A brand-new contemporary art festival is joining the scene in Georgia’s capital with the inaugural edition of Digital Tbilisi – an event inspired by a French counterpart hosting nearly 50,000 annual visitors.
The project is derived from Scopitone, a yearly festival of performance art, music, media forms and more, hosted in Nantes for a wide audience and professionals for 18 years now.
The transdisciplinary fest will now be transposed to the Tbilisi context and adapted to the local scene, involving work by Georgian creatives as well as foreign creatives from Scopitone in developing artistic productions.
In parallel, Digital Tbilisi will become from year to year an attractive center to promote multicultural artistic exchanges and will propose innovative experiences around new technologies” – Digital Tbilisi. To mark the inaugural festival, four shows will be hosted at different Tbilisi venues starting later on Friday, with _nybble_, an audiovisual performance by Paris-based music artist Alex Augier. Setting up his performance in the open-air yard of the Museum of Georgia venue at 3, Rustaveli Avenue, Augier will introduce viewers and listeners to the work first developed for the 2017 L.E.V Festival in Gijon.
Augier’s spatial performance will be followed by the first of two festival appearances by Guillaume Marmin with Licht, mehr Licht!, an installation centred around lighting dynamics and sound.
‘Licht, mehr Licht!’, in English ‘Light, more light!’, were Goethe’s dying words. The mysterious utterance can be understood as the mystical final pronouncement of the great author and scientific thinker, who developed his own theory of optics”, the artist says in his description for the work. In the third festival evening Mickael Lafontaine and Georgian artists will then take over with a collaborative effort of creating an audiographic map of the Georgian capital.
Hosted at the recently unveiled Tbilisi Photography & Multimedia Museum, the show will precede the concluding event of the maiden festival – a performance bringing talents of Marmin and Georgian music artist Kordz. In their 30-minute performance, the two creatives will bring a circular-shaped LED lighting encapsulating their “meeting point” where they use ambient sounds for a live show synthesising audio and visual elements at Tbilisi’s Mtkvarze club.
Supported by the Tbilisi City Hall, the first edition of Digital Tbilisi will run between October 25-27.