Four Days Festival
Four Days is a dedicated festival of digital arts as part of LDF’s 2023 activities in collaboration with the EUNIC-Pakistan cluster. The festival is the culmination of the year’s activities and will include an academic conference on the first day, MikroPOM at BNU. The theme of the festival continues our explorations from LDF II online festival in March 2023 around Metaverse Bodies. See below for more information on LDF and the festival theme.
About LDF
Lahore Digital Arts Festival (LDF) aims to celebrate the emerging digital culture of Pakistan by bringing together a community of artists and audiences to explore the intersection of art, technology and everything in-between. LDF seeks to nurture dialogue around art accessibility, creative exchange, and experimental expression to commemorate the growing interest groups in the areas of art and technology. The festival will bring together people from all backgrounds, whether they are artists, designers, scientists, enthusiasts, experts or other interconnect- ed walks of life. In doing this, LDF hopes to help flourish digital creativity and diversify art in Pakistan, and South-Asia at large.
Metaverse Bodies
What is our embodied experience of reality?
The further we move into the digital age, the more we seek to immerse ourselves. From the static experience of reading a webpage to now tricking our minds with augmented reality, we are full of science fiction visions of fully customizable simulated realities in which we live out our dreams and fantasies. The COVID-19 pandemic provided the necessity to investigate more practical virtual realities for work and socializing, while the success of NFT avatars and virtual real estate provided a financial interest for companies working in the field. Many companies, including Meta/Facebook, announced plans for the development of their own metaverses; fully-formed digital universes in which people live, work, and interact, entirely from their own spaces.
This concept also calls into question how our physical bodies will be shaped by digital reality, and vice versa. It touches on notions of isolation and the lack of physical touch that many experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and postulates if digital interaction can ever be as meaningful as physical interaction, even in an immersive virtual environment. It leads to interesting notions of materiality and how digital creations might manifest in physical reality, and what infrastructure might be created in order to support a more digital existence.
Curator's Note
Coming soon.