For the digital art enthusiasts out there, Singapore receives this week the first edition of the Betwixt Festival, Art & Bytes. The festival is a homegrown effort of Spang&Lei artist collective to not only exhibit the works of local digital artists but also to nurture collaborations and promote the dialogue between artists from different backgrounds and nationalities and the public. Spang&Lei is Serena Pang and Wen Lei and their work seeks to explore interdisciplinary collaborations mediated through art, performance and technology. About the Festival’s unusual name, the founders explain: ‘It was a struggle to name a festival that straddles two communities (both art and tech). We (Spang&Lei) kept searching for a word that would embody the cross-fertilisation and the “neither strictly here nor there” quality of our festival. We finally settled on Betwixt, an archaic term describing “in-between”. Digital technology often gets conflated with the future and futurity itself, we opted for Betwixt because it was such a long-forgotten word describing “in-betweenness”.’ Despite its curious name, the theme this year is Interstice as the festival itself tries to fill in the gap of a more comprehensive platform to showcase digital art and discuss its role as a medium to portray smart [...]
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