The exhibition “Remediation”, prepared by the guest curator Jurij Dobriakov, is an attempt to answer a question if during the last 15 years there was a strong and vital scene of media art in Lithuania. Here the media culture is a problematic category – contemporary artists undoubtedly use some kind new media in their creative work, nevertheless only few identify themselves as media artists. This exhibition of 10th media arts and music festival is probably the best opportunity to conclude these occurrences and processes in one space and to consider if they gave birth to more or less solid discourse of Lithuanian media art.
Diverse program “Severe Stream” presents the festival as a platform of pure creativity that generates open streams of sound and visual art. Lithuanian and foreign artists participating in the program will delve into experimental processes engaging all senses of the viewers. “Severe Stream” is a constantly mutating and flowing creative space where audio and visual elements reveal themselves in unexpected ways in their synthesis and intersections.
Born from students’ initiative in 2002, festival “Centras” today is one of the most important specific events representing the city of Kaunas. It was inspired by ambitions of young, free people who wanted to reveal possibilities of synthesis between modern technology and various fields of art, and to grant the necessary creative niche to the emerging and professional audiovisual artists.
During many years Kaunas’s audience has participated in creative experiments, live and and electronic music performances, explored their senses and expanded their knowledge about media culture. The festival “Centras” now has become an active platform for artists of different genre, joining the visitors in impressive audiovisual events in various places in the city. The festival gives attention to the central part of the city as a heart of open culture and strives to introduce the audience with information technologies as creative tools, with a mission to motivate artists to search for new means of creating engaging forms of contemporary art.