The theme of the world's duality and parallelism has stirred the minds of writers, artists and musicians for hundreds of years. At the 8th International Video Art Festival "Now & After" you can see the autonomous reality through the eyes of film directors.

February 7, 2018 will see the opening ceremony of the grand festival "Now & After" at the ARTPLAY Design Center. In the framework of the project, this year tackling upon the theme "Autonomous Reality", the visitors will see a lot of works by talented contemporary video artists from around the world.

Reality is an intuitively perceived component of our life. This is both a philosophical category, and a scientific constant; everyone can give their personal definition to it. Reality refers to everything that arises in time and then disappears; its existence does not need proof usually. Autonomy presupposes independence and acting in as per one’s own internal motives, which is of special significance in the age of globalization.

Artists resort to an autonomous reality, the one that is not controlled from outside and develops according to its own laws, self-sufficient and independent, self-governing and detached. They find it both in the system of scientific knowledge and in the phantom field of illusions and words, in the digital world that tempts virtual reality, and in the hidden memory of the extraneous universe, in the illusory world of cinema and in the figures of economic development, in the outer space and in the close family circle.

The organizers of the project suggest that the festival participants find an autonomous and independent reality, the one that cannot be controlled from outside and develops according to its own laws.

Have the artists managed to cope with the task set before them? Where did they seek that very autonomous reality? Answers to these and other questions can be found at the festival “Now & After”.

Having set the theme "Autonomous reality", the organizers of the festival did not limit the imagination of the participants. Now the viewers are presented with surreal sketches, anti-utopias, science fiction videos, space fantasies and social dramas.

All the plots have already passed preliminary selection of the international jury and are ready to surprise visitors.

In addition to the Festival’s main program, which will be shown in the Small Hall of the Artplay Center for ten days as a multi-channel video installation, Now & After'18 will present an extensive special program: lectures and discussions, excursions and performances, meetings with artists and curators. Programs of videoart festivals from France, Spain, Argentina, Germany, etc. will be screened.

Special guests of Now & After'18 are Tomasz Wendland from Poland (director of Mediations Biennale), Gabriel Susscher (director of Videoformes Digital Arts Festival, France) and Marisol Belluschi, (curator of the VideoBardo festival, Argentina). The guests will present video art programs and will talk about the development of media art in their countries.

Special project of the video art festival Now & After'18 - a digital art exhibition of Data Mania (Taiwan) - will be held at the Factory CEC from February 28 to March 29.

The organizer of the festival '18 is Media art center “Now & After”.

Co-organizer of Now & After'18 is ARTPLAY Design Center

Director and curator of the festival is Marina Fomenko

When: February 7 to 16 (every day from 10 am to 9 pm)

Where: ARTPLAY Design Center at the address of 10, Nizhnyaya Syromyatnicheskaya Street, next to Kurskaya and Chkalovskaya metro stations

See details on the festival website