Pixelache Festival 2016 ‘Interfaces for Empathy’ brings together multiple activities and events that challenge the participant’s perception in myriad of ways and explore the festival theme of enhanching empathy. Below is a preliminary information about the program of the festival. The full program is currently being confirmed and detailed info of it will be published during the summer months.

The festival program starts already as early as mid September with Saša Spačal’s and Slavko Glamocanin’s ‘Syncness’ installation in MUU Cable Gallery. ‘Syncness’ is an audiovisual interface that researches human ability to relate crickets through invitation to try to vocally sync with them.

During the actual festival days, our main venue, the Lapinlahti hospital area, will be full of activities. A participatory installation and performance space the ‘Machine to be Another’ by BeAnotherLab collective has gathered a lot of interest in various publication and festivals over the last two years. The project will be presented in Finland for the first time. ‘Machine to be Another’ is an open source art investigation on the relation of identity and empathy that has been developed on a basis of low budget experiments of embodiment and virtual body extension. The installation offers the participants the possibility of interacting with a piece of another person’s life story by seeing themselves in the body of this person and listening to his/her thoughts inside their mind.

Various Artists will travel from Brussels to Helsinki and collect artefacts & stories from local merchants along the way. The project called ‘Saudade de Europa’ highlights the importance of empathic trade as opposed to apathetic consumerism and proposes a strategy for change in a poetic manner by raising awareness and starting a dialogue about our current economic system that seems to be reaching a dead end. Their findings are presented in the festival as well as in the online shopping sites.

The festival program includes a new work from the Kinobox Obscura collective: The first 3D camera obscura pedal paddle boat catamaran in the world! The project will see its launch already the 2nd of July in the Lapinlahti hospital area. This participatory installation is going to be available to the audience  throughout the whole festival.

Julie Andreyev’s and Simon Lysander Overstall’s ‘EPIC-Tom’ expands on new media performance by considering more-than-human creativity. The human and canine collaborative project is inspired by lived experiences shared together over time. Relational potentials are at the core of the performance where human and canine creativities co-arise.

‘Beat to the Balance’ utilises Lapinlahti hospital sauna as an environment of empathy and introduces treatments of Baltic whisking; a tradition of using whisks – branch bundle of different tree species and temperature balancing for opening the locks of trauma we carry due to the exploitation of the Earth. Invited whiskers are Maaria Alén and Bradley Blalock, the project is by Mari Keski-Korsu.

‘Interfaces for Empathy’ festival includes several hands-on workshops throughout the festival days. Experimental housing for urban bees will be developed during 'Architectures for the Other Side' -workshop. The workshop is part of Melliferopolis Fest program. An emotion mini-hackathon will be lead by NEMO -researchers Katri Saarikivi and Valtteri Wikström where an emotion sleeve can be designed. World-wide known animal communicator Maiccu Kostiainen will lead us to the world of communicating with other animals to learn there’s nothing mystical about it. 'Soft robotics' -workshop the participants will become acquainted with a number of selected methods for simple production and control of soft morphologies.

Andrea Traldi introduces dreamwork and dream space that is made with spiritual qualities, is a constitutional part of our connection to nature, and it is a fertile territory where emotions and hidden feelings can re-connect to conscious thoughts. Theun Karelse with ecologist Matthew Creasey and Clemens Driessen ask in their workshop of designing a wilderness machine: how do we design something that relates to the full biodiversity of a given landscape, it's ecological flows, the levels of communication and material flows? Another way to connect to the environment we live within, is Grit Ruhland’s and Walburga Walde’s participatory experiment to sing with Länsiväylä motorway close by to the Lapinlahti hospital.

The Recycling Olympic Games (ROG) is an alternative sports event that is focused on creative waste reuse. During ROG, international teams compete for the title of a champion and a trophy! The project enables situation-specific creative production and performative actions to be happening at the site of ROG for the duration of the games. This year ROG will enjoy the sea side views of Lapinlahti beach.

The festival introduces an evening conversation series about the thematics, questions and experiences raised in the program. One of these conversations, led by Egle Oddo and biologist & cancer researcher Emmy Verschuren takes place in an outdoor hot tub (palju), while eg. the Melliferopolis -project will bring Finnish Weird author Johanna Sinisalo to the festival. More detailed conversation program will be published during the summer.

Foodycle festival is again collaborating with Pixelache, for the fourth time already. This year Foodycle happens in the same location as the rest of the Pixelache festival program, in Lapinlahti hospital area. Foodycle 2016 explores how empathy is present in human food chains and in the final food product. These questions are raised and discussed in playful “battles”. Foodycle will also bring farmer’s market to Lapinlahti that includes eg. sausage making workshop.

‘In Situ: Äänipuutarha / Sonic Greenhouse’ will transform the whole Helsinki City Winter Garden into a musical instrument. The glass walls of the greenhouse will be turned into speakers and the soundscape is modified by the data collected from the surrounding environment such as traffic or weather. In the background of this work by work by Otso Lähdeoja and Josué Moreno is the notion of anthropocene where other species other than humans live only in controlled habitats.

Lastly but not least, Channel Surfers will take festival participants to a voyage of playful discovery, collaborating and competing with faceless other people - dressed exactly the same. This will happen in the Kiasma seminar room throughout the festival days.

Many parts of the festival program is suitable for all ages. We warmly welcome to participate and enjoy the 2016 edition of Pixelache Festival titled 'Interfaces for Empathy'!