For two straight days, teams of artists and hackers will hole up in V2, the old Value Village space on Capitol Hill, and make. Their 48-hour hive is the opening event for Black Box 3.0, the third iteration of the annual festival created by Julia Fryett’s Aktionsart.
Every year is different and Black Box’s survival is never guaranteed.
“Black Box relishes remaining in permanent beta,” Fryett wrote in a letter on the festival’s web site. “I founded the festival in 2014 with the vision of it becoming a nomadic pulse for the region’s evolving arts and technology landscape. It’s not surprising then that each edition of the festival has a timely, ephemeral, and vanishing quality. It’s also not surprising that Black Box was cancelled and revived no less than three times this year.”
In the end, the show goes on, with more than a hundred artists and 15 programs in conjunction with multiple partners like Seattle Design Festival, the Hedreen Gallery, and the annual UW Bothell Convergence on Poetics. Exhibitions, talks, and interactions involve virtual reality, vertical-growing plants, large-scale sound, a dilapidated print shop dating back to 1918 in South Lake Union, robots, apps planning the future health and strength of trans people, and a place called Mount Analogue.
Right now, the festival is still taking applications from artists and hackers interested in participating in the opening events September 17 through 19. “We’re responding quickly to the waitlist with confirmations,” Fryett told me. “We’re looking for diversity of practice and perspective, especially for more individuals working with bio art, machine learning, VR/AR/MR, robotics, and critical design.”
You probably already know this, but VR/AR/MR=virtual reality/augmented reality/mixed reality.
