Upcoming festival looks at brave new humanity

November’s festivals are coming on thick and fast, and will soon include the Work in Process Festival (WIP) presented by the CYENS Centre of Excellence. With the 2022 title Brave New Humanity, the festival presents an art and technology exhibition programme, hosting artworks from invited local and visiting universities, organisations and artists, as well as from groups within the CYENS Centre of Excellence.

Running from November 11 to 23, WIP aims to break new ground in the east Mediterranean and become an annual reference point for scientists and creatives experimenting at the intersection of Art, Science and Technology.

This year the festival is expanding. It will host over 80 experiences and presents media artworks, performances, research projects, talks, workshops, screenings and interactive games. The events will take place all around the old town near CYENS, opening with live music performances. The festival’s full programme can be found at the festival’s website (www.wip.cyens.org.cy), the CYENS website, as well as CYENS Thinker Maker Space’s website and social media outlets.

“In an era of exponential technological developments, creatives, scientists and innovators are zealously rethinking natural and artificial resources by embracing emerging technologies,” write Marios Constantinides, Stella Taousiani and Myrto Aristidou in the Curatorial Note. “The WIP Festival looks at this Brave New Humanity that explores how our sensorial, analogue selves fabricate new civilizations and augmented worlds that are simultaneously close and far from the ‘natural’, as D. Norman argues in The Invisible Computer (1998). The emerging conceptual clusters – Raw, Mechanos, Transience and Play – include projects that act as critical commentaries, inquiries, and aestheticisms on the shifting environmental and human conditions.

“This year’s featured artworks, talks and workshops,” they conclude, “are situated supra-locally, among the feverishly changing landscape created by the collision of novel natural and technological environments, fertilizing our immediate future.”

Work in Process Festival – Brave New Humanity

Arts and technology festival. By CYENS Centre of Excellence. November 11-23. Various locations around old Nicosia. www.wip.cyens.org.cy