In 2019 I started to think about the Pixelache 20th Anniversary approaching in 2022. During the years we had several survays and reviews of our activities but they were exclusively made by Pixelache members. I thought it would be interesting to take the chance of the anniversary and invite a person who is not familiar with the organisation to delve into Pixelache online archive and write an article. I have been following the work of curator Kisito Assangni since 2018, and as a first step of Another Story project, I invited him to research our archive and formulate his findings. He wrote a review article analysing the 20 years activity of Pixelache, higlighting themes and concepts relevant in the global discourse about media art. His article was published on Art Dependence magazine under the title "Disentangling Archives - How We Are Entering a New Era: The Case of Pixelache Helsinki".
Assangni detects a positive development of Pixelache program, specifically taking place in the last ten years of activity:
Pixelache festival presents artistic projects and approaches of understanding technology, as opposed to not being a mere consumer, but rather a creative individual using new technology for subjective development, enhancing the community in general. How can society overcome the contemporary circumstances of the pandemic, the economic turmoil and war, while paradoxically technological progress continues? How can we advance our way of life, without producing more waste that is left behind? Digitalization is shaping the modern way of life, it is especially obvious in big cities. The examples of the artworks, workshops, and projects presented at Pixelache in the last ten years are re-calling to relations between human behavior, environment, architecture, technology and communication, and associations with the diversity of living systems.
He addresses the inherent limitations of the digital media, creating a friction in the embodiment of communication and knowledge:
"Human relation to body is essential in developing human relation to nature, physicality, using diverse senses, proprioception or articulation of body movement and its gesturing, consciousness presence in the now moment (Fićović, 2016). The organic-body tool, using proprioception sense, can ground the virtual reality, and occupy the mind, influencing on cleansing the digital – pollution or, digital social toxicities, that in fact represents a digital colonization of human brain today.
(Note of the Author: Digital colonization of the human brain, which is functioning as an analog organ and it could be described as an electromagnetic oscillator, can be remediated and cleaned through free body movement, body movement that is essential for our mind – body harmony rises consciousness over the digital (true or false) illusion. About Heart & Brain Coherence on – How Meditation Can Help You create a new reality for your life, see Dr Joe Dispenza, Becoming Supernatural: How Common People Are Doing the Uncommon, Carlsbad, California: Hay House Inc., 2017."
Assangni further underlines that in the recent past Pixelache has become more porous to the inclusion of art disciplines not strictly related to coding and digital media, in an attempt to critically overcome the limitations of digital media art:
The advantage of Pixelache festivals is that they are inclusive of both, digital and non-digital interfaces and systems. The physical actions in real time and space, organic thinking often collectively articulated, are interwoven with virtual reality, using digital tools, programs and techniques, improving skills, while re-questioning the relation towards new technology on creative workshops, art events, projects, nurturing human-nature relations.
Therefore, in the thesis of Assangni, Pixelache's efforts to listen to and to include a wider range of cultural productions contributes to widen the definition and the perspectives offered by media art in the present era:
Art is based upon expression of emotions into aesthetics. Through centuries, these questions penetrate into philosophy, ethics and aesthetic, and this is an inevitable contemporary challenge for new media technology development, as well as for the future perspective of Pixelache. Establishing a dialogue based on a word-based communication (language, culture, writings – the ecosystems of linguistics), intuitively being present in the moment, while telepathically interconnected with ecosystem and other living systems, the channels of nature (telepathic communication, still part of Aboriginal culture in Australia).
(Note of the Author: “Aboriginal Australians' oral tradition and spiritual values build on reverence for the land and on a belief in the Dreamtime, or Dreaming. The Dreaming is considered to be both the ancient time of creation and the present-day reality of Dreaming. It describes the Aboriginal cosmology, and includes the ancestral stories about the supernatural creator-beings and how they created places. Each story can be called a "Dreaming", with the whole continent criss-crossed by Dreamings or ancestral tracks, also represented by songlines”. Quote from Rainbow dreaming ceremonies explained, Aboriginal Incursions, 16 January 2020.)
Assangni also realised a video-statement describing his research process and his method when approaching and studying the archive. The video was installed at the foyer of Kiasma theatre during the seminar celebrating Pixelache 20th Anniversary - Contacts, curated by Soko Hwang, Irina Mutt, and Andrew Gryf Paterson.
Thanks to the collaboration with Kisito Assangni, I became more conscious of the limitations of the organisation and of the need to include different narratives in the fabric of the association's activity, and this gave to the project Another Story further strenght.
- Egle Oddo
Feature image: Timo Tuhkanen, Epistemic Dreaming, 2019
