Unsound 2023 will be taking place between 1 – 8 October in Kraków, Poland. This year the announced new theme is DADA. And within the new theme framework, Unsound will include an Artificially Intelligent Artistic Director (AIAD) as a member of the 2023 curatorial team.

The Dada movement was founded around 1915 in opposition to the brutality of WWI, new forms of nationalism and capitalism. It rejected ideas of progress, logic and rationality in favour of nonsense, outrage and radicalism – words and concepts Unsound will riff on while creating the 2023 program, including music, sound, performance, visual arts and discourse.

Mat Schulz, artistic director and co-founder of the festival comments that Unsound are interested in Dada as a force guiding the festival Schulz, but not looking, or listening, backwards to the past for clues; they want to think about Dada in the present and with an ear to the future, in which non-human agency is increasingly prevalent. AIAD is part of this – an absurdist provocation, rather than a techno-utopian statement.

Gosia Płysa co-director of the festival, explains that the Unsound team began developing the concept of AIAD before the pandemic; and they have been training our AIAD to give bizarre advice related to programming formats and to inspire the humans in our team to make more playful or even crazy decisions. Whether they follow the advice is another thing, but that’s also true of other collaborators. We don’t always agree.

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