It’s August, which means Festival Fever is coming to a close after another busy year of overhyped corporate-sponsored performances, problematic Native American-inspired headdresses, and high-profile headliner cancellations resulting from rare, Midwestern tornado warnings. It was fun while it lasted, but alas, all life-changing things must end eventually.
But hark! What’s this on the horizon? A brand new festival featuring all your favorite musicians/speakers/performance gurus/conceptual digital artists in Tokyo, Japan — which I hear is just lovely this time of year?! Yes, it’s the brand new インフラ INFRA Festival, taking place in venues across the world’s most populous metropolis during the week of August 19-26 and featuring “art, music, and thought in the digital age!” And guess what?! You are invited! (Provided you can afford the ticket prices, of course.)
The festival is a result of a collaboration between the Berlin-based 3hd Festival and Japan’s own EBM(T) Gallery (isn’t it so nice to see the world come together in this day and age?), and this year’s event will be based on the theme “Inside the Outside World.” Here’s your thematic primer:
Those infrastructures [that rule the modern world] provide an ecosystem where artists, musicians, and performers locate and navigate their work, one that has changed dramatically since the emergence of the Internet. It’s here that インフラ INFRA’s global, interdisciplinary and independent state of mind exists, proposing a break from institutional and market-based boundaries for artists, and interrogating these notions in a series of lectures, panels, workshops, live performances, and commissions examining music and art at its intersection.
Artists taking part in this year’s festival include Foodman, DJWWWW, Nobukazu Takemura, DJ Paypal, TCF, and, oh my god, so many more! There will also be plenty of talks, performances, and workshops, along with digital media exhibitions such as “#WHITE_PAPER,” “an unpredictable work performed on [a] sheet of Google Docs” — which is great, because I definitely don’t spend enough time on there as it is, so sign me THE FUCK up.
Full knowledge of all of these these incredible Fest-level goodies can be yours if you check out the enormous full program at the festival’s website. Don’t miss this opportunity to keep Festival Fever going strong, folks! (Seriously; you don’t even want to know how dismal the remainder of the year’s going to be once it’s all over.)
More about: DJ PayPal, djwwww, Nobukazu Takemura, TCF, 食品まつり a.k.a foodman
