VISUAL ARTS PROGRAMME FOR D-CAF

Exhibited previously in March, InterLAB is a collaboration between Medrar and Kazoosh! in Dresden, Germany which brought together Egyptian and German artists and technologists to produce prototypes that allow the audience of exhibitions in Cairo and Dresden to communicate live.

The protypes invited audience members to be part of the art creation experience, and not just recievers and included experiences such as: a photo booth, each in a location, where the face of a person on one end replaces the face of the other, and you see the other person’s face as yours enabling you to mold their facial expression to your pleasing. Another new piece will use the emotional recognition mechanisms of a viewer’s reaction to a film, and will modify it to determine what happens next.

The D-CAF version of InterLab will also give audience members a chance to interact, only in two parallel spaces in Cairo: Medrar for Contemporary Art’s space in Garden City, and Hotel Viennoise in Downtown, with several prototypes experimenting with emotional intelligence and technology.

InterLAB opens on Saturday 6 April at 5pm. It will be ongoing throughout the rest of the festival between 5-10pm in both spaces until April 28th (with breaks on Friday).

Drones are autonomous machines with propellers that are able to stay still in space and move through the air. Augmented Airspace aims to explore air as a medium of expression, to anticipate the questions that modern society will face in decades to come: the presence of robots in public spaces.

Augmented Airspace creator, Lot Amoros, will work with Egyptian artist, Dia Hamed, to create an art installation in Cairo, filming the city from the air and enabling viewers on the ground to see the live footage in a completely radical new way thanks to the digital skin layer that will show an augmented view of the city.

Augmented Airspace will take place everyday between the following dates:  Thursday 11 April till Monday 15 April at 6pm outside the Stock Market.

German project SMSlingshot VR-Urban brings this project because of the increased commercial interest in paving public space with digital advertising screens, the need for accessible intervention devices seemed necessary. The aim of SMSlingshot is to reclaim urban space and give inhabitants the ability to occupy urban screens by providing them with the tools necessary to create their own multimedia content in the streets. Text messages can be typed on a phone-sized keypad, which is integrated into a wooden slingshot. The user then aims at a media facade and shoots the message straight to the targeted point. The text message will also be tweeted in real-time – just in case.

SMSlingshot will take place in EMDP outside the Stock Market between the following dates: Wednesday 17 April till Saturday 20 April from 7 till 9pm.

Egyptian artist Mohamed Fahmy (commonly known as Ganzeer) collaborates with computer wiz and member of Open Lab Egypt Yasmine El-Ayat on this installation which will take place in the window of a public storefront so that the street and the passing pedestrians are involuntary participants. The Vitrine will blur the line between private and public space and explore how it feels to be watched, exposing our own gender and identity dynamics between subject and observer. How does society react to being observed when the act itself is exposed versus when it is concealed? This is the launch of a six-month project that will change every month to show a new storefront.

Face the Vetrine will take place on a shopfront on 11 Mahmoud Bassiouny between the following dates: Monday 22 April till Sunday 28 April  from 10am till 5pm and from 6pm till Midnight.

French-Tunisian performance piece ‘I’m Nobodys Shadow’ by Marion & Ghazi, a performance that brings video art and shadow theater together. It is about a shadow, free from the body that produced it, that evolves between dream and reality, happiness and discomfort. Sometimes happy to be able to act as she pleases, to take the shape she wants, to grow taller and taller, or smaller and smaller. Sometimes uncomfortable about the fact that she cannot sit, touch or hold things because she doesn’t have a body to do so. Sometimes dreaming about her “lost” body, sometimes rejoicing in her freedom. A reflection, an allegoric voyage on the theme of freshly acquired freedom and its limits.