NEoN Digital Arts

Under the theme ‘Wired Women*’, NEoN have looked to address the digital gender divide and highlight the contribution of female and nonbinary artists in shaping the digital and technology-driven arts sector. Over 18 months, NEoN delivered its pop-up programme and a 4-day festival, both being a hybrid mix of online and physical exhibitions, interventions, performances and talks celebrating new and past works by women and nonbinary artists.

In 2020 NEoN Digital Arts invites artists to help us explore what sharing means, whether we’re talking about environmental biodiversity, community relations, or data leaks. We casually use the word ‘share’ to describe distributing images, stories, and info across social media networks, but what responsibilities come with sharing resources today? Can digital tools help us understand our collective needs and make better, fairer choices?

A tide of change is sweeping across the globe — from immigration to the rise in nationalism — socio-political landscapes are increasingly subject to crisis. Unparalleled events such as Brexit, the #MeToo movement and the Yellow Vest Protests in Paris have elicited an unprecedented response as activists and community groups mobilise.

In Scotland’s Year of Young People, NEoN will envision the paths of ‘digital natives’, those born into an internet and digitally-enabled world. We’ll investigate how this affects our perception of lifespans – considering both our socio-digital lives online and our real-world lives offline – as we’re propelled into a technologically-enhanced future.

In 2017 under the theme of Media Archaeology NEoN presented its 9th annual festival across the city of Dundee. While archaeology has often understood cultures through excavations of hoards and coins, what will today’s digital currencies tell future archaeologists about the way we live and trade?

Physical urban space and virtual information space are inseparably intertwined. How does being digital change our sense of our spatial surroundings? Can we play in or animate the hybrid or glitched spaces in-between? Is there negative space in cyberspace? NEoN 2016 brought a new media and digital art perspective to Scotland’s Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design, by considering these real and virtual environments.

NEoN, Scotland’s only digital arts festival, headed North East of North Asia in 2015 to bring the best of digital and electronic art from Japan, China, Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan to the city of Dundee. NEoN Festival invited you to examine the origin and understanding of digital arts practice in Asia, against the backdrop of our assumptions about its cultural motifs or traditions.

NEoN Festival of Digital Arts asked how do you ensure your story is remembered in the future? One tactic is to share it more widely. With a theme of FUTUREPROOFING, NEoN 2014 looked back across the recent history of digital art at the same time as it tried to share its support for digital art production more widely across Dundee.

In the context of the changing landscape of Dundee, this 2013 NEoN festival explored the ‘spaces in between’. As we moved out of the industrial unionised landscape and created collective cultural cities we explored the space and balance between historic fabric, urban planning and ‘progressive’ design.

Investigating, encouraging and exploring the movement between the physical and virtual environment. Featuring moving image, performance, music and technology-driven arts.

Building on the success of last year, the theme of the 2011 festival is 'collaboration and legacy'. NEoN 11 will also have a distinct Nordic flavour, including the participation of several renowned artists from Scandinavia.

NEoN digital arts festival 2010 adopted the theme of ‘character’ and featured appearances from Akinori Oishi and Pictoplasma, with contributions also coming from EIDOS and tDR. Running from the 8th until the 14th of November, the festival consisted of talks, workshops, exhibitions, screenings and performances at many of Dundee’s cultural, business and public spaces, including the city’s Centre for Excellence.

The NEoN Digital Arts Festival 2009 was the first of its kind in Dundee and thanks to its success, started what would become an exciting yearly event.