The curation of the 2015 edition of the Day For Night festival involved identifying 15 visual artists who could create site specific installations that worked at large scales and connected both audio and visuals.
The selected artists were Casey Reas, Zach Liebermann, The School For Poetic Computation, Nonotak, Refik Anadol, Kamil Nawratil, Joanie Lemercier, Gabriel Pulecio, Vincent Houze + AV&C, Dave Cihelna & Gene Han, MasOMenos, Mark Eats, Markus Heckmann and Nightm0ves.
Here is my curatorial statement :
It is almost a cliche to say that our times are dearly missing clear categories. Our world is becoming more blurry, as massive amounts of perspectives add to each other, we start seeing things from so many different angles that calling a cat a cat is a luxury reserved for politicians and ultra specialists.
How many people are "this, and this, and this,..."?
And maybe that's just fine. In fact why not embrace it? Can a music festival that boasts very popular acts like Kendrick Lamar also showcase artists only those who read the write online publications would know about? And what does that mean about Kendrick Lamar and these artists?
That is the space Day For Night is inhabiting. Casey Reas, who explores the infinite variations of precise computational simulations, Nonotak who use visible light with religious fervour, Joanie Lemercier who builds giant polygonal abstractions, and others who's only real common point is to day they work in the "digital space". No other term is interesting enough to sum up the choice of using this palette of artists, aside from the fact that their work is at the border of definitions ; "light art", "interactive art", "new media art", "computational art"....if these are too boring, ignore them all.
Everything solidifies around the site. Day For Night offers scale, a scale rarely seen for some of these artists. The music is big, the venue is big, the art is big. And it is big because this is a chance to hit hard, to show that art of this type doesn't only have to be experience on YouTube and The Creator's Project, but can in fact be seen before a huge concert, and after the next even bigger one, to remind you that in the end what this is all about is experience. And what is this experience exactly? It is Day For Night, so it is out of focus, difficult to pinpoint, somewhere between categories, and thus - completely contemporary.