T&M at the 2020 HTMlles Festival

Several T&M members are participating in the 2020 HTMlles festival. Taking place in Montreal, HTMlles is a festival in media arts and digital culture that brings together local, national and international artists, scholars, and activists who are passionate about critical engagement with new technologies from feminist perspectives. Each edition explores urgent socio-political questions through a series of exhibitions, round tables, conferences, performances and workshops.

Sophia Borowska, Kelly Thompson and Alice Jarry will be facilitating a workshop + discussion, ETHER-NET, on Friday, November 21, from 11am to 2pm (Online via zoom)
Registration here before November 19: bit.ly/34vXutW

Alessia Signorino, Isabelle Charette, Amélie Charbonneau, and Nina Parenteau will facilitate an artist talk on their project, TAKE HEED: MENTAL HEALTH AND WEARABLE DEVELOPMENT on Tuesday, December 2, at 3pm (Online).

Suzanne Kite is facilitating the public roundtable, AN ARTIST’S ALMANAC, with Alisha B. Wormsley, Lindsay Nixon, Lupe Pérez Roundtable
Friday, November 13, 17pm – 19pm
Online: https://tinyurl.com/y4k5zvh9

Anna Eyler and Nicolas Lapointe are exhibiting LA FABLE DO’XA 21965, as part of the video program: ECOLOGICAL DISTURBANCES: SLOWING DOWN, REFLECTING AND RE-IMAGINING.
Visible here from November 6 to December 2. 

____________

SLOW TECH

An attempt to interrupt the ceaseless cycle of updates, activity reports and new devices.
Trying, unsucessfully, to find a moment of repose; arriving at an impasse.
Looking up, seeing the sky, and being caught by a passing cloud in blue emptiness.
Then another cloud, white, vaporous, which clings to it.
Is that where we are?

The posture of Slow Tech emerged at Ada X in 2018 as a response to an overflow; to unsustainable overreach and overconsumption in the midst of a climate emergency. How could this unbridled and incessant quest for always higher-performance, more omniscient devices, ever have been justified? They were attractive, and efficient. But can we retain the vital (if invasive) tools of digital culture, and also our habits of rapid gratification, while taking a necessary step back? Is it possible to see both the potential and its abuses ?

With the three-year Slow Tech cycle, we tried to escape from a timeline of hyper-production, and instead invested resources in artists whose practices explore environments, alternative temporalities, and networks of interaction.

Then a virus spread.
It engulfed us.
A generalized, experimental techno-slowdown.

So in 2020, with its ambivalent thematics, HTMlles festival will be broadcast online, in an involuntary return to its early days as a digital gathering. In the fog of the present, we offer you intermittent projects, visible at a distance by the glow of the screen, absorbent materials. From November 6 to December 2, this first series of cloud content will unfold.

Then, if an opening appears – hopefully at the end of spring 2021 – a second series of projects will take place IRL 🤞🏽. In a strange weather system, the contours of an HTMlles program are taking shape.

Since in the current context any medium or long-term forecast seems impossible and our vision of the future is particularly obscured, we can only invite you to approach this month of November at a wandering pace. Stroll with us through the fog, considering what is possible and getting closer to the voices that reach us as an echo.

Composed of speculative discussions, interactive workshops, and a selection of contemplative video and Web works (which can also be understood as passages), the online programming of the festival is multiform. It proposes encounters that allow us to take new paths together, at a distance, in a fluid space where we have yet to determine what we will bring along with us.

***

Initiated in 1997, the festival began as an international platform for introducing women’s web art. Collaborating closely with partner organizations, The HTMlles has become a multi-site festival dedicated to the presentation of women’s, trans, and gender non-conforming artists’ independent media artworks in a transdisciplinary environment that strives for anti-oppression. To know more about past editions of HTMlles, click here.

HTMlles is produced by Ada X, a bilingual, feminist artist-run centre for technological exploration, creation, and critique, founded in 1996.

Check out the full programming, here: https://htmlles.net/en/

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s