Text by CLOT Magazine
FIBER Festival, the Amsterdam-based festival for everyone interested in audiovisual art and experimental electronic music, is back from May 11 to 14 for its 8th edition. With a four-day multi-sensory programme spread over unique indoor locations in Amsterdam, FIBER invites the audience to explore and reimagine the relationships between humans, technology and a radically changing world.
Fragments is this year’s edition of FIBER. Fragments invites the audiences to reassemble a new understanding of our surroundings and identities, using different acts of listening, music, sound, sonic speculation, and magical worldbuilding as inspiring and critical media. The theme acts as a collection of lenses, frequencies, vectors, and objects through which we explore contemporary developments in art, music, technology, and ecology – all in relation to a technologically-disorientated human mind and precarious state of the world due to climate collapse. The people behind FIBER explains.
What new languages and thoughts arise from amplifying and listening to non-human forms of communication, from AI to animal entities? What voices have been pushed into the background while shaping a dominant view of history and the present? In times of crisis, can listening create a resilient state or move us to act? These are some of the questions we may find answers to at FIBER festival.
The programme opens on May 10 with the Fragments exhibition at the art-warehouse Door Open Space, Amsterdam. The exhibition combines a range of art forms, from film installations and sound art to media art, in which artists create sound compositions, 3D graphics, film, character design, ceramic sculpting or code. The nine artists participating (Christine Hvidt, Erik Peters, Félix Luque Sánchez, Jan Christian Schulz, Josèfa Ntjam, Myles Merckel, Ralf Baecker, Sébastien Robert and Tianzhuo Chen) will challenge our perspective on our surroundings, identities, beliefs, and interactions with non-human actors. The works carry a duality between something falling apart while simultaneously offering a chance to rearrange and explore new compositions.
On the sound and audiovisual side, the festival kicks off on Thursday 11 with the opening concert in which Aleksandra Słyż, Judith Hamann & Gerard Lebik, Alliyah Enyo and Perila will present an evening with adventurous crossovers between the world of classical sounds and spherical electronic music. Then, on Friday 12, the music & performance programme offers audiovisual sets, DJ and live sets at Noordwaards with the likes of Signal Transmutations and Puce Mary, among many others.
Lastly, FIBER Festival provides unique learning opportunities for students and professionals. Join the at the De Brakke Grond and online for our two-day symposium exploring the work and visions of artists and researchers who shift our understanding of reality. With lectures and talk from Aimée Theriot-Ramos, Jordan Edge, Studio Above&Below or Pim Boreel, they will explore and delves into the urgent developments in art, technology, and ecology.
Find tickets here.
