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The Touch me project, which is concerned with art at the intersection of science and technology, was begun by KONTEJNER in 2002, giving it a name with a slightly erotic connotation stemming from the frequent interactivity of new technology art installations. In 2005 it turned into a festival, with the topic “The Intelligence Abuse”. Touch me festival is an international thematic event that presents some of the most important projects from the domain of new media art. Artists who use new technologies and science in their projects are in the most radical ethical manner testing out both contemporaneity and the future.
This year’s festival has a name with connotations of pleasure − Feel Better!. In addition, the Touch me festival is still testing out how the individual can be bound into the network of mechanical, electro-mechanical, electronic and cybernetic aids and biotechnology, and the non-critical attitude of society towards ethical issues that the changes in contemporary technological reality open up. The topic of this edition of the international festival is related to the imperatives of happiness, pleasure and hedonism, and draws upon paradigms that explain how in the contemporary social and political system the issue of stability and control has been diverted from the area of power and repression
to the area of happiness and fun. It starts off from the proposition that being down, gloomy, depressive, uninterested is equivalent to being socially unacceptable. Some of the pieces in the festival thus attempt to cheer the visitors up, to shift them into a state of short-lasting hedonism, provide them with all kinds of sensual and sensory pleasures, known and unknown. The pieces also take issue with concepts such as food, sex, and various ‘substances’; also inescapable are references to the phenomena that provide us man the consumer socially controlled by the happiness and achievement barometer.