Unsound focuses on a broad swath of contemporary music — emerging, experimental, and leftfield — whose sweep doesn't follow typical genre constraints. Influential, it has developed a reputation for identifying innovative scenes and radical sounds.[1]

Founded in 2003, Unsound wasn’t always the festival it is now. The very first edition ended with artists thrown out of a club for playing music that was too weird for regular patrons. Now, with the main festival still happening every year at a number of venues across Kraków, regular events also take place in New York, Adelaide, Toronto, and London. Between 2016 and 2018, Unsound also produced eleven festivals in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus, part of a long history of working with curators and artists in the post-Soviet region.[1]

As well as spotlighting emerging artists, Unsound also commissions new shows and encourages transborder collaborations, adapts and reimagines abandoned spaces for concerts and club nights, manages cutting-edge artists, and is known for its sound-inspired Ephemera perfume project. Unsound is also a platform, commissioning and releasing new music and books.[1]

Over 20+ years, CTM has been highlighting new strains of pop and fringe cultures that venture through the weird, the challenging, the cathartic, the esoteric, the contagious, and the ecstatic – simultaneously exploring sonic histories, contexts, and political and technological entanglements. Though international in its approach, CTM remains deeply rooted in and committed to Berlin’s DIY and club scenes, from which it emerged in 1999. [1]

Listening and dancing within the gaps between musics, communities, and scenes, CTM defies easy categorisation and tests the current possibilities and limits of sound and music. Programming supports a multitude of voices, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives – CTM is for all forms of music as long as they dare to experiment, question, and demonstrate conviction. Our work reaches out to all corners of the globe to explore and explode wildly different, experimental, mutating global scenes. [1]

CTM is an independent, non-profit initiative built, from the very start, on constant collaboration. We work closely with artists, guest curators, and researchers to support them in realising new projects and to produce and transmit new knowledge across performances, exhibitions, talks and artistic labs, writing, and more. Through a multi-perspective approach, we aim to respond to the diversity of an increasingly polycentric, polychromatic, and hybrid (music) world, always with empathy, openness, and a desire to counter global asymmetries. [1]

Because of CTM’s mutually collaborative nature, activities highlight a large and ever-expanding range of practices in and around sound. Through yearly themes, the festival experiments with formats, locations, technologies, and ways of listening, creating multiple entry points from which to engage with sound and their contexts. [1]

Music is not a parallel world, but rather a seismograph of our current societies, a powerful force with which to cope with uncertainty and change, and a medium through which to imagine different futures. [1]

From Ars Electronica:

Art, technology, society. Since 1979, Ars Electronica has sought out interlinkages and congruities, causes and effects. The ideas circulating here are innovative, radical, eccentric in the best sense of that term. They influence our everyday life—our lifestyle, our way of life, every single day.

The Festival as proving ground, the Prix as competition honoring excellence, the Center as a year-‘round setting for presentation & interaction, and the Futurelab and Ars Electronica Solutions as as in-house R&D facility extend their feelers throughout the realms of science and research, art and technology. Ars Electronica’s divisions inspire one another and put futuristic visions to the test in a unique, creative feedback loop. It’s an integrated organism continuously reinventing itself.

From Wikipedia:

Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in Linz in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center, which houses the Museum of the Future, in the city of Linz. Ars Electronica’s activities focus on the interlinkages between art, technology and society. It runs an annual festival, and manages a multidisciplinary media arts R&D facility known as the Futurelab. It also confers the Prix Ars Electronica awards.

Neural is a printed magazine established in 1993 dealing with new media art, electronic music and hacktivism. It was founded by Alessandro Ludovico and Minus Habens Records label owner Ivan Iusco in Bari (Italy). In its first issue (distributed in November 1993) there was the only translation in Italian of the William Gibson’s Agrippa (a book of the dead) book.[1]

The first topics covered were: cyberpunk (both as a literally and political movement), electronic music, networks and BBS, virtual reality, media, science fiction and UFO. The magazine’s mission was to be a magazine of ideas, becoming a node in a larger network of digital culture publishers. The magazine was also committed to give its topics a proper visual frame: focusing on graphic design and how it could have expressed the electronic culture in a sort of printed ‘interface’, exploiting at the same time the “sensorial” possibilities of the printed page. So, for example the page numbering was strictly in binary numbers for 3 years, then decimal figures were added aside. There was a department with stereogram pictures and the centerfold hosted a few optical art artworks. The graphic design included a fixed space in every article for contact and links, being inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog experiments.[1]

A MAZE. / Berlin is an international festival focusing on arthouse games and playful media. For the day experience A MAZE. / Berlin invites globally spread and diverse experimental game and VR creators, digital artists, musicians and other playful creatives from around different countries who share in an inspiring 5-day program of talks and workshops, idea market places and knowledge bazaar the art of video games making. [1]

Brighton Digital Festival is a platform that supports and encourages people across the city to experience and explore digital technology in all its forms. The festival celebrates [Brighton's] creativity, its innovative digital economy, and top-level arts scene, and provides space for meaningful critique of the role of digital technology in reshaping life and culture. BDF supports the community to produce an open programme of events on the nexus of digital arts, technology, and society alongside education programming.[1]

A space and medium dedicated to post-Internet cultures.

