Marked by its enriching sociocultural diversity and united through innovation, electronic art from the southern circuit has transformed in recent years into a phenomenon at once captivating and heterogeneous. For a more thorough mapping, the competitive show of the 15th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival, entitled Southern Panoramas, has been divided into three categories that seek to capture the meaningful nuances of this increasingly more complex and free artistic production: State of the Art, Contemporary Investigations, and New Vectors.

The political use of new media characterizes the production of the southern circuit and drives it towards an artistic genre associated with risk: performance. The curatorial theme of the 15th Videobrasil Festival, this experience that blurs the boundaries between genres, is present in the nine live works in the Performances section and in the ample retrospective traced in the Screenings section, with screenings of recorded performances by artists of reference and from the festivals and media centers that have stimulated the genre.

Performance is also present in the Reflection Zone, which includes a circuit of debates, a performance workshop, the launch of a publication the focus of which is the analysis of themes related to contemporary art–“Caderno Videobrasil”–, VJ Nights, a series of live-image sessions with guest artists, and laboratories to introduce videomakers to the content of Videobrasil On-line, an extensive database on electronic art from the southern circuit.

Performances, shows, debates, and meetings fill up the three weeks of the Festival’s programme and are multiplied on video screens transmitting the thoughts of artists, curators, researchers, and the general public on a series of questions thrown up by Videobrasil. As a counterweight to the ephemerality inherent in the Festival’s condition as an event, our intention is to potentize to the utmost the exchange between the members of this artistic community so that the swell of ideas the Festival promotes can generate concrete results.

Solange Oliveira Farkas
Curator and Director
Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival