Is post-digital existence possible? We are to look for the answer of this question between June 19 and 28, when the city of Plovdiv will be hosting for the second consecutive year the ONE DESIGN WEEK international festival for design and visual culture. The topic of the seventh edition of the festival is named Digital One. The organizers are to launch a special exhibition entitled Being Post-digital. Traditionally, the forum gathers people from all parts of the globe popular in the field of design and visual arts, who present the good practices and the modern trends in this sector. Dutchman René Beekman who has been living and working in Bulgaria over the past 12 years is a curator of this exhibition. Mr. Beekman is an artist, a lecturer and co-founder of the Master's Program Digital Art at the National Academy of Art in Sofia. Here is what René Beekman told Radio Bulgaria:

“The title of the exhibition Being Post-Digital comes from Nicholas Negroponte's book entitled Being Digital published in 1995. The book describes the transition from the analogue to the digital world. Everything happened too quickly and the digital world evolved. In the beginning we thought that computers consisted of screen and keyboard, whereas recently Google announced that some clothes will be part of the interface of the future computers. The past 15 years are known as a post-digital period, i.e. what happened in the past remained in the past. In fact, Being Post-Digital will continue to develop. This exhibition will display works that are not used in a traditional manner anymore. There are many paintings, sculptures and other digital-made works of art. ”

In 2000 renowned composer of electronic music Kim Cascone introduced for the first time the word post-digital. Since then this term has been widely used in discussions about contemporary art and culture. Our world became entirely digitalized, which changed the way we think, live and work. The exhibition will display works of nearly 20 artists from 8 countries who make post-digital art. René Beekman told Radio Bulgaria about some of them:

“I will present three interesting foreign artists. The first one is US artist Addie Wagenknecht who lives in Austria. Her work of art displayed at the exhibition Black Hawk Paint is a mixture of existing technology and conceptual art. She uses a drone instead of a paintbrush and creates paintings which bring mixed emotions of romantics towards technology and artistic expressiveness.  Belgian artist Frederic de Wilde works on the borderline between art and science. He is interested in the artistic result of the intersection between both fields and the use of the quantum noise, which is in the fundament of our universe. He works with many world laboratories and universities, including the NASA laboratories. Mr. De Wilde is to show two small sculptures at the forthcoming exhibition, based on data of a quantum measuring made at Australian laboratory. Carl-Johan Rosén is a Swedish national. He is to present his work named I Speak Myself Into an Object. His project is a mixture of a book and computer program. The computer program contains the design and the layout of the book and the contents of the book itself is part of its code. When you start the software, it reproduces the layout of the book with its software code and contents. The book content was written with the programming language C++. This language was invented by people for computers. When we read the book aloud the programming language transforms into spoken language and enables us to make a new interpretation of the code”, René Beekman explains.

We also asked René Beekman about the impact of the digital revolution on our lives and he answered with a smile on his face: “I do not believe that one day we will use technology less. On the contrary, I think that we will start using it more and more.”

English version: Kostadin Atanasov