Sound and new media art practices in the rural context

As Iain Chambers writes, “In recent years, our world has shattered itself in different geographies, with different meanings and directions”. Rural areas, that often suffer for competitive disadvantages in terms of infrastructures, services, knowledge and opportunities, are anyway characterized by strongly connotative elements such as living sustainability and cultural identity.
In the time of crisis, we can see the emergence of a new cultural value, hoping it would bring a new economical value. If the “artists can be possible triggers of the interaction for the future culture and society” (Yukiko Shikata), experiencing the rural world could lead us to a possible future through redesigning the local region and nature in relation to art, sound and media technology.

This conference session will examine some concrete sound and new media art practices. We will see how landscapes and traditions of a rural territory become signals of a different way of experiencing those same places that are marginalized in the development process of contemporary western society, but which indeed own a sustainable heritage either from a cultural and environmental point of view.

From Interferenze new arts festival to Liminaria, from Suoni dal confine to the Third Soundscape project, I will be discussing how exploring rural context through sound and new media art does not only mean to look at a frozen frame of reality, but to deal with enlarging our vision of the “places outside the place”.

Focusing on these marginalized areas can lead us to a different sense of experiencing the local territory, taking out from the drifts and the folds of the borders an alternative and sustainable way of approaching (and reappropriating) the rural landscape in the post-digital era.