For the XVIII edition of Share Festival, we make this demand because we know it's impossible.

Here in glamorous Torino -- a city known for its cordial support of "every form of art" -- we can't take one natural, untainted breath.  Not only is the planet's whole atmosphere polluted with Greenhouse gases -- here in Torino, thanks to our industrial heritage and our specific geographic climate, we're particularly badly off from an all-pervasive haze of PM2.5 micrometer pollution particles, including metals, combustion products and even agricultural dust.  As you read this, we breathe that.

And yet, at the very same time, our Italian province of Piedmont is world-famous for its devotion to hand-crafted, artisanal "Slow Foods" grown from the unique plant and animal varieties of the fruitful Italian soil.

In our forthcoming Festival, we plan to tackle this contradiction headlong -- through our favorite medium of technology art.   Can this become a dialectic instead of a contradiction?   Can we witness net.art that is all about birds, bugs, bees and natural local landscapes?   Can we interact with robots made of natural woods, sculptures digitally carved from marble, and interactive artworks composed of horn, reeds, seashells, bamboo, straw, bones, fossils, or better yet, severely imperiled natural materials entirely unique to the artist's own region in the world?

It's not enough to "defend the environment" -- how can natural materials infiltrate tomorrow's unnatural substance and take some terrible, weedy revenge?

Please do your best for us.  We need a breath of fresh air!

The 2024 edition ALL-NATURAL addresses an urgent and topical issue of our contemporary age: nature and its relationship with art and technology. At a time when climate change increasingly affects our daily lives, it is crucial that people are aware of how technology can offer solutions, reflecting through art and promoting debate.

The XVIII edition of Share Festival will examine this dichotomy, often perceived as a contradiction in modern society, in relation to art. Numerous artists of all ages and backgrounds responded enthusiastically to this year Share Prize call.
Here are the six artworks selected by the international jury.

Artworks ︎︎︎

Ups and downs II

Heidundgriess

The artwork is a kinetic installation consisting of a segmented tree, manipulated by wooden gears, ropes and pulleys. The tree, repeatedly raised and lowered by a complex system, symbolizes the delicate balance between nature and human interference. This movement represents humanity's attempt to control nature and exploit it for economic reasons. Despite concerns about the destruction of natural cycles, there is hope for a future where technology might aid in environmental conservation. The installation serves as a reminder of both the fragility of our environment and the potential for positive change through sustainable practices.

The skin of a tree

Shin Jina

The artwork offers the viewer the opportunity to feel the piece in a ‘tactile manner’ to awaken the importance of forgotten senses. Our skin is the first to receive stimuli from the external world and communicates with it, acting as a boundary between us and the world. The chance to feel a specific skin through one's own and the experience of 'getting under the skin' fosters an emotional connection between the viewer and the art. The tactile memories experienced in the artwork remind us of our past. The piece invites the viewer to experience it in their own way, drawing on their particular experiences. In this way, the artwork becomes a moment where the viewer's personal history and experience merge with contemporary history.

Love letters without the recipient

Ziyao Lin

The work combines artificial intelligence technology, artistic expression, and Eastern philosophy. A typewriter, guided by artificial intelligence, endlessly performs the futile task of writing ephemeral love letters, centered around the concepts of "self-connection" and the impermanence of Eastern Zen philosophy.

In this installation, artificial intelligence becomes a projection of human desires, and the natural imagery it generates reflects the Eastern aesthetic of placing emotions in nature.

Breath

Alexandra Marinova

“The society, sicker than ever but also more powerful than ever, has recreated the world as the environment and script of its illness, a sick planet.”
— Guy Debord

The artwork addresses the fragility of the balance between nature and the human race. Breathing is entirely linked to life: every action impacts our breath. Nature relaxes when humans slow down their daily lives. And if in art "still life" is merely a genre to be admired, the message is to avoid transforming the world we live in into a still life, into a world without breath.

Kinesintesi

Livia Ribichini

This artwork, described by the artist as "theoretical," creates a connection both spatially, between the real world and the virtual one, and temporally, between what can be considered the past and the future. Kinesintesi is a video installation in which the artist depicts traditional agricultural labor, such as tilling the soil and planting seeds. These actions are recognized by artificial intelligence that nurtures a digital plant, which gradually takes shape, begins to grow, and eventually flourishes. Although the manual labor of agriculture has almost been forgotten, the artist highlights ritualistic aspects that are fundamental to our life on this planet in a virtual dimension. The new plant is nourished by numerical parameters provided by new algorithms and, through them, rapidly develops green leaves, grows in height, and produces flowers and fruits: the ancient symbiosis between humanity and nature continues, sublimated, in the digital world.

Datalake:Groundtruth

Franz Rosati

The artwork consists of a collection of scenarios generated by artificial intelligence, accompanied by a backdrop of continuously evolving complex sounds, and in which the succession of moving images evokes the struggle between nature and technology to coexist within a new dialectical system. Nature emerges from the screens in an incessant flow of hypothetical realities that recombine, while the boundaries of the real dissolve into a series of structures. Nature and technology thus begin a subtle dialogue as well as a violent struggle, made up of streams of information drawn from the remnants of the visual and auditory reality we know (fragments of literary essays, news from the web, novels, etc.).

The jury