Text by CLOT Magazine
On March 11, the WHO announced the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic, and the world went into a lockdown, leaving our lives and plans on a ‘stand-by’ for a number of months. Festivals like Sónar in Spain were postponed, and our ‘cultural’ life became even more digital. Now Sónar is organising an extraordinary edition of Sónar+D on September 18 and 19 at Barcelona’s CCCB, the venue where Sónar first took place 27 years ago.
As people at Sónar say, Sónar+D CCCB will be at once a celebration and a meeting place for creative communities from the city and further afield. We will come together to share the new projects that inspire us, and that push us to ask questions, imagine possibilities, sketch ideas and forge the paths that may come to define future intersections of culture, art and technology.
This extraordinary edition will take place both in virtual and physical formats. Sónar will become an audiovisual platform broadcasting the full program live via two free-to-watch channels and exclusive on-demand content. Focused on local talent and creativity, 140 artists and speakers will participate in over 70 activities, including concerts, debates, DJ sets, workshops, exhibitions and new formats such as exclusive video performances.
The conference programme will revolve around five main topics: the more artistic side of robotics; advances in immersive technology; artificial intelligence and its role in the economics of creativity; science with a trans-disciplinary focus in the fields of bioacoustics, neuroscience, biohacking and climate change; and music creation and its relationship with technology.
Some of the names participating in this special edition of Sónar+D CCCB are Max Cooper, Laurel Halo, Daito Manabe, Arca, Maria Arnal i Marcel Bagés, Ryoji Ikeda, Nicola Cruz, Holly Herndon, Richie Hawtin, or the special collaborations in immersive audiovisual format by Alba G. Corral with Carles Viarnés, among others.
