Interférences, Belfort’s festival of urban multimedia arts, opened last night with great ceremony at the Atria centre. For one week, 350 artists and speakers from forty-one countries will take over the city. The programme comprises six shows, sixty-three installations, thirty artistic performances, twenty CD-ROMs, thirty-seven websites, seventy videos and thirty activities.
A dense, multifaceted event, exemplified by its opening show Syntax Error, a multimedia concert by Jacopo Baboni Schilingi in which acoustic instruments mingle with electronics and text and music respond to each other.
The festival is a challenge with a double aim. Organisers hope to create an essential meeting place for multimedia art at the cutting edge of contemporary creation. Interférences is an international competition: three juries—professionals, art schools and residents—will each award two prizes of 50,000 francs. At the same time, organisers want the general public to find its way into the event, a promise barely fulfilled last year.
Note: Today at 6 p.m., following the public debate “Textual structures/urban structures” in the Atria amphitheatre, the Agence du temps will be presented. Inspired by similar European experiments, it will examine the consequences of new working and opening hours for urban life.
Caption: A multimedia concert opened the Interférences festival last night.
[The unrelated article about automotive equipment on the same newspaper page is excluded.]