EarZoom Sonic Arts Festival
Programme
EarZoom is composed as a three-day symposium. It's events feature both art projects (concerts, installations, performances etc.) and lectures from the researchers of contemporary arts. It also includes various workshops with a wide selection of different sub-topics of electronic music, ranging from mobile music computing to hardware hacking.
In 2013 the main focus was live coding, where the musician is writing computer code live on stage, which is then being transformed into music. While the main point of the symposium is the presenting of new trends in art, it is also a place of critical reflection. Because of the fact that IRZU is a private institution, it's main objective of researching, contemplating and producing this kind of art relies on the EarZoom Festival because the dialog about sonic arts in Slovenia is almost non-existent. The festival is a platform for discussion between the institutions and the artist and a way of creating a context for IRZU's work both in international and local networks. In 2011 the concept of the festival expanded from technology-exclusive centred art to a more wide socio-political context that tries to raise questions about power structures.
International collaboration
IRZU collaborates or has collaborated with many other international institutes: Transcultures: Centre for Intermedia and sonic arts & cultures (Mons, BE); Nida Art Colony: Interdisciplinary art, education & residency center (Vilnius/Nida, LT); Kitchen Budapest: Cross-disciplinary new media lab (Budapest, HU); Pixelache: Festival of electronic art and subcultures (Helsinki, FI); MigAA: Migrating Art Academies (Cologne/DE, Vilnius/LT, Poitiers & Angoulême/FR).
Together, they created a network called T.R.A.C.E.S. - Transcultural Research, Artist, Curator Exchange Series. It's purpose is the discussion about the internal workings that unfold behind the scenes, regarding both artistic and curatorial practices. The reason for this is the fact that these behind-the-curtains processes occupy a large portion of an organization’s working resources.
Collaboration with IMC
In 2012 the festival was held in connection with ICMC- International Computer Music Conference which has been the most important european forum for research, both musical and theoretical, involving computers in creation of music since 1974. It is the annual conference of the Internation Computer Music Association (ICMA). Each year it is held in different countries and in 2012 it was held in Slovenia.