This year the festival explores the theme Prima Materia; alchemical thinking and making in art, design and music.
The theme Prima Materia allows FIBER to connect the work of today’s artists, designers and musicians to a renewed interest in the old field of alchemy. Back in the day alchemists speculatively worked with matter to understand the design of the universe. Their main focus was reaching the mythical Prima Materia, the metaphysical matter that would connect everything in the cosmos.
For a long time alchemy was considered a mystical pseudoscience, but it now becomes unmistakably clear that it is a precursor for contemporary science and the development of our knowledge about matter.
FIBER points out extraordinary similarities between the work of alchemists and the modern interdisciplinary artists, designers, programmers and engineers. Prima Materia explores their search in hybrid materials, data, alternative instruments, magical thinking and artificial life like bots and machine learning. Through the theme Prima Materia FIBER presents new narratives and irrational ratios between man, machine and nature.