Digital and organic are never antonyms at »Interferenze,« the annual festival of new arts in San Martino Valle Caudina (Italy), which takes place amidst a beautiful chestnut forest. At the 2006 edition, the young, local, enthusiastic crew of curators succeeded in integrating digital culture with their own cultural roots. The leitmotif of this three-day festival of electronic art was »Naturalis Electronica«. It went off in a friendly atmosphere, with no barriers between artists and public - who shared more or less the same spaces -, perfectly mixing the local environment and traditional food with artistic research at the interface between the digital and the organic. The curators\' commitment to this philosophy is almost total, and it was seamlessly implemented in the festival program, which attracted the usual mass of thousands of curious local people, in addition to experts who came from all over the country to attend the event. Among the most popular items were the workshops with solar-powered micro-robots by Ralf Schreiber; they were unofficially repeated every day after the first one was overcrowded. Schreiber also scattered some of his chirping electronic life-forms around the forest as an installation (»Living Particles«), causing people nearby to wonder if the sounds they heard were real or virtual. Food was also one of the main topics, as in the »gastro-acoustic« performance by the Troyer brothers with Philip Furtenbach. This was perhaps even too ethereal, bringing together speakers who »cooked« sounds while chicken and vegetable soup (available free of charge) were cooking over a wood fire. But this was not the only food involved: a daily professional workshop was run on learning to appreciate skillfully prepared cheeses, wines, truffles and hams. This kind of food knowledge added important levels of information to the tasting process, providing a deeper level of understanding of the act of manufacturing and, more relevantly still, a much more intense and conscious sensory experience. Increasing awareness of technical tools was the goal of a conference on the use of open-source software for intervening in the management of urban and natural territory. On the other hand, »Acquatic« by Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski - a hidden, webcam-activated sound environment that produced calm, normal or frightening recordings of sea waves, depending on the amount of audience movement – aimed to stimulate awareness of sound. The other two installations were the famous »Process 6,7,8« by Casey Reas, which generated beautiful organic drawings coded using Reas’ own Process programming language, and an interactive showcase of the graphic, organic irony of Frédéric Durieu/LeCielEstBleu. Sounds were omnipresent, and the locative approach of Zeenath Hasan and Richard Widerberg (IMPROVe) was refreshing. After a walk together in the woods to collect recordings, they happily edited the sounds they had found or generated and gave a »concert« using them. A different type of collective performance was organized by the well-known Japanese Sine Wave Orchestra. Their shared sine-wave-generating transparent eggs gave a different soundtrack to the obscure surroundings, causing night birds to twitter in wonder.
In the night, the live sets were surrounded by the profound darkness of the sleeping mountains. Biosphere opened his long and retrospective set with agricultural samples he has used in his forthcoming album, while the Japanese O.blaat caused ripples in a silver bowl of water placed on a big speaker with her own software-generated sound waves. The only performance to be negatively affected by nature was the one by Emi Maeda with Lia. While the former was intriguingly attacking a classical harp, the latter guided her graphic, abstract, evolving patterns on the screen; but a sudden thunderstorm interrupted the final part.
With a solid partnership with the Pixelache festival in Helsinki, Interferenze is a uniquely valuable addition to the world of digital-art festivals, one that goes deeper and deeper in exploring its own territorial roots and passes on its specific research to the rest of the world.