After a 6 year hiatus, we’re back!!!
Responding to the mass move to online music making during the 2020 global pandemic and with increasing concern among artistic communities about the climate emergency, the festival is returning for a global fourth edition, which will take place entirely online 15-18th July 2020.
The Network Music Festival ran from 2012-2014 in the heart of the creative community in Birmingham (UK). We featured performances from more than 250 artists who explore music making via web platforms and internet connections, and we hope to build on our past festivals with this new online edition running 24 hours a day during the festival period on web streaming platforms.
The main theme for 2020 is communities near and far. As many people find themselves socially distant, the importance of community is not diminished, but rather transformed. People rely on sound to bridge physical gaps, from singing or applauding out their windows, to connecting with others online. Our connections, then, are either intensely local, or virtually borderless. We stay in touch with friends and neighbours, but also find that collaborating across the world is not harder than collaborating across town. In this year’s festival, we want to celebrate and strengthen the musical communities people have built with networking tools, as well as exploring the aesthetics, performance practice and technologies around topics such as web-streaming, multi-location performance, collaborative music making environments, accessible and sustainable performance practice and more.
We’re happy to be teaming up with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) funded MIMIC project, who are developing a web platform for the artistic exploration of musical machine intelligence, for a special concert of new works developed with MIMIC tools.
We are also running a VR Algorave in collaboration with TOPLAP Mexico who pioneered the VR format in 2020.
We are also launching our OPEN CALL for Performances and Workshops TODAY with a deadline of 7th May 2020. DEADLINE EXTENDED TO: 11th May 2020.
As well as a general call for performances and workshops that fit under the festival themes, we also have four special performance calls: MIMIC New Works, New to Networking, VR Algorave and Student Works. We have an ‘Other’ category for submissions in other formats that fit with the theme and online format of the festival.
Network Musical Festival will build on past success bringing together communities of artists and researchers through the festival events to build a global community of artists for the festival period. The festival will feature an international line-up including pioneers in the field of Network Music and new and veteran performers who are turning to network music for the first time. Full programme announced in June 2020.