To celebrate the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games in London, Watermans is holding a Festival of groundbreaking installations exploring interactivity and participation in New Media and Digital Art. These installations will be accompanied by a series of discussions, artists’ presentations and talks in collaboration with Goldsmiths, University of London.

The Festival will showcase six interactive installations by distinguished international artists, each representing a different continent, which will be exhibited between January and October 2012.

This Festival aims to:

• bring together artists from around the world in a series of exhibitions that will create a dialogue between the artists and audiences
• showcase innovative and experimental work
• explore and question audience engagement, participation and accessibility in new media and digital art
• engage students and academics in a series of debates throughout the project and in the development and presentation of the exhibitions
• involve other organisations and individuals in the process with partnerships and collaborations
• promote London as a major cultural capital
• invite people to take part in cultural activities and promote and incorporate the Cultural Olympiad themes and values ‘inspiration, participation and creativity’

The artists/collectives have been selected from an open call for proposals circulated worldwide. The final six proposals were short-listed by a panel including Prof. Janis Jefferies, Goldsmiths, University of London, onedotzero, London’s leading digital media innovation organisation, the curatorial team at Athens Video Art Festival and Irini Papadimitriou, Head of New Media Arts Development at Watermans.

All six artists have been commissioned to produce work designed to explore the nature of interactivity in digital art. Each installation will only come alive when people interact with it.

What this means is that the installations are only as good as you are. You will need to think of ways to interact with them. You will need to be creative. You will need to shrug off your inhibitions, jump right in and Be Part of the Art

Representing The Americas: Joseph Farbrook with Strata-caster, Saturday 25 August – Sunday 14 October 2012

Representing Europe: Suguru Goto with Cymatics, Saturday 7 January – Sunday 19 February 2012 Cymatics has been produced by Action Sharing with support from Torino Chamber of Commerce. It appears at Watermans with support from The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and is supported by The Japan Foundation

Representing Africa: One-Room Shack Collective with UNITY, Saturday 25 February – Sunday 8 April 2012

Representing Australasia: Michele Barker and Anna Munster with HokusPokus, Saturday 14 April – Sunday 20 May 2012

Representing Asia: Phoebe Hui with Granular Graph, Saturday 26 May – Sunday 8 July 2012

Representing Britain: Gail Pearce with Going With The Flow, Saturday 14 July – Sunday 19 August 2012

Collaboration will be an important aspect of this year long project and Watermans is keen to initiate partnerships and involve many people including students, academics, curators, art professionals and the wider public.

The exhibitions will be accompanied by a programme of seminars organised in collaboration with  Goldsmiths, University of London. These seminars are open to the public. For the full seminar programme and to learn how to book tickets, CLICK HERE