Tomorrow Now: The Art of 2050
SHARE PRIZE XVII
Via @BRUCES over on Medium, ye olde blog platform
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This edition of Share Festival takes place in the year 2025 — a full quarter of the twenty-first century.
But at Share Festival, we are a veteran, traditional, avant-garde technology-art festival, so the passage of time can’t bother us. We’re a native festival of the city of Torino, the home of a National Cinema Museum full of long-dead “new” media-devices. Torino has Ancient Egyptian relics in a state-of-the-art, high-tech museum that’s been there for two hundred years.
That is why Share Festival has the unique power to show people art from a different time entirely. In this case, art from the year 2050 AD — not this quarter of the century, but the next quarter of the century. The art world of tomorrow, now.
One might imagine that it’s technically impossible to have technology art from the year 2050 AD — but we know that you, our artists, can provide this. We simply want to see the everyday, accessible art that’s popular and fully-accepted by the people who happen to live 25 years in the future. It’s not our art from 2025, it’s their own art from 2050. It’s created for them, not for us. It is the art of their time.
Is 2050 AD a happy year or a sad time? Prosperity or disaster, utopia or dystopia? In 2050, when artists hear a “Call for Art” like this one, do they still fret about modern buzzwords like virtual, artificial, national, gender, social, mechanical, robotic, or big-tech media platforms? That’s up to you, the artist, to decide. Tomorrow’s year 2050 — the chosen moment of our festival — is just as real, human and valid as this year. It’s the sister year of 2025, 2000, 1975, 1950 and 1925. Every one of those years had characteristic art-of-the-time, enjoyed by people aged 7-to-70. “This too shall pass,” we know that. So please show us some art after this-too passes.
At Share Festival, we often show kinetic art, interactive art, installations, and machine-art. These art-devices that we show our public actually work. However, in this particular case of this 2025/2050 festival, it’s fine if the devices from the future merely APPEAR to work. They’re from the future, after all.
Other art festivals will never get away with this radically speculative, intensely futuristic behavior, but here in Torino, we most certainly can. And so can you! While visiting Share Festival in 2050 AD, you can also visit Turin’s flourishing MUFANT Science Fiction Museum, which is full of marvelous “futuristic” science-fictional artifacts that are already a hundred years old. Some are even older, while some are brand-new!
We look forward to the results of you looking forward!
Bruce Sterling, Share Festival Artistic Director
Jasmina Tešanović, Share Prize Curator