The Artmix Cultural Association (www.artmix.ro) announces the launch of the second Festival of Urban Art Architectural Projections, which will be held in the night of September 20, 2008 as of 10 PM in Constitution Square and University Square. Urban Art will be part of an event called Bucharest Days, organized by BucharestCity Hall and ArCuB – the City Hall's Center for Cultural Projects.

In the night of September 20, 2008 from 10 PM till dawn, 52 Romanian and foreign artists will reinvent the city that has sunken into the routine of daily news: crowding, construction sites, electricity blackouts, cuts in running water supplies, and missing lids of sewage canals – namely all kinds of monsters that will be exorcised during that colorful night.

The buildings included in the circuit will become pretexts and interfaces for several artistic media: painting, graphics, photography, installation, graffiti, digital art, video, computer art, real time audio-video performance, and interactive multi-media projects.

Urban Art seeks to continue its annual trip to landmark buildings of Bucharest and to project works of art that interpret the space in question, liberate it from the commonplace perception, and bring new meaning to it – in connection with both the social context and with the personal history of the artist who intervenes on it.

Starting out from the premise that the public space is not used enough by the city inhabitants, they have included six famous buildings of Bucharest in the circuit. Each artist has chosen the building that best communicates with him aesthetically and conceptually.

This is also the origin of the dynamics of those images, which are so different in point of style and perspective, but whose common denominators are the "support" (the concrete size of the building and its architectural details impose a certain discipline, and so does the projecting technology) and the desire to make the public space less cold and depersonalized.

This year, the spectator-visitor will become a player, user, spy, and monitored character through a variety of interactive works. He will end up drawing things on the Architecture School using "magic flashlights" or recomposing images on Parliament Palace.

At 11 PM, the spectator will be turned into a pixel with democratic views and will become visible on the very

"The project called GAME 21: LOVE OR LOVELE is a giant multi-dimensional puzzle letting users combine symbols or fragmentary images into a whole that makes sense (aesthetically or logically). The users' access to the controls of the work will only be allowed through cell phones, which will function like remote controls." (Mircea Florian)

For midnight, at the ArchitectureSchool, PLAY THE MAGIC has sketched a divine plan with digital tools: 10 magic flashlights end up in the hands of the public. Having become a human cyborg, the "anonymous" spectator is turned into an "artist" and will use his recently acquired electronic limbs to make up an evanescent work out of sounds and light beams.

Still on the ArchitectureSchool, 2META will install hundreds of mobile eyes which will exchange glances with the public. Activated by motion sensors, those pairs of eyes will follow the spectator and turn him into the subject of an artistic experiment. "I SAW SOMEBODY WHO WAS NOT THERE" is a project which, like the other interactive works, lets the visitor occupy the central space.

"Urban art will offer to Bucharesters an opportunity to rediscover their city, to look at it with different eyes, especially to see it through the eyes of the 52 Romanian and foreign artists who will turn the streets into a playground and will shake us out of our daily routine.

"Most of the artists have sent to us conceptual works especially designed for Bucharest buildings, which intervene on the architecture of the buildings they are projected on, and which try to make unfamiliar to us the spaces we pass by so often, the spaces that we have become indifferent to.

"The images we have chosen are very varied, they are more than just an artistic project: Urban Art is a street show, an explosion of imagination, color, and light, which combines art, architecture, and music." Marilena Oprescu, curator of Urban Art.

The Urban Art event continues a series of cultural projects in the public space organized by Artmix, which have experimented with the concept of coalescing spaces – indoor/outdoor, real/virtual – and with the influence of various communication media on the works of art (1,200 degrees in Celsius, a multimedia exhibition, Carturesti, 2005; Artmix.ro, an interactive multimedia experiment, the greenery in front of the National Theater, 2006; and Urban Art, Festival of Architectural Projections, Parliament Palace, 2007).

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

2META, RO

MUSIC:

A project by:

Media partners:

Curator and coordinator of project: Marilena Oprescu