November 2021 will bring the fifth year of media art, technology, and digital culture festival. The festival will be held in the spirit of Human Responsibility. Read and find out the reason for this topic and why you shouldn’t miss this year’s Art & Tech Days.
Human Responsibility – the road to a sustainable future
The fifth year of the festival Art & Tech Days is dedicated to the topic Human Responsibility – the ultimate Responsibility of humans for the impact, usage, and development of technologies on the environment and humans. „The event in 2021 aims to point out the influence of humans and technology on the environment and the world. Digital reality and all of its technologies are human’s pieces of work, and that’s the reason why we can consider people to be fully responsible for their use. The impact of a human on the planet is considerable,“says Michal Hladký, the director of Creative Industry Košice.
The artificial intelligence and digital revolution, social inequality or digital dementia, climate change, and its impact have become the biggest problems that the world should consider intensively. We need solutions that will help us orient in the tangle of complex challenges and lead us into a sustainable future. The role of every single one of us is to take responsibility for all the areas we interfere with and which we conquered as humans. We should find a sustainable way to live a fulfilled and responsible life for ourselves and the world. Specialists from many different fields will offer their outlook on the topic of responsibility.
Top world speakers from the leading companies and organizations
This year we will welcome new speakers to our previous 78 speakers from 13 countries from all over the world. Interesting headliners will present to the audience their speeches about Human Responsibility. We introduce you to the first ones:
Neil Harbisson is a contemporary artist and cyborg activist best known for having an antenna implanted in his skull, thanks to what the government officially recognized him as a cyborg. Since he was born blind, the antenna allows him to perceive visible and invisible colors via audible vibrations in his skull, including infrareds and ultraviolets. He can also receive colors from space, pictures, videos, music, or phone calls directly in his head. He identifies himself as a cyborg; he feels like the technology and a transspecies; he no longer feels 100% human. In 2010 he co-founded Cyborg Foundation, and in 2017, he co-founded the Transpecies Society.
Dutch innovator and maker of social designs Daan Roosegaarde explores the relationship between people, technology, and space. On his projects, one can see that he has always been driven by nature. One of the examples is Smog Free Project – the largest outdoor air purifier in the world which makes jewelry from smog. Together with his team of designers and engineers, they develop „Landscapes of the Future “, where they build smart, sustainable prototypes for the cities of tomorrow. He says he doesn’t believe in utopia, but protopia – the prototype of the world which we improve step by step.
Roosegaarde has received many prestigious awards, such as Young Global Leader of World Economic Forum and LIT Lighting Design Award 2019. He was a member of the innovators team NASA and was selected as a “Creative Change maker” by Forbes. He cooperated with Tokyo National Museum, Design Museum London, Rijksmuseum, TateModern, etc.
A week packed with a program for participants of all ages
Art & Tech Days festival is accompanied by many side events dedicated to fans of the world of technologies and art, no matter their age. You can look forward to many artistic installations, hackathon, design sprint, or children’s workshops. Art & Tech Days is considered to have no limits – its goal is to support education and cooperation with digital technologies for society. That is why it might interest everyone who likes to broaden their horizons in culture with the spheres they are not familiar with yet.
A platform to create collaborations between the IT, culture, and art sectors
Michal Hladký also mentions the unconnected worlds of culture and technology in Košice during the process of the Master Plan in 2012: „In the past and still nowadays, there exists this general feeling of a great potential of creative people who use and work with digital technologies, whether in the artistic sphere or otherwise. In our organization, CIKE, we believe that connecting people from the IT and cultural or artistic sectors can bring new products, innovative results. These can then be useful for the city itself or even, for example, other sectors such as healthcare, tourism, travel. We wanted to create a platform for such cooperation – it eventually became the festival Art & Tech Days. We want to point out the possibility of working together and emphasize the potential of contribution in other industries. Various collaborations with our partners such as DAAVS (Days of Current Audiovisual Meetings) led by the team of VUNU, T-Systems Hackathon, Košice IT Valley, Game Days by Game Dev Košice have already been established in the process of making the festival. This year we are hoping to work with AmCham Slovakia and the Botanical garden of Košice.“Cross-sectoral cooperation is, therefore, one of the main reasons for organizing the festival. First and foremost, it is a physical space where creative people from different industries meet and bring unique products by connecting their professions.
A link to the international title of Košice from the UNESCO Creative Cities Network
Festival Art & Tech Days reacts to the prestigious title UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts, which Košice received in 2017. Thanks to an international network of creative cities, UNESCO supports and develops the cooperation between cities, which consider creativity the main factor of sustainable city development. The project originated in 2004, and currently, it is an international network of almost 250 cities from around the world.
A chance to get to know the city and its institutions in a different light
Art & Tech Days festival is not just enlightenment of media art in eastern Slovakia – on the other hand, it is an excellent opportunity to get to know other buildings and venues of the city where individual events occur. Director of CIKE – Michal Hladký suggests that this city festival should, last but not least, have an urban character as well: „Every live performance, whether dance, music or otherwise, a lecture, workshop or conference is held at a different spot in Košice. Through various genres, visitors are introduced to the city’s premises – they wander and discover its face in a new light to which they are originally used to.“
Festival Art & Tech Days 2021 – Human Responsibility is almost here. Therefore, don’t forget to follow our web and socials, where you can find all the newest information about specific events or speakers. If you are interested and would like to attend the event, don’t forget to buy your ticket today through this website.
The Festival is supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.