The Tools and the Tribute

Bruce Sterling

Share Festival is a Turinese cultural event where we solicit technology artworks worldwide. We award a prize and display the results to the locals. I’m one of the judges and often the art director.

This event has been showing device art, interactive art, software art, installations and net.art for a round dozen years. It’s long been my intuition that Torino, a city of many public art fairs, should be more productive of these forms of art. The city has everything required to become a powerhouse in the niche world of tech-art: boutique manufacturing, elite polytechnic education, engineers and designers with educated taste and some time on their hands, plus a large culture-industry sector with a smart-city ideology.

So, as a Turinese cultural event, we’re bending more of our energies toward technology-art production. Our best-known effort to date is this year’s “Share Festival Artmaker Bag, Version 1.0.”

We’re quite proud of this local innovation, with its global implications. This handsome festival gift is a portable tool kit, a sturdy black nylon valise containing a curated mix of light electronics gear with standard Italian craft tools. At Share Festival, we choose these tools, we buy them, we package them inside the Share Festival bag, and then give them away as morale-raising trophies to artists we admire.

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Continua qui: https://medium.com/@bruces/the-tools-and-the-tribute-c0ef12bf911b