Last update: January 17, 2012, at 06:26 PM

"OFF LABEL FESTIVAL"

Monday, 24 October to Wednesday, 2 November 2011

About the Festival

The OFF LABEL festival is an exploration of experimental thinking, seen through the triple lenses of art, technology and spirituality. OFF LABEL is derived from a social practice (or malpractice) in which pharmaceuticals are prescribed for illicit use, breaking with approved standards of medication in order to engage new -- if sometimes contested -- possibilities for treatment. The festival takes up the term and its variations -- in ways both literal and allegorical -- to examine the possibilities, politics and variations of meaning in a technologically-enabled, artistically-motivated and ideologically-invested world.

OFF LABEL is an invitation and a challenge -- what happens to questions of art, technology and spirituality when we begin to peel the labels off -- when we begin to remix the codes of remix itself, living -- or attempting to live -- the imaginary versions of the story as it might otherwise proceed. This is a forum where the suspension of disbelief meets the science of placebo-induced effect -- a world where the feedback loop of technology can merge seamlessly with artistic dreams and spiritual desires because each was always already a strange but compelling fusion of the real and the imagined.

The OFF LABEL festival takes an OFF LABEL approach and abandons conventional canons of content, presentation and interaction in order to integrate itself with the lived cultural, ideological and spiritual particularities of our times. With participants from many disciplines, representing a wide range of original perspectives, OFF LABEL emphasizes knowledge, creativity and practice for the ways they are integrated, remixed and reinvented by scholarly, artistic and scientific communities.

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Organizing Committee:

Art Clay
Doug Jarvis
Ted Hiebert
Yifan Wang

Organization representatives:


Digital Art Weeks - Arthur Clay
Open Space Arts Society - Doug Jarvis, Helen Marzolf

Centre for Studies in Religion and Society - Paul Bramadat, Leslie Kenny

Chinese Student & Scholar Association - Yifan Wang, Cui Xuantianyihe
Visual Arts Department, UVic - Lynda Gammon

Un-Conference - Art Clay, Doug Jarvis, Yifan Wang, Ted Hiebert
The Wayward School - Heather Cosidetto, Stefan Morales

Organizing Institutions:

Open Space Arts Society, Victoria,→ more
Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, University of Victoria→ more
Department of Computer Science ETH Zürich→ more
Office for Creative Collaboration & Scientific Convergence→ more
The Wayward School, Victoria, BC → more
Digital Art Weeks, Zurich, Switzerland → more
Chinese Student & Scholar Association, Victoria, BC→ more
Visual Arts Department, University of Victoria→ more