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]

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]

FILE – Electronic Language International Festival is a non-profit cultural organization that sparks a reflection on the main aspects of the contemporary digital and electronic universe; disseminating the electronic language across Brazil and South America through events and publications since the year 2000.

FILE gathers works of aesthetic expression that capture the main trends and movements of our contemporary culture, which are diversified amongst the main categories of the festival:

Electronic Sonority: Sound Performance, Sound Installations, Sound Art, Genetic Music, Biologic Music, Classical Electronic Music, Pop Electronic Music, Dramatic Radio Broadcasting, Radio Art, Sound Landscape, Sound Robotics, Music Video, Sound Poetry, Sound Robotics, etc.

Interactive Art: installations, performances, internet projects, virtual reality, augmented reality, multitouch tables, digital objects, outdoor projections, phone projects, electronic graffiti, VRML, etc.

Digital Language: digital games, animation, digital theatre, machinima, digital video, digital architecture, digital fashion, digital design, robotics, artificial life, biological art, transgenic art, software art, new interfaces, animes, hypertexts, non-linear scripts, artificial intelligence, programming language, digital poetry, digital dance, etc.

Founded in the year 2000 by Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto, FILE aims to magnify technological discussions in the cultural scope. Besides the traditional annual event in São Paulo city, the festival expands itself across national and international borders to cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Vitória, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Porto Alegre, São Luis and Brasilia.

FILE’s mission is to promote wider access from the general public to technologic languages demonstrating how our contemporary world builds itself on the advances of new and digital media.[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]

The SPEED SHOW exhibition series was conceived by the artist Aram Bartholl in June 2010. The basic idea of this exhibition format is to create a gallery like opening situation for browser based internet art in a public cyber-cafe or internet-shop for one night. The exhibition format is free and can be applied by anyone at any place. (See how to instructions)[1]

The SPEED SHOW exhibition format:

Hit an Internet-cafe, rent all computers they have and run a show on them for one night. All art works of the participating artists need to be online (not necessarily public) and are shown in a typical browser with standard plug-ins. Performance and live pieces may also use pre-installed communication programs (instant messaging, VOIP, video chat, etc). Custom software (except browser add-ons) or offline files are not permitted. Any creative physical modification to the Internet cafe itself is not allowed. The show is public and takes place during normal opening hours of the Internet cafe/shop. All visitors are welcome to join the opening, enjoy the art (and to check their email).[1]

Now in its fourth edition, the Gray Area Festival is a unique global event focused on advancing open culture and the common good through holistic innovation and aesthetic practice. Our programming presents a survey of culture through the lens of art and technology, offering a deeper understanding of the present moment along with visions of the trails and opportunities ahead. Held at our Grand Theater in San Francisco's Mission district, the Festival highlights Gray Area's continued pursuit of integrated art and technology applied toward civic, educational, entrepreneurial, aesthetic, and social practice.[1]

CYFEST is one of the largest international media art festivals, it was founded in St. Petersburg in 2007 by independent artists and curators. The festival promotes the emergence of new forms of art and high technology interactions, developing professional connections between artists, curators, engineers and programmers around the world and exposing wide audiences to the works in the field of robotics, video art, sound art and net art.

New Forms Media Society (NFMS) is a non-profit society and media arts organization founded in 2000 that exists to unite creative communities, push artistic and conceptual boundaries, and explore digital media as an art form. By producing the annual New Forms Festival (NFF) as well as a growing schedule of year-round public presentations, we aim to raise the profile of Canadian artists, media arts, underground and subversive arts movements and practices both in Canada and abroad. NFMS is dedicated to showcasing innovative media works that generate a critical and creative discourse within the public sphere.

By promoting Canadian artists in collaboration with the international arts and technology world, New Forms facilitates multimodal art works and engages in discussion on their role in our cultural environment. Since its inception, an integral element of New Forms is the recognition of independent and groundbreaking artists. The New Forms Festival aims to showcase and increase awareness of these artists and their work within our community and beyond by promoting them within a larger milieu.

New Forms Festival is part of a larger, international, multi-media festival movement, which explores the ever changing and evolving world of art and creates a platform for artistic growth. The Society’s goal is to make new media art, music, film, technology-based installation and performance accessible to a wider audience. [1]