INSTRUMENT (Detail) by Jürgen Moritz
ABOUT
Evolution is a strand of the Leeds International Film Festival which aims to explore and contextualise contemporary digital and time-based arts practice within a wider tradition which encompasses and recognises the significance of its history and origins.
For Evolution 2002, Lumen are programming three consecutive days of specially curated film and video screenings, seminars, live performances and exhibitions curated around the theme of PROCESS. An international mix of high-profile speakers who span over thirty-five years of practice, work within a multitude of media and have pioneered theoretic and technical approaches to art and technology, will be brought together in this rare forum.
The 1960’s saw artists depart from the constraints of traditional discourse causing boundaries between mediums to be shifted and re-considered. Simultaneously the research and development of radical technological processes advanced the mediums of sound and video in new directions. Phrases such as expanded cinema, inter-media and happenings were used in the critique of these new and complex inter-relationships.
Decades later, in today’s era of networked information technology and computer intelligence, artists are faced with a multitude of tools through which the digital signal can be processed, transformed and output. Once again, phrases such as new-media, multi-media and hydra-media have been established to contain these variants and combinations of form.
Evolution 2002 explores how the art-making process, the technological process and the reconstructive process of the mind have been – and could be – embraced in the pursuit of new artistic work.