ANNUAL FESTIVAL - PROGRAM SUMMARY
Overview

San Francisco International Mechanical, Kinetic and Electronic Arts Festival – a series of events throughout the Bay Area taking place in October.

Description

The Annual Festival will take place every October at venues throughout the Bay Area. The goal of the festival is bring together dozens of artists who are working with mechanical, kinetic and electronic art, to bring to light the current transition taking place in contemporary art related to these mediums. The Bay Area is one of the hottest places on Earth for this type of art, yet there is currently no local forum for it to be shared on a large-scale basis. This festival will become that forum.

Only by way of a large festival that incorporates dozens of artists and utilizes a variety of venues will a wide audience be able to realize the diversity, the complexity and the inter-connectedness of the art being created in the Bay Area. The festival will feature a wide variety of performances, lecture demonstrations, film screenings, and hands-on, meet-the-art-and-artist workshops. We will seek works of high aesthetic quality and challenging concepts, with a focus on innovative, inventive, extraordinary works of art that draw on new materials, new processes, and new technologies.

The festival will incorporate Bay Area youth, bringing them in to help out with event production, and working with a wide coalition of youth organizations to put young people in contact with professional artists, by providing youth-oriented shows, seminars, classes and exhibition opportunities.

The future goals for the festival include bringing artists from around the world to participate and collaborate with artists here in the Bay Area.

Activities

Producing a world-class art festival to highlight the work produced here. It will include:
  • Performances
  • Lecture/demonstrations
  • Hands on demonstrations for youth and adults
  • Documentary screenings
  • Interactive gallery installations
Roles and Participants

The festival will be directed by QBOX, with other organizers coming from YLEM, Rhizome, the Exploratorium, YEA, SF Running Crew, Precita Youth Center, Spanganga, CELLspace, and others.

Impact

The impact of this festival on San Francisco will be quite dramatic. It will bring together many divergent organizations working in the Bay Area supporting performing arts, art and technology, mechanical, kinetic and electronic art, youth and arts, and more. Even though the Bay Area has one of the highest densities of artists working in these fields, there has been no local forum for their work. Most of these artists spend their summer on European tours instead of showing their work here in our city. This festival presents an opportunity to show the world that the arts in the Bay Area are not only alive and kicking, but reshaping, redefining, and pushing the boundaries of contemporary art world-wide. As the festival grows year after year, we hope to build it into the preeminent festival of its kind in North America, bringing artists from across our nation and across the world.
 

548 Precita Avenue     Q     San Francisco, CA 94110     Q     415.642.7273     Q     info@qbox.org