Image OiOi / Sami Kämppi.
Media art festival Media Façades, coming to Finland for the first time, plays with media interfaces. Among other things, the festival will bring interactive media pieces and projections to Helsinki.
The long wait will soon be over. The anticipated Helsinki Festival will kick off with an ever-expanding program that keeps pleasing its audience by transforming. One of this year’s novelties is media art festival Media Façades, which will bring interactive media art pieces, projections and VJ sets into downtown Helsinki starting from the Night of the Arts.
Media Façades is an urban space media art festival taking over public spaces in seven European cities. In addition to Helsinki, the festival will be seen in the fall of 2010 in Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Linz, Liverpool and Madrid. It is an experimental event looking for new media interfaces in urban happenings and testing urban media experiences.
”The basis for the festival is the international Urban Screens movement, in which artists and creative technology developers search for new form and content for urban media, says MINNA TARKKA, director of media culture organization m-cult. ”It is organized by e.g. Liverpool’s FACT and Linz’s Ars Electronica, both key operators in the European electronic art scene.”
Passion for media
The festival’s Finnish organizer m-cult is a decade-old media culture association. Its workforce consists of artists, researchers and developers working with media – people bound together by a passionate interest for creating new forms of media culture.
”We’re especially intrigued by the urban and participatory forms of media as well as the interaction between art and technology,” says Minna Tarkka. ”Our association focuses on three main aspects: media art, community media and open source. We do productions, organize workshops and develop online services related to these aspects.”
For example, the non-profit m-cult maintains an urban television channel M2HZ, which broadcasts experimental and communal media productions. In September, Helsinki’s media lovers can feast on a new TV channel Stadi.tv, which m-cult and M2HZ have helped develop.
Media games downtown
The core of Media Façades programming is made up of international pieces, chosen by a European curator group. These pieces invite citizens to partake in media, experience urban rhytms and play in a city space. Sounds like a summer weekend, but better.
”So far urban media has been mostly a platform for push advertising. In Media Façades, artists explore the new interfaces between media and architecture as well as the experimental and interactive aspects of urban media,” Tarkka specifies.
Helsinki’s opening night will feature almost a dozen new pieces. Through the festival’s online portal, people of other cities can also check out what’s happening.
”The main venue will be the Lasipalatsi square, but pieces will also be seen around the town, like in Kallio, in Helsinginkatu’s window gallery Alkovi. Festival clubs will be organized with mbar, and they will include danceable media to the tune of We Love Helsinki among others,” Tarkka enthuses.
Media Façades is not a completely new event. The festival was last organized – for the first time – in 2008 in Berlin. This is the first event for Media Façades in Helsinki, and the next one is already planned for 2012. †
Media Façades festival in Helsinki 27.8.–5.9.2010.
-
Text Petteri Kainulainen Images Media Façades / m-cult
Light snow 
