The #zerofuture is Beautiful! The HTMlles 11 - RECAP 2014 Montreal (Canada) http://htmlles.net
See pics here: http://htmlles.net/2014/slider/index.html After 10 days of activities, the 11th edition of The HTMlles, feminist festival of media arts + digital culture, ended beautifully (and sweaty) on November 15, at the monthly Cousins Party, with special guest Juliana Huxtable from NYC. ZÉR0 FUTUR{E} featured more than 70 artists and speakers, with a considerable number of women of colour from 5 different continents, presenting nearly 40 projects, most of which were premieres. This year, the festival's success was especially noticed by the public, cultural workers, as well as the media. The HTMlles attracted more than 3000 visitors across a dozen venues throughout Montreal. ZÉR0 FUTUR{E} Co-Directors, Sophie Le-Phat Ho and Katja Melzer, were particularly moved by the fact that a feminist festival of media arts and digital culture could attract such a diverse audience, including trans, queer, men, and inter-generational representation. The future is obsolete. There's hope in #zerofuture! To warm up and begin reflecting on critical and creative notions of the future, The HTMlles 11 offered a series of pre-festival events, including the Notopian Film Nights / “Pas de futur, pas de problème” and solo exhibitions by Christina Goestl (Vienna), Marlène Renaud-B. (Montreal), Nadia Seboussi (Montreal), and Lisa Reihana (Auckland), which launched with a conversation between Lisa and Emilie Monnet (Montreal) about indigenous prophecies and the deconstruction of colonialist imageries. The festival officially kicked off on November 7 with a day-long conference, Feminist Technics, Queer Machines: Inventing Better Futures, that brought together graduate students and artists to discuss themes of Technology and Futurity, Decolonizing the Future, and Futures of the Mediated Self. The panels were followed by a keynote talk with Ytasha L. Womack (Chicago) introducing the concept of Afrofuturism as Creative Empowerment. The festival headquarters were inaugurated on November 8, with collaborative works by Frances Adair Mckenzie (Montreal) and Amy Chartrand (Montreal), Angela Gabereau (Montreal) and Coral Short (Montreal), Alisha B. Wormsley (Pittsburgh) and Lisa E. Harris (Houston), as well as Valérie d. Walker (Montreal) and Bobbi Kozinuk (Vancouver). Solo presentations by micha cárdenas (Toronto), Jenny Lin (Montreal), and Mehreen Murtaza (Lahore) also premiered at 4001 Berri Street that same evening. The following days were marked by intense discussions on ways of re-imagining and re-designing our futures. The conversations on Afrofuturism and Cyberfeminism featured artists, researchers, activists and cultural workers, connecting with an engaged audience around urgent issues of community building, online and on the ground activism. Hands-on workshops such as the FemHackFest 2014 organized in collaboration with FemHack (Montreal) invited the public to share their skills and knowledge about feminist hacker culture, solar power and a variety of open source software. An offshoot of ZÉR0 FUTUR{E}, the Mad Parade video programme curated by Anne Golden (Montreal), featured shorts by Diyan Achjadi (Vancouver), claRa apaRicio yoldi (London), Sandra Araújo (Porto), Alison Ballard (London), Cristine Brache (London), Francesca Fini (Rome), Beate Hecher and Markus Keim (Vienna), Myriam Jacob-Allard (Montreal), Nelly-Ève Rajotte (Montreal) and Sabrina Ratté (Montreal). Another highlight was the performance night on November 13, which started with an intimate soundscape by Julie Matson (Montreal), followed by the networked audio-visual performance G.I.A.S.O. (Great International Streaming Orchestra) conducted by Jenny Pickett / APO33 (Nantes), and culminated with a compelling witch opera by The Pre-Lubed Sisters (Montreal). The festival also presented performances by Véronique Binst (Brussels) and Sonia Paço-Rocchia (St-Joseph-du-Lac), tobias c. van Veen (Vancouver), Aïsha C. Vertus (Montreal), and those of the Journée Paroles et Manoeuvres : Eros Frankenstein, with contributions by Montreal-based artists and speakers Raphaële Frigon, Désirée Holman, Virginie Jourdain and Florence Larose, Audrey Laurin, as well as Catherine Lavoie-Marcus and Priscilla Guy. Although the official closing party already took place, the festival is not over yet! The exhibition Maid in Cyberspace - REVISITED, featuring works by Gaby Cepeda (Lima), Émilie Gervais (Marseille), Faith Holland (New York), Jessica MacCormack (Montreal) and shawné michaelain holloway (Chicago/Paris), can still be viewed online (http://htmlles.net/2014/index.php?page=events&lang=en&evId=104) until December 31, and the video work by Linda Franke (Cologne) is being projected in the windows of the Goethe-Institut Montreal until January 2015. Additionally, festival tote bags and t-shirts designed by B L C K M S S N (Montreal) can still be purchased online (http://htmlles.net/2014/index.php?page=info&lang=en&mer=true) or at Studio XX. Other artists and speakers who made this festival edition memorable include: Adwoa Afful (York), Tatiana Bazzichelli (Berlin), Pascal Beauchesne (Montreal), Madelyne Beckles (Montreal), kimura byol (Montreal), Li Cornfeld (Montreal), Jessie Daniels (New York), Jess Dorrance (Montreal), Eleanor Dumouchel (Montreal), Nantali Indongo (Montreal), Andrea Joy Rideout (Montreal), Michelle Lacombe (Montreal), Sharrae Lyon (Toronto), Nnedimma Nnebe (Montreal), Audrey Powell (Montreal), Anna Pringle (Montreal), Mikhel Proulx (Montreal), Lisa Taylor (Sherbrooke), and Alain Thibault (Montreal). The festival documentation will be available on Studio XX’s Matricules Archives in 2015. See a selection of pictures here: http://htmlles.net/2014/slider/index.html What’s on the Horizon On its last weekend, ZÉR0 FUTUR{E} also launched a local and international forum on festival sustainability, using a wiki – a conversation to be continued over the next months… This 11th edition was made possible with the collaboration of more than 20 programming partners – from artist-run centres to grassroots collectives – as well as 8 unpaid interns, 4 unpaid bloggers, over 30 volunteers, and 14 staff members and freelancers, all of whom donated many unpaid hours. In addition to our desire to make non-remunerated labour a thing of the past, The HTMlles is also working to expand the festival's accessibility for differently-abled and disabled participants in the future. The HTMlles is a non-profit festival with very limited resources, and therefore relies on the personal engagement of the participating artists allowing the festival to present a powerful and high quality program that highlighted the vitality and diversity of feminist futurisms. Studio XX and The HTMlles would like to thank all the artists, speakers, partners, interns, volunteers, freelancers, funders, sponsors, and everyone who joined this challenging and unique initiative! See You in the Future Finally, as Studio XX wraps up its 11th edition of The HTMlles, the feminist media artist-run centre invites you to engage with its regular activities, but to also look out for signs of the next HTMlles, coming soon to a future near you. Find more information about Studio XX’s upcoming workshops and events here: http://www.studioxx.org More links: http://htmlles.net http://htmlles.net/2014/slider/index.html http://htmlles11.tumblr.com https://twitter.com/LesHTMlles https://www.facebook.com/pages/Studio-XX/207210409308922?fref=ts # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
