CYFEST
01.
INTERDISCIPLINARY COMMUNITY
CYFEST is one of Eastern Europe's largest international media art festivals. Founded by a group of independent artists in 2007, its primary mission is to support interdisciplinary collaboration, dialogue, and experiments, examine various visual languages and technological cultures and present them to a wide audience. CYFEST unites professionals in the field of art and representatives of scientific communities: artists, curators, engineers, programmers, media activists, and theoreticians.
02.
NOMADIC
CULTURAL EVENT
CYFEST is a nomadic cultural event. Since 2013, its exhibitions, concerts, performances, video screenings, lectures, and master classes have been held all over the world: in the U.S.A. (New York, San Francisco, Miami, Minneapolis, Arizona, and Alaska), Armenia (Yerevan), Belgium (Brussels), Brazil (São Paulo), Great Britain (London, Dartington), Germany (Berlin), Spain (Barcelona), Italy (Venice, Caserta), Columbia (Bogota, Manizales), Finland (Helsinki), France (Paris), South Korea (Gwangju) and Japan (Fukuoka).
03.
EST.
2007
The first CYFEST constituted a small program of events. The festival exposition opened with Andy Warhol's installation Silver Clouds contributed by the artist's museum in Pittsburg (U.S.A.). The festival has also been memorable by the exhibition History of the E.A.T. 1960–2000, dedicated to the lab Experiments in Art and Technology of engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman. In subsequent years, CYFEST has consistently expanded, becoming more comprehensive and complex.
04.
ARTISTIC & CURATORIAL FORUM
From 2007 to 2024, over 350 artists and collectives participated in it. Among them are the pioneers of electronic music, some of the more influential experimental musicians in U.S. history: David Rosenboom, Phill Niblock, and Al Margolis; Austrian post-conceptual artist, curator and theoretician of media art, director of Z.K.M. Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe Peter Weibel; artist, founder, and editor-in-chief of e-flux journal Anton Vidokle; innovative video artist Bjørn Melhus; conceptual artist and author of the first total installations Irina Nakhova and others. The festival projects in Venice and New York in 2019-2022, organized in collaboration with Kolodzei Art Foundation, united works of contemporary artists with creations of the XX century classics: Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Mihail Chemiakin, Ernst Neizvestny, Francisco Arana Infante, Valentina Povarova, Lydia Masterkova and others.
05.
LEARNING & PUBLISHING PLATFORM
Since 2020, CYFEST has collaborated with the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology Leonardo, contributed to the Leonardo Journal and organized LASER Talks. The last issue of Leonardo, put out by the M.I.T. Press, contains texts of the world-renowned French artist whose work enacts the most significant biotechnological and trans-personal metamorphosis in the history of art ORLAN and the internationally recognized multi-disciplinary collective of artists, designers, and writers Slavs and Tatars.
