PrintScreen 2018 looks at faking it and making it

One hundred artists from Israel and around the world the world have collaborated on more than 60 interactive exhibitions, films, concerts, workshops, installations, performances and talks.

By HANNAH BROWN
PRINTSCREEN 2018 at the Holon Mediatheque is themed ‘Fake it, make it' (photo credit: Courtesy)
PRINTSCREEN 2018 at the Holon Mediatheque is themed ‘Fake it, make it'
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The “PrintScreen” function captures a screenshot of what you’re looking at on a computer and the PrintScreen festival for Digital Art provides a living screenshot of our new media era.
PrintScreen 2018, the eighth PrintScreen Festival, which opens on October 31 and runs through  November 3 at the Mediatheque in Holon, has the theme: Fake it, make it.
One hundred artists from Israel and around the world the world have collaborated on more than 60 interactive exhibitions, films, concerts, workshops, installations, performances and talks examining the very nature of how artifice and creativity connect.
PrintScreen is the main annual festival in the Mediatheque and almost all the other organizations that are headquartered there take part: the Design Museum Holon, the Holon Cinematheque, the Israeli Center for Digital Art, the main library and more. The events will take place in the Mediatheque and Design Museum Holon and will end each night with a party open to the public, with the support of the Holon city call, in front of the entrance to Design Museum Holon.
There will be a number of talks and workshops. One of the highlights of the festival will be a symposium on the topic, “Art and Museums in the post-digital age,” which will feature talks by Christiane Paul, associate professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, and adjunct curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; Maya Dvash, chief curator of the Museum of Design in Holon; and Loic Tallon, chief digital officer, The Metropolitan Museum, New York City.
The nine films in PrintScreen are extremely varied. They include Sorry to Bother You, an unclassifiable satiric comedy by Boots Riley that mixes dystopian fantasy with the vibe and concerns of early Spike Lee movies. In Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching, a distraught father looks for his missing daughter via her social-media footprint. The Cleaners, by Hans Block and Moritz Rieswieck, is a documentary about screening content on the Internet. Ferrante Fever is a documentary by Giacomo Durzi about the literary phenomenon of Elena Ferrante’s work and how she has managed to keep her identity a secret in the modern age. Ann Oren’s The World is Mine is about a director who transforms herself into a Miku character through cosplay.
Among the exhibitions will be “In the Deep,” curated by Dr. Lior Zalmanson, Udi Edelman and Shimrit Gil, which examines how algorithms that drastically change our visual reality. This show will examine the work of artists and scientists who have created and used smart algorithms, with often unexpected results.
Seven performances will be presented. These include The Talking Stick Learns Hebrew (Part 1) by Ohad Fishof, in which a foggy entity delivers a complex narrative and Foxdog Studio’s Robot Chef, a unique comedy-tech experience, where the audience connects their phones to Foxdog’s own WiFi to play games, music and more.
Among the workshops will be Omer Even Paz’s “Artworks for Software,” which will offer tools to help people understand the mechanism behind new software and deal with the changes it brings to the process of making art.
For children, there will be a guided tour of the festival exhibitions by the museum staff, and a special workshop called “Behind the Scenes of Commercials,” led by Yuval Kedem, a special-effects expert, who will show the techniques used to make commercials and how imaginary worlds and visuals are created using simple tools.