
this topic not from the perspective of smooth, supple merging of
material and virtual worlds, but from the perspective of the accident,
of friction and rupture which are necessary elements of any technical
reality. Thus, the festival also inquires how complex social relations,
individual actions and new forms of identity, take shape at the
intersection between the technical and social reality. DEAF98 stimulates
a critical consciousness of the transformation and the makeability of
the spatio-temporal framework within which we are constructing our
social and cultural identities. Notions of time and space are related to
ideological models which inform the architectural creation of social and
cultural spaces, whether material or virtual. Earlier ideas of the
linear rationality of time and space have, in the 20th century, been
superceded by a critical world picture in which uncontrollability,
non-linearity and unpredictability have come to play an increasing role.
There is a clear sense of the "time-space discontinuum" which is
becoming visible and which can be shaped in virtual spaces and
electronic network environments. The modernist aesthetics of the
smoothness, order and regulation and seriality is countered by a
re-evaluation of an 'aesthetics of heterogeneity." In relation to the
conceptualisation of time and space, this means: non-euclidian spaces,
vertigo, unexpected events, and the acceptance of all sorts of
accidents.

For more information, including the complete call for participation, see: