Geneva’s Mapping Festival, the annual multidisciplinary event dedicated to audio-visual art and digital cultures, has announced plans for its 2018 edition, taking place from May 9 to 12. Scheduled to perform are the likes of Plaid and Felix’s Machines, Alessandro Cortini, Inga Mauer, Moritz Simon Geist, Tobias, Lanark Artefax, Tolouse Low Trax, N.M.O., NSDOS, and Patrick Russell.

This year, the festival will concentrate almost all its activities within the new urban campus of the Haute Ecole d’art et de design Genève (HEAD), in the Charmilles district of Geneva. There will be two 12-hour days of workshops and lectures (May 9 and 10) followed by and two 12-hour evenings specifically devoted to performances and live (May 11 and 12). This new format aims to decompartmentalize disciplines by making them coexist in a single space.

On Wednesday, May 9, the festival will host the second edition of its Paradigm_Shift international forum. Supported by the Federal Office of Culture, and curated by Carmen Salas, the forum features a series of talks, keynotes, and discussions on the theme “Human + Machines by Design, not by Default.” It invites artists, creatives, curators, philosophers, and scientists from Switzerland and around the globe, all of whom will address topics as diverse as technodiversity, contemporary utopias and dystopias, the future of money, Glitch Feminism, and the relationship between human and technology from artistic, philosophical, and scientific points of view. This opening night will welcome Plaid & Felix’s Machines, a performative installation project set to music by the duo Plaid of Warp Records.

Thursday, May 10 will be devoted to the festival’s traditional technological and creative workshops. There will be no fewer than 13 workshops, all curated this year by Alexander Scholz of the CreativeApplications.net platform. Throughout the day, work shoppers will learn about new creative coding and machine learning, how to draw a synthesizer, how to embody data, and how to work with augmented reality, all under the leadership of artists and specialized designers.

Then, May 11 and 12 will host audio-visual performances, live music and DJ sets, from the end of the day to the end of the night. The public will enjoy, among other things, a visual symphony that illuminates buildings next to the HEAD campus (Antoine Schmitt), a musical creation played by robots (Moritz Simon Geist), an invention that transforms and levitates water with the help of sound (Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand), and an installation that produces music thanks to tennis balls launched at a speed of more than 150 km/h (Philip Vermeulen).

In addition to this rich program located in the HEAD campus, the festival will run two events outside, both free to the public. More information, including full lineups and ticket packages, can be found here.