Where is one to find out about the beginnings of robotic devices, at what place can one discover how they have developed and changed over the course of time and what is happening with them today? Since one of the ∫rst associations with the word robot is for many people with Karel Čapek and his Czech homeland, KONTEJNER decided to go back to the roots and to cast an eye on what is being offered by the contemporary Czech art scene dedicated to new technologies. Since the Czech device scene is dynamic, interesting, fun-filled and vivacious, KONTEJNER is going to shift a little bit of this exciting technostory to Zagreb, presenting it as part of the Device_art project through an exhibition, robotic concerts and musical performances, workshops for hacking food and electronic devices, a film programme, a roundtable and this festival publication. As well as our Czech guests, this year’s Device_art is showing again (traditionally by now) the latest sci-tech artistic productions from local ground, while guests from Slovenia and Serbia together with Croatian artists round off the logic of the basic comparative approach that during the fourth Device_art will build a bridge between Bohemian science-technology artistic practice and its coevals from this area.
The themes that this Device_art deals with are as diverse as the forms through which they are communicated: although it seems that most of the concepts are embodied in installation form, they are quite different from each other, and range from interactive projections, prototypes of objects and devices to holograms and (your) activity in expanded reality.
Thist edition of Device_art Festival presents the idea of the robot through a creative interfusion of very diverse practices in art, science and technology, and reveals the logic of the robot even where its presence is not entirely obvious. Combining technologised people with the humanoid technology of the device, roboticised device with living organisms and biological communities as well as interactive machines/interfaces with wilful devices that act autonomously, Device_art will develop under the sign of the robot into its next, fifth version − a version which, we hope, will be organised by them − the robots.
