NODE10 abstrakt Abstrakt – The Systemized World

After NODE's successful kick off in 2008, NODE10 sparked enthusiasm with its exhibition at Frankfurt Kunstverein among an even broader audience. Parallel to the main program, the former Diamanten Börse offered a separate program including interactive sketches, laboratories and a hackathon.

In its second edition NODE proved to be more than just an expert meeting. International artists, creative programmers and the general public came together to explore, discuss and investigate ‘Abstrakt Abstrakt – The Systemized World’, the leitmotif of NODE10.

Read all about the festival theme

 

Program

NODE’s program featured a hackathon, workshops, an exhibition, panels and a symposium, all revolving around the Leitmotif ‘Abstrakt Abstrakt – The Systemized World’.

 

Voices

  • „Drawing a line between digital media and art has become obsolete.“

    Art Magazin

  • „Whether it be visual music, data visualisation, or physical computing, there is something to cater for everyone.“

    Data is Nature

  • „Kunstverein turned into a melting pot of young creatives from all over the world whose work and presentations gave astonishing insights into the creation and cultural production of digital art“

    Holger Kuebe Ventura, Director, Frankfurter Kunstverein
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At the intersection of Arts, Culture and Technology

 
 

NODE10

Investigating cultural consequences of a
post-industrialized, technological society

The way of the world is increasingly controlled by relations and conditions that reside on an abstract plane. Cause and motivation for many events remain secret, because they trace back to invisible sets of rules that permeate our society and guarantee its functioning. The complexity of these abstract sets of rules often goes beyond the capacity of the human mind. But how can we trust systems we do not understand?

 

At first abstraction appears as a method to contain certain properties of the world in a new medium. Formalised in this manner, these properties can be edited in a completely new way, demonstrating the power of abstraction as a productive tool. By these means the things of reality are transformable in an unprecedented way. This also implies a reversion of causality: The motivation for ‘real’ events now resides in an abstract place, in a certain constellation of values of the formalising medium. ‘Abstrakt Abstrakt’, NODE 10’s leitmotif was dedicated at investigating cultural consequences of a post-industrialised, technological society.

The two complementing events of the festival, exhibition and symposium, sought to analyse the nature and effect of such systems of abstraction. While the exhibition drew upon artworks as visual evidence for the changing conditions of production in an abstract world, the symposium approached the topic from a more theoretical perspective, enriched by contributions from economists, scientists, artists and philosophers.

 

But not only eyes and ears were fed. Again the creative community laid their hands on vvvv: An extensive workshop program supplemented the heated talks, exhibition and the symposium. The real time multifunctional tool kit was used to create generative graphics, visual music, animations, multi-user applications and to communicate with physical interfaces, gathering the vvvv group, Sound Artists, Dancers, Designers and curious Programmers.

For the first time hosted at Diamantenbörse and Frankfurter Kunstverein, NODE10 turned out to be a great leap forward. An international forum for knowledge exchange between designers, artists, engineers, philosophers believing in the powers of digital technologies was born.