InCAST 2023 will be held mainly in the Czech Republic. On that occasion, we have received a greeting from the organizers.
Welcome to the highly anticipated conference in Ostrava, Czech Republic, where the spotlight shines on artificial intelligence and the dawning of a new era. As we bid farewell to the classic era of human intelligence, we embark on a journey into the unknown, filled with uncertainty and boundless possibilities. This gathering aims to explore the uncharted territory of the future, where the speed and essence of this new world remain veiled in mystery. Join us as we dive into the depths of this rapidly evolving landscape where fear and expectation are intertwined and discover together the potential that lies ahead.
by Tomáš and Arek.
InCAST is an international organization of artists, teachers and researchers from Poland, Czech Republic, Japan and other countries.
Dates : August 1-4
Location : City Campus Ostravské univerzity
Openning Event
“Butoh” dance was born in Japan as a counterculture against relatively opposing concept, such as established classical ballet. Ballet aspires to flight into the air.
“Butoh” aspires to return to the earth. In ballet, the stretched body becomes a symbol of freedom and openness. In “Butoh”, the shrinking movement of the body becomes awe that questions the bias.
For me, “Butoh” is also connected to homage to those who have been discriminated/oppressed or estimated to be weak.
In “InCast2023”, Professor Arek Marcinkowski set up a confrontational presentation between universal Western music and “Butoh” rooted in the regional characteristics of Japan. Based on his magical inspiration, Prof. Katarzyna Dondalska's noble soprano and Mr. Michal Landowski's dynamic piano will confront Shibasaki's “Butoh" and then expected to be created new conflicts, with the great potential to lead to the result of cross-cultural resonance.
After a wonderful collaboration on the visual project with Professor Arkadiusz Marcinkowski, we wanted to do something new, perhaps even something that had never been done before. And that's when the irresistible idea came from Professor Marcinkowski. It involved combining music with vision and Butoh dance. For me, it was a beautiful, new, and exciting challenge, completely different from opera performances or symphonic concerts that form the basis of my profession. We selected a beautiful program, including new and contemporary pieces that have a powerful impact on our imagination. They serve as a fantastic catalyst, building a connection between our professions of music, words, vision, and dance.
Prof. Katarzyna Dondalska
Exhibition Outline (tentative)
Incast 2023 – Exhibition – Distant Relatives
Distant Relatives is a presentation of contemporary fine arts of artists from Japan, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland.
The viewer is going to be confronted with the works of fine artists, for whom creativity is a life necessity. Through creativity, artists often come up with parallel worlds, in which many of them live more intensively than in a real world.
Exhibiting artists: Piotr Ambroziak, Kohji Asakawa, Milan Cieslar, Tereza Čapandová, Jan Drozd, Izabela Fedorowicz, Pavel Forman, Seisuke Fujita, Andreas Guskos, Kyoko Hara, Haruo Higuma, Zbyněk Janáček, Karolina Kaleta, Takuro Kojima, Tomáš Koudela, František Kowolowski, Ireneusz Kuriata, Satoshi Machida, Yuri Matsumoto, Arkadiusz Marcinkowski, Chigusa Muro, Ayako Nishidate, Mica Nozawa, Jakub Palka, Dominik Dragos Pohludka, Jakub Pohludka, Jaroslaw Rybicki, Yasuyuki Saegusa, Marek Sibinský, Ivana Štenclová, Andrea Uváčiková, Dominika Zawojska-Kuriata, Weronika Zieziulewicz, Zbigniew Szot.
Curators: Tomáš Koudela, Arkadiusz Marcinkowski, Yasuyuki Saegusa.
Related: similar, same, one’s own, familiar, comprehensible, but also in the sense of view, inviting to view, as well as wild, miraculous, and admirable.
Distance: existence, being, shape, content, subject, object, idea, matter.
To be distant is a matter of a viewpoint. Affinity is a relationship of differently acting statements about the same thing. Distance is not only that which is taken and carried somewhere, just like that which acts motionless, and anticipates context. Affinity is a moment manipulated to eternity.
Distance: figurative index of traditional anthropometry or remix evoking metaphors of recent, nonetheless unfailingly forgotten visual lexicons.
Distance: discontinues time through motion to its inverse side, to its gaps.
Distance: being always in motion. The shape of this motion is the phenomenon of time, about which one could say that it adds some parallel shape to being – simplicity, as its sense or, more precisely, one of its terrible images, where sense is stripped from its own essence, it turns itself into non-sense, and this loss of motion, de-representation, the loss of time, is existential de-conceptualization of reality that is something of a reformatting of the world.
Affinity: field of force, being under pressure of its own structures, constitutive phenomenon of the ego, is given, and, at the same time, being forced to be given different, being the same.
Affinity: always such a way of existing order, not only from today’s point of view (and exactly from today’s point of view) somewhat ridiculous, cannot in the end seem any different than as a decent arrangement of things – interpretation of the world (…) coming about to its completion through the picking of trivial contents and strange forms.
Distant Relatives: coexistence – its hybrid feature is the case of being of the existentially rehabilitated. The artificialities of this fundamental remake are existential self-awareness and existential performative spontaneousness.
The artists presenting themselves at this exhibit project are working with materials and concepts situated on the verge of artistic practice. Their favorite topic is emptied being and destructed thought contents. Their creations offer such final visual matters, in which traditional complex value structures are very hard to be identified, and meaning constituents of their works must be decoded by the viewer from residually present visual traces that – at the point of their illumination or, more precisely, at the point of seemingly reaching their punchline – configure new, visually subversive contents.
How does the artist imagine the world? As a distant affinity. As a thing worthy of admiration. Firstly, detecting a light breeze of ontic essences, then a raw simplicity of emotions entering their field of vision, finally crowned with an image sequence that is inexpressible point in time.
Parallel focal point of distance is the trust in a real mundane world as a hope represented by faith in its meaningfulness without useless gestures and proclamations. Hope, accompanied by deep silence and trust in the natural order of things, whose time is not necessary to elaborate on too much.