Since its opening in 2011, La Gaîté Lyrique is both a space and a medium, a living space centred around research, creation, experimentation and sharing, a space open to all audiences. As witnesses of our hyper-connected era, our focus is on post-Internet cultures: these emerging artistic practices, born on or transformed by the Internet, sit at the intersection between art, new technologies and societal issues. They are rampant, resolutely popular, often festive, sometimes marginalized. [1]

In a time when the use of innovative digital tools leads to the multiplication and hybridization of musical styles, La Gaîté Lyrique explores the rich field of contemporary music, its primary area of interest. But it also celebrates the dance movements that are born and shared online, the podcasts and video games that transform the way we tell stories, the virtual reality tools that renew our perception of the world, the design narratives that help imagine the future, the creative models born from blockchain, and all the art forms that shape the world of tomorrow.[1]

Via a multidisciplinary programme –packed with concerts, exhibitions, talks, performances and workshops– that favours immersion, experimentation, narration, collective experience, entertainment and engagement, La Gaîté Lyrique’s mission is to welcome the artists who are making their mark on society and to support each and every citizen in their discovery and understanding of post-Internet cultures. [1]

Cashmere Radio is a not-for-profit community experimental radio station which was originally based in Lichtenberg, Berlin for the first six years of its existence before recently moving to Wedding. The ambition of the station is to preserve and further radio and broadcasting practices by playing with the plasticity and malleability of the medium. We do this by both honouring and challenging its inherent qualities: it is both a physical station open to the public and an online radio; it has regular shows, yet opens itself up to extended and one-off events; it features extended generative music performances and installations at the same time as working within radio’s typical durations. In short, it is an attempt to enhance and celebrate the performative, social and informative power of radio that we believe lies within the form itself. The radio can be heard 24 hours a day, seven days a week on our website, and on Friday and Saturdays via 88,4 Berlin and 90,7 Potsdam via the 24/3 Radio Netzwerk, a collaboration between six of Berlin’s independent radio stations — Reboot.FM, BLN.FM, WEAREBORNFREE! EMPOWERMENT RADIO, Savvy Funk, Radiomobil and Cashmere.[1]

HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel is dedicated to digital culture and the new art forms of the Information Age. Since 2011, the institution has been central to the creative and critical discourse on the aesthetic, socio-political and economic effects of media technologies. As a platform for contemporary art that explores and employs new technologies, HEK promotes aesthetic practices related to information technologies. This not only enables a better comprehension of the changing world we live in, but also serves to actively engage with these processes and confront pressing questions of 21st century culture, while actively contributing to their mediation.[1]

As an interdisciplinary museum, HEK is a turntable for current artistic events in the visual arts, music, theatre, dance, performance and design, offering the public insights into art production at the interface of art, media and technologies. The institution’s diverse programme of exhibitions, performances, concerts, smaller festival formats, educational and online activities address current social issues and questions.[1]

Besides this abundance of events and exhibitions, HEK is concerned with the methodology of collecting digital art. With these tasks the museum takes on a unique position and pioneering role in Switzerland. HEK initiates and values close collaboration with artists, researchers and institutions from Switzerland and abroad in its efforts to map, document and promote current trends in media art. In recent years, HEK has established itself as a centre of competence for media art in Switzerland through its agency in global discourse.[1]

Rewire Festival is an annual international festival for adventurous music, held since 2011 in The Hague, Netherlands. The festival presents a broad program with a focus on contemporary electronic music, neo-classical, new jazz, experimental pop, sound art and multidisciplinary collaborations. It has featured artists such as Laurie Anderson, James Holden, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Ricardo Villalobos, Arca & Jesse Kanda, Nils Frahm, Animal Collective, Nina Kraviz, and The Field (the band). Venues differ from churches, old factories and abandoned spaces to the more institutional theatres and pop venues. According to Resident Advisor "[The festival] prides itself on musical diversity first and foremost."[1]