The annual Share Festival, held in both Turin and Belgrade, features a juried prize for electronic art; this year’s theme is “Fr@nkenstein: The Modern Prometheus,” and will be judged by an international panel under the direction of Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic.
The Turin festival is held in May 2018, and entries must be submitted by February 18, 2018.
Two hundred years ago this year, “Frankenstein”
was first published.
The author kept herself
anonymous, so that no one would guess that she was a radical teenage feminist who had
run off to
Italy.Victor Frankenstein is a bright Swiss college student with a private lab.
Victor secretly hacks dead
bodies and builds a giant.
One dark night, Victor “infuses the spark of being” into his superhuman
creation.But “Frankenstein
‘s Monster” never gets a name.
He does have a mother
—
Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley
—
but he has never had any legal identity, not for two hundred years.Illegal, unethical, penniless and not even human, he’s the ultimate clandestine refugee.
This
Nameless One has no family, no friends and no legal papers.
He’s a citizen of nowhere,
lurching
off the design table into a troubled, fragmented world of epic Greek mythic passions and torch-and-pitchfork mob riots.The Nameless One wanders the globe.
He
listens and learns by
spying on people.
Often he does
free favors, and even works hard for no pay.
Yet despite all these conveniences, people never
trust the Monster.
He
exists; he grows ever bolder, stronger and more capable; but he can never
really
be one of us.
When he “friends” people,
the alien becomes even less human.
He becomes a troll; he rants,
rages, demands a female soul-mate,
and plots cruel reprisals on innocent brides.
Those who
know him best are the ones who dread him worst.
Must the Modern Prometheus suffer for his gift of fire?
Must he be chased down with torches
by an angry and panicking user-base?
Will Silicon Valley ever have a Hollywood happy ending?SHARE FESTIVAL
XIII
is about the many powerful entities mank
ind has built, that are active
among us, huge, strong, unloved, scary, mythic and Romantically tragic.
They are alive!
—
but we
are the children of Mary Shelley, and of Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace.
What about them
—
and
what about us?
Call For Entries: Share Festival 2018, FRANKENSTEIN [Bruce Sterling/Beyond the Beyond]