Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is supporting the Prepared Surroundings Festival of Experimental Sound

Date

8 JULY 2020

This year’s festival will be held in a new format featuring performances by Russian artists presented as video documentation.

Prepared Surroundings (PS) is an annual festival of experimental sound and technology art that has been run in Moscow since 2009. An informal homage to the artist and composer John Cage, participants of the festival use prepared objects, environments, as well as constructs and often design their own technologies, software, and hardware. Prepared Surroundings encourages the most unconventional ideas and techniques for sound production.

The goal of the festival is to foster the development of experimental creative activities on the intersection of arts, sciences, technology, and music. The project is initiated by the community of independent artists SoundArtist.ru.

A few years ago, Prepared Surroundings started focusing on integral themes that help to guide the contributing authors as they prepare performances for the festival. The theme of its 2020 edition is Technology and the Truth. Just like technology easily turns the truth into a political instrument, technological art will easily transform the truth into a musical instrument. We seem to have learned to control reality by simply removing the requirement of the truth from sight. But without the truth, ontology disintegrates. The most non-banal thing to do today is to try to find the truth and make honest and genuine gestures.

Participants of the festival will be invited to reflect within a vast framework for interpreting contemporary phenomena such as truth VS post-truth, fake VS deep fake, relativism VS determinism, artificial intelligence VS natural emotions, global data VS death of the expertise, synthesizer VS interface, pandemic VS isolation, conception VS constitution, and the like.

Participants of the 2020 festival: 

  • Oleg Makarov

  • Sergey Filatov

  • Nikolay Golikov, Vladimir Ermachenkov

  • Alexander Senko

  • Coincidental Institute feat. BKB performance group

  • Vadim Logvinov

  • ::vtol::

  • Alex Pleninger /\ \/ Anastasia Koroleva

  • Boris Shershenkov

  • Tatlin's Tower

  • Aleksandr Iliashenko, Sofya Zamanskaya

  • Andrey Rylov

Curator: Sergey Kasich, co-curator: Vitalina Strekalova

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