CYLAND Media Art Lab invites artists worldwide to participate in the 13th CYFEST International media art festival in St. Petersburg, Russia. 

Festival theme: Cosmos and Chaos

Dates: First quarter of 2021

CYFEST is one of the biggest international festivals of media art in Eastern Europe, founded by a group of independent artists and curators in Saint Petersburg in 2007. CYFEST unites art professionals, programmers, engineers and media activists all over the world, expands territories and possibilities of contemporary art, intertwining it with various disciplines of science and technology.

CYFEST is an exceptional international project. In 2019, the festival projects were presented at the leading cultural institutions in New York, Rome, Venice, Moscow and St. Petersburg. 

Saint Petersburg CYFEST will engage largest city’s art spaces, including Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, the State Hermitage Youth Educational Center, Art.ITMO.Residency. 

COSMOS and CHAOS

The Greek CHAOS means “void”, “chasm”, “abyss”. This mythical time preceded the empirical (profane) one. CHAOS is a god of engendering. For ancient Greeks, Earth, Sky, Love, Abyss and Gloom were born of CHAOS.

By COSMOS, the Greeks meant an aesthetically adorned order. COSMOS has always been secondary in relation to CHAOS. It would emerge by way of replenishment and clarification of its properties.

Darkness transforms into light, void — into filling, amorphy — into order. And it was precisely the human being whom Plato proposed as a prototype of COSMOS. 

What do we have in mind today by reaching out to those philosophic notions? Is it not strange that we ever more frequently refer to our human life as chaotic and to the immeasurable abyss of the Universe as Cosmos?

Every style in art has strived to give birth to its own cosmos — an aesthetic structure and a formal solution. But what is taking place when the aesthetic and formal lose their meaning in the process of determining what art is? Abyss gives birth to abyss? What could be engendered by the “immeasurableness” of information? Or soon the new technologies will completely engulf the aesthetical and our old cosmos of meanings will be of absolutely no interest to a new generation of artists? — Elena Gubanova, CYLAND Curator

Application Process & Technical Requirements

Interested artists need to complete the Application Form (.pdf).

Applications should be submitted to competition@cyland.org. In the subject line of the email, please use the following format, where the first word is your family name: Jones_Application_CYFEST-13.

Deadline for submission of proposals: October 31, 2020.

Winners will be announced on December 1, 2020.

We are accepting applications for multimedia projects. To get an idea of the sort of projects we expect, take a look at the 12th Cyfest catalogue (pdf). The projects should match the festival theme. They may be projects that you have worked on in the past, or completely new ones made specially for the festival. 

We provide technical support in production of artistic projects for display at the festival; if it is necessary to be present in setting up the project, we cover expenses connected with attending the festival (visa, tickets, transfer, accommodation) and the cost of transporting the art project to and from the festival. We do not pay fees for participating in the festival.

Please pay particular attention to the technical rider of the project, and describe it in as much detail as possible.