NODE15 Wrapped in Code – The future of the informed body

The NODE Festival 2015 topped all previous editions: Booked up workshops and new impulses for Frankfurt's art and culture scene with this years exhibition. Mousonturm and Naxoshalle figured out to be perfect new festival locations.

‘Wrapped in Code – The future of the informed body’, NODE in its 4th rendition was dedicated to the negotiation of the human body throughout current technological developments and how this is being expressed in our present projects; utopias; and fictions. For one week, we investigated the melding of the human body with technology and took up the current debate regarding its effect on our social interactions, body and society.

Read all about the festival theme

 

  • 150+ events

  • 11.000+ total visitors

  • 3.500+ total professionals

  • 120+ invited experts

  • 6 days of festival

  • 2 huge venues

Program

One week of intensive festival program: With a series of lectures, concerts, performances and an exhibition, Mousonturm became the stage for drafts of the future of the ‘Informed Body’. In parallel NODE15 featured more than 50 creative coding workshops and turned the second location Naxoshalle into a forum for creative experimenting with digital technologies and open knowledge transfer.

 

Voices

  • “NODE addresses the integral role of the body in processes of perception and interaction; as location of implicit knowledge; and as a tool we constantly try to extend and optimise.”

    Creative Applications Network

  • “This year’s Leitmotif ‘Wrapped in Code - The future of the informed body’ has its finger on the pulse of time.”

    Journal Frankfurt

  • “NODE is an interesting place and an interesting way of discovering stuff when you collaborate with different artists that have different skills.”

    Quayola, artist
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Documentary

 
 

NODE15’s
festival theme

Observing recent design developments one may assume that all is directed to an ideal state of complete seamlessness. We observe the virtualisation and dematerialisation of anything that is bound to decay. Design is focussed on the creation of intelligent surroundings which free us from the necessity of physical effort.

Critical tasks such as health and mental care are being undertaken by robots while wars are being fought by remotely controlled drones. Roles formerly performed by human beings have undergone a process of disembodiment. We have reached a critical point and have to wonder if this process has started to run independently from actual human needs and nature. And in fact, we find spheres in which the human body slowly reclaims the attention it deserves. NODE15 focused on this revival of the body.

 
 

The festival addressed the relation of flesh and consciousness in the interdependent evolution of humankind and technology. Starting from the gradual incorporation of instruments and processes into the body, gadgets and algorithms optimizing our daily life to virtual reality devices trying to connect our physical bodies to potentially any virtual space and time.

NODE15 invited projects that investigate how these processes shape our perception and consciousness; how they alter communication and interaction with humans or machines. Coders, artists, scientists and developers quarrelled with the question, which significance to give to our flesh and shell called body.