CYFEST, one of the biggest international media art festivals in Eastern Europe, was founded by a group of independent artists and curators in 2007. Since its inception, CYFEST’s main concerns have been to examine the dialogue between new and traditional visual languages and to show technological achievements via artistic transformation. CYFEST unites art professionals, artists, curators, educators and thinkers, programmers, engineers, and media activists all over the world, and expands contemporary art, intertwining it with various disciplines of science and technology.
CYFEST is one of the world’s few nomadic cultural events: in 2022 festival projects will be shown in Yerevan, Armenia, Dartington, UK, and Arizona and New York, USA. Both classical and experimental institutes are partners of the festival. The program includes an exhibition project, a video art display, a series of performances and educational meetings.
Curators:
Anna Frants
Elena Gubanova
Victoria Ilyushkina
Sergey Komarov
Natalia Kolodzei

Fermentation in the conventional sense is a technological process in food industry. However, if we give it some thought, practically everything that happens over time to animate, inanimate and even strictly material objects falls under this definition. Wine undergoes a long process of change of state from ripe grapes to beverages of various degree of sweetness and strength. Human relationships also get ‘fermented’ over the years, acquiring various degrees of intensity and transforming from young and raw to mellowed and mature.
The world culinary art is abundant with recipes based on fermentation processes: pickled vegetables and mushrooms, beer, salted fish in the north and air-dried meat and fruit, fish sauce of Greek cuisine in the south. Cosmetologists of the entire world have long been trying to stop or at least slow down the ‘fermentation’ process of human beauty.
But the process of all these metamorphoses is quite a lot of fun, it is often picturesque, it even has an interesting sound to it, and it has inspired quite a few artists all over the world. Authors of the works showcased at the festival CYFEST-14: Ferment call to each other with changes to things live and dead, color and smell, sounds and impressions.
— Anna Frants, Artist, Curator, CYLAND MediaArtLab
Read More at Cyfest.ru .