Vesna Madžoski's website

IAFF (2008)

Wired Suicides

This year, IAFF goes green. The environmental problems have been around for a long time - they are not new. We are all aware that the sustainability of the present system is an absolute impossibility. The question is no longer "IF" but "WHEN" and "HOW". In this year’s edition, we will explore how wired art practices, environments, and interventions contribute to the discourse on sustainability.

In recent years, the artists have become the forerunners or the avant-garde of raising the awareness and the dangers humankind has created with its natural environment. They offer us valuable insights and possible solutions on how to understand and practice the complex interactions that occur between the technological, social and natural systems that we inhabit.

While systemic change is no doubt needed, it must be accompanied by all of our individual transformation into local brokers within our own designed environments, and the artists are the one offering us new solutions and modes of this relationship. After all, environments do not exist, they are imagined and re-imagined, and when it comes to imagination, the artists are the one here to inspire us for future transformations.

Beside the works that directly deal with the questions of our relationship to nature, Wired Suicides also presents works that belong to the category of ‘ambient media’, or the works that are part of the new (media) environments created by today’s artists. The ambient media is considered to be the intersection between the wired, the sustainable, and the environmental, in the same time involving design and visual experimentation.

The purpose of presented artworks will be to disturb the protected world we inhabit today in which things just happen and nobody takes responsibility for. We see this ‘green’ phase not as something that should be promoted as a passing fashion of the moment, but as something that has to be integrated into our thoughts and lives. If that does not happen, we might be reaching the phase when humankind will reach its final moment of ecstasy while watching its own total destruction, its own collective suicide.

Brad Downey (USA/D): Street Installations in Amsterdam

Brad Downey is one of the most original urban artists who changes the city landscape on the everyday level. You will be able to see his stunning installations on two prominent locations in Amsterdam. Leidsaplein & in front of de Balie, October 10-20. 
IAFF screens Downey’s first film, Public Discourse, a documentary about street art with works by Swoon, Ellen Harvey, Keith Haring, JJ Veronis etc. featuring music by Japanther. The artist will be present after the screening at the “Urban Cookbook Party” in de Balie Foyer with live cooking by KING ADZ. De Balie, October 16, 8pm

King Adz (UK): The Urban Cookbook – The Film

As one of the main events, IAFF premiers this short, creative stream-of-consciousness documentary full of raw poetics linked to music and street-art. The documentary was shot in Paris, London, Berlin and Amsterdam, to accompany “The Urban Cookbook” - a cookbook with a difference published by THAMES & HUDSON in September 2008. Come to taste these urban recipes prepared by King Adz personally with the assistance of the Dutch-based urban creatives he interviewed for the film: The London Police, Laser 3.14, Helmut Smits, Erik Kessels, Miss Blackbirdy. This event is co-sponsored by Thames & Hudson (London, UK) and the American Book Center (Amsterdam). De Balie, October 16, 10pm