NEW CODES */ AVAF 2012

Athens Video Art Festival (AVAF) is an annual digital arts and new media festival taking place in Greece, mainly Athens. Being part of an international art network, it reflects a wide range of ideas and developments in the art world.

It aims at bringing together experimental projects of contemporary artists and at promoting free expression, exchange of ideas, and creative interaction while exhibiting new media and new technologies application in arts.

Through a variety of creative forms, it presents alternative ways of “viewing” urban landscape and of perceiving art, and new codes of interaction between art and contemporary societies.

2012 EDITION

In a spirit of renewal and reorganization that is dictated by the new social conditions of our time and the consequently changing social role of new media, AVAF renews its program based on the concept of new codes, while retaining an important number of its structural components.

By helping create new perspectives in digital arts’ presentation and their perception by society, this new code constitutes a powerful tool for redefining AVAF in its entirety.

NEW CODES

The units forming a whole create, by the use of symbols, codes and languages, in order to perceive, understand, and communicate with each other. A whole, a code, a language or communication in general must begin with the formation of a sequence of cohesive meaning.

The innate need of human beings, as units forming a whole, to express themselves leads them to discover a code, whose starting point is their perceptive ability. Every code as an active structure, a communication system, influences the social structure, while the transient nature of society causes the continuous development of new codes and the redefinition of existing ones.

The artistic medium is condusive to the development of the code: through creative dialogue it enriches the sensory experience of the viewer. The recorded material resulting from the artistic activation of space and/or appropriation of the body is filtered and forms a new language, new communication potential. The exploration of the new communication code then brings together, in an original way, artist and viewer, and forges a two-way relation between them, as demanded by the times.

Athens Video Art Festival is a living organism created and developed within the contemporary art and society environment to address a wide range of artistic and social issues. It aims at contributing to the strengthening of the ties between audience and artists, on the foundation of a multipurpose program seeking to enhance artistic and social awareness and understanding.

The New Codes concept establishes an alternative view of digital arts history and of their relation to an ever changing everyday life, thus reintroducing AVAF.