Situated formats around the science-art-technology debate: an introduction to European Digital Arts Festivals (DAF)

Digital Arts Festivals (DAF) are one of the most booming situated formats and performative experiences for debate, dissemination, exhibition and artistic practice around the science-art-technology intersection. From Ars Electronica or Transmediale and CTM in Berlin to the Spanish Sónar, L.E.V. or MIRA, more than 50 Digital Arts Festivals have appeared in Europe in the last few decades. Although the paradigm of the “festivalization of culture” has received a great deal of academic attention, DAFs have been minimally analysed. What are Digital Arts Festivals? How do they differ from other festivals? How can we define, categorize and analyse these festivals in depth in order to understand their role in cultural production and artistic creation today? In order to address these questions, this article presents the first results of an empirical study which began at the end of 2020 and is still ongoing and which concerns the paradigm of Digital Arts Festivals in Europe. Based on qualitative, multi-sited and wide-ranging research, and having generated a list of more than 50 DAFs in Europe and conducted a first round of semi-structured in-depth interviews with 10 festival directors, I introduce a starting definition of Digital Arts Festivals. Based on three case studies from Southern Europe – the Semibreve festival in Braga, the MIRA festival in Barcelona and the ROBOT festival in Bologna – I present a theoretical apparatus and an analytical approach in dialogue with the concept of festivalscape, that allows us to expand the study of Digital Arts Festivals, especially from the tools of cultural sociology.