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PIKSEL 25 – Perma/Soils: Interdisciplinary Strategies for Soil Recuperation

20–23 November | Bergen | 25.piksel.no

We’re thrilled to announce the 23rd edition of Piksel Festival – and this year, we’re digging deep!

From 20–23 November, Bergen becomes the meeting ground for artists, researchers, and activists exploring the vital connections between ecology, technology, and art. Under the theme Perma/Soils – Interdisciplinary Strategies for Soil Recuperation, Piksel 25 brings together visionary minds to imagine new ways of caring for our planet — and the complex networks, human and more-than-human, that sustain it.

We’re presenting special programs, exhibitions, and happenings that move between soil regeneration, digital ecologies, and sonic experimentation.

Compost Computational by the Spanish artist Marian, together with Compost Computing led by UAL’s Critical Climate Computing (CCC) in partnership with FutureEverything, are projects questioning the need to rethink our data practices. The increasing impact of digital infrastructures on planetary health demands urgent action in computational sustainability, and these works present new ways to look at this challenging climate reality.

Artists are also experimenting with new approaches to food. From the noisy workshop FEED Me by APO33 — a cooking-noise experiment — to Ewen and Maya, who will bring their fermentation magic to invite guests into new ways of making and experiencing food.

AI, algorithms and generative systems are key in this edition. Projects question how AI reshapes music-making, authorship and profit-sharing, such as Kunst Kaputt, or encourage audiences to create new variations of animals, fungi, plants, and robots through an AI simulator in Speculative Evolution by Marc Lee. Meanwhile, seismic2midi by Jeremy Leung generates music from earthquakes happening 24/7 around the globe.

Post-pandemic glitch perspectives on mental health and perception appear in the PikselFLIX video program, while nostalgia surfaces through minimal code homages to early digital culture in Pikselsavers (Nick Montfort). Glitching also emerges as a political and anti-capitalist practice, transforming the Amazon website — a symbol of consumerism — into a space of resistance and digital subversion. Performances like Interim Dissonance insist that there is no error — only expression. Glitch becomes a way to reimagine the post-collapse era: in Constructions of Collapse and Desire by Natasha Barrett, humans and nature become entangled to create new objects of desire, tearing the old apart and rebuilding it in a surreal manner.

Destruction and construction appear again as life cycles. In the auto-destructive art live-coding performance NoNoNoMoreLessPlease, Leon Volbers — Destroy What Destroys You — stages the live destruction of his previously created digital artworks. Meanwhile, Paul Magee, in his work Signal, rebuilds a human voice by modulating sine waves with a bank of signal generators to match the frequencies of human vocalization.

Dirt, fermentation, glitch, collapse, destruction and renovation, evolution and food. Join us for this PIKSEL25 program, featuring the work of 44 artists from all over the world meeting in Bergen for a very special festival.

More info: piksel.no
Piksel is supported by the Municipality of Bergen, Arts Council Norway and others.