Trondheim Matchmaking is arranged by Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre, TEKS, and is a meeting point to present innovative ideas and artistic projects, a place to share knowledge, make contacts and learn new skills and develop resources within new technology and electronic arts. New art projects with a need for technology – new technologies with a need for substance: a place to bind together resources and competence within the field.

This year’s event has got a general theme of 'Soft Freedom'. As co-curator and first speaker for the day-program, we have invited Alan J. Munro, currently a Senior Researcher at the Department of computer and information science, NTNU:

It’s a hundred years since Norway became a nation and 30 years into a communications revolution, and we are reflecting on just what it means to be a citizen in these times. We are free to use open source software, free to communicate with people and access information across the world. But new technologies offer abilities to track and surveil, which may radically change, or extinguish, basic privacies. In terms of the world around us, intelligence may make the world around us ‘soft’, even architecture becoming responsive and manipulable. What is it to live in this world?

Trondheim Matchmaking this year takes place in week 42, Monday 17th to Sunday 23rd of October, and we start the festival with a four day long workshop; ‘Trondheim Dialog goes Matchmaking: Envisioning new situations’, where we invite professional artists and art-students in Trondheim, to participate in discussions, project development, and concept creation co-hosted by literature- and new media theorist, researcher and co-director of Virtueel Platform, Rob van Kranenburg, The Netherlands and Alan J. Munro. 

Wednesday and Thursday we show the “digital" theatre piece “Knockings. Beacons. Smokesignals” Uli Winters/ Marcel Keller/ Klaus Fehling Germany, presented by mechanical dolls at Teaterhuset Avant Garden.

Friday and Saturday we enter the conference centre NOVA, where we present, in quick shifts, a wide range of speakers, from home and abroad; artists, researchers, technologists and philosophers. Like always, the festival will be visited by many high-profile researchers in the field! 

Saturday night is concert night, with a blend of bands and solo-artists, put up in cooperation with Lars Myrvoll at http://enlightenment.no.

This year’s exhibition, "5002", will be opened during the festival weekend at Trøndelag Centre of Contemporary Arts. 

WELCOME!

Trine E Eidsmo,
director TEKS

Espen Gangvik
co-curator