amber'07: Voice and Survival

festival theme.voice and survival  (Ekmel Ertan, Nafiz Akşehirli)

Digital technologies that store, process and send all types of data efficiently and quickly are becoming crucial elements of our lives. We are happy and comfortable thanks to the tools that employ such technologies as the latter are fast becoming the determinants and signs of a good life. However, we are simultaneously living through the risks that are created and mediated by digital technologies, which are used in circuits of global finance, advertising, entertainment, health and weapons systems as well as in everyday tools such as cell phones and computers. Such technologies affect each and all of us. They articulate and redefine our ways of communication, our speech, writing, visual and aural practices and even our sensory capabilities. Increasingly for individuals and groups, institutions and even states, the capability to be heard, to have a legitimate voice has come to depend on the use of digital technologies. We all feel the need to institute a technological presence. In today’s world, we are always already present as data, sign, number, image or voice thanks to the generative capacities of digital technology. Yet, as the subject of a collectivity, we all too readily assume that we are capable of producing a voice, and hence a worthwhile presence in the scenes and spheres that matter to our lives and to our future. Rather than being a given fact; the capability to produce a voice that will embody our plight, our stance in art, thought, love or politics has become a crucial question that we all face.

In light of the above, amber’07 takes up the theme of Voice and Survival in a world where digital technology has become instrumentalized to generate the mundane as well as the sublime. What happens to Voice, in its artistic, personal, social or physical/bodily incarnations as digital technology increasingly mediates human and systems’ interrelationships? What kind of Voice do we adapt to survive as individuals and societies in and through contemporary technology as the boundaries between Art and Technology transform.

amber’07 aims to pose these and similar questions and seek possible answers.