From September 27 to October 3, KISD – Köln International School of Design will be exhibiting at the Simultan Festival in the Romanian city of Timișoara. KISD contributions include “City Of Youth – Oraș al Tinereții” and the project “50 cities – Who’s Victoria?”. The projects originate from KISD’s participation in a 2019 summer school in the planned city of Victoria, Romania, with the international research project “Utopian Cities, Programmed Societies” as a cooperating partner.
“Utopian Cities, Programmed Societies” examines contemporary dreams and nightmares of digital governance and smart cities by looking at the history of planned cities and economies in the European East. As a partner in this project, students and teachers of KISD have contributed to a summer school in 2019 in the planned city of Victoria, Romania, that served as a laboratory for experimental and critical design research projects.
The results of this endeavor were first shown in an exhibition in Cluj, Romania, in late 2019. This is now followed up by a group show at Simultan Festival, Timișoara, Romania. Together with the work of a diverse international group of researchers, artists, and designers, members of KISD present videos, magazines, and algorithmic work dealing with the concrete city of Victoria and the abstract ideas of planning, control, and optimization embodied by this town.
KISD contributions include “City Of Youth – Oraș al Tinereții“, a magazine by Konstantin Hehl, Lars Köppl, and Kevin Paterka that is representing today’s youth culture and the process of growing up in a once utopian planned city that nowadays is losing its inhabitants. Another project is “50 cities – Who’s Victoria?” by Audrey Pety consisting of a silent film and a magazine of 50 reproductions of hand-drawn maps of Victoria, all collected during a field-study in the city.
“Utopian Cities, Programmed Societies” is organized by 2580 Association and co-financed by AFCN – The Romanian Agency of the National Cultural Fund. It is coordinated by Tincuța Heinzel and co-coordinated by Dana Diminescu and Ioana Macrea-Toma.
Simultan Festival 2020: Unseen
Entitled UNSEEN, the 2020 edition of Simultan Festival aims to point out how artists respond to the major challenges of today, under the sign of uncertainty that infiltrates the spectrum of collective perception and memory.
Theories of the future try to provide explanations and synoptic descriptions of the state of affairs and fundamental trends, each trying to capitalize as many followers, resources and power, in a state of amplification and mutual development, both in contradictions and collaborations. Multiple responses to complex stories, kaleidoscopic opinions, tutorials for tomorrow, social movements, as expressions of different paradigms, will collide in this process, often violently, but also creatively in search of reconciliation. Where are we, what does the future hold for us, and what are we heading for in this unseen war?
SIMULTAN is an artist run art organization and a festival dedicated to interdisciplinary arts – emerging media projects, experimental music, audio-visual and sound art.
The festival’s perspective has shifted over the years – going from challenging our audiovisual comprehension experience to exploring human-machine interactions and experimenting with various tools and technologies to question their social implications and overall impact on our daily lives.
Dates: September 27 – October 3, 2020
Location: Comenduirea Garnizone, Timișoara, Romania
https://simultan.org/2020/
KISD Students: Konstantin Hehl, Lars Köppl, Kevin Paterka, Audrey Pety
Supervised by Prof. Dr. Lasse Scherffig, KISD contribution to summer school supervised by guest teacher Mara Siegel
Images: Copyright: KISD
