Guests

thursday April 7th
19h
Adbusters (Canada)
http://www.adbusters.org

Based in Vancouver, British, Canada, Adbusters is a not-for-profit, reader-supported, 120,000-circulation magazine concerned about the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces. In addition, annual social marketing campaigns like Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week have made of Adbusters an important activist networking group. Adbusters campaigns involve artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. The aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century.

thursday April 7th
20.30 h
Dragan Zivadinov / Noordung Cosmokinetic Cabinet / NSK (Slovenia)
http://www.ljudmila.org/embassy/ http://www.nskstate.com

Zivadinov is founder member of Slovenian artist group Neue Slovenische Kunst (NSK), which is now considered as one of the milestones of European artistic experimentation in the last 20 years. NSK began operating in 1984 as a large collective, a union of various groups brought together by their shared way of thinking and similar style of expression through different media: popular music, visual arts, graphic design, theater, philosophy. Dragan Zivadinov is the founder of the Noordung Cosmokinetic Cabinet (named after the Slovene space scientist Herman Potocnik Noordung), which evolved from the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theater and the Red Pilot Cosmokinetic Theater. In 1995, it presented the capital project "One Versus One", with restagings taking place every 10 years. The next one is due to be held in Moscow just a few days after The Influencers. The show will play until 20 April 2045. The place of those actors who die in the meantime will be taken by a mechanical symbol, their spoken text represented by sounds (melody for women, rhythm for men). In 2045 these symbols will be shot into zero gravity space in a capsule. This action is intended to finally abolish mimetic theatre and establish the rule of non-corporeal art.

friday April 8th
17h film
19h talk
Ceský Sen (Czech Republic)
http://ceskysen.cz

Ceský Sen (Czech Dream) is one of the largest consumer hoaxes ever staged in Europe: a fake cheap and attractive supermarket that was nothing less than a large-scale anthropological experiment. Ceský Sen, which has also been made into a movie with international distribution, caused some controversy and provoked extreme reactions in the Czech people and media and was even discussed in Czech Parliament. The whole Czech Dream operation (the marketing campaign, the final disclosure of the hoax, the movie) is a funny and provocative look at the effects of rampant consumerism on a post-communist society. The movie “Ceský Sen” will be screened during the festival.

friday April 8th
20.30 h
Josh On (New Zealand / U.S.A.)
http://www.theyrule.net
http://www.exxonsecrets.org
http://www.antiwargame.org

Josh On is a free-lance designer living in San Francisco. He is best known as the maker of several web projects such as The Anti War Game, Communiculture and especially They Rule and Exxon Secrets. These are interactive mapping systems that aim to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class (They Rule) and the connections between the giant Exxon corporation and "scientific" anti-environmental think tanks.

saturday april 9th
19h
Eddo Stern (Israel / U.S.A.)
http://eddostern.com/

Born in Tel Aviv and San Francisco based, Eddo Stern's work ranges from video game modifications, to machinima (cinema made through video games sequences) and installations. His work explores new modes of narrative and documentary, fantasies of technology and history, and cross-cultural representation in film, computer games, and the Internet.

saturday april 9th
20.30 h
Marko Peljhan / Makrolab (Slovenia)
http://makrolab.ljudmila.org

Marko Peljhan started Makrolab as an autonomous communications, research and living unit and space, capable of sustaining concentrated work of 4 people in isolation/insulation conditions for up to 120 days. Conceived in 1994, the project was first realised during an art exhibition, documenta X in Kassel in 1997 and since then it evolved including work of many people from many different disciplines. Makrolab has a projected life span of 10 years and the project will end in 2007, when a new architecture will be placed in the Antarctic as a permanent base. In the framework of the proejct, robotic UAV operations are planned and the INFLUENCERS presentation will be focused on the corresponding Spectral System program with the title "Unmanned systems architecture in civil tactical media and reconnaisance applications - The Spectral System Program" that he is pursuing as part of the research agenda at the University of California in Santa Barbara, where he is currently holding a professorship.

saturday april 9th
17h film
22h talk
The Yes Men (U.S.A. / international)
http://theyesmen.org

The Yes Men is a group of pranksters-activists that gained world-wide notoriety for impersonating the World Trade Organization on the Internet, on television and at business conferences around the world. They practice what they call "identity correction": they pretend to be representatives of powerful organizations and then use their newfound authority to speak truths that, ostensibly, those entities dare not. In their latest intervention they appeared on the BBC as the spokesmen for Dow Chemicals, the company responsible for the Bhopal, India, disaster which killed thousands. When they declared that the company was finally accepting its responsibilities, the Yes Men managed to create a public scandal on an international scale. "You know how a funhouse mirror exaggerates your most hideous features? We do that kind of exaggeration operation, but with ideas. We agree with people turning up the volume on their ideas as we talk, until they can see their ideas distorted in our funhouse mirror. Or that's what we try to do, anyhow but as it turns out, the image always seems to look normal to them".
The movie “The Yes Men” will be screened during the festival.