Theme 2020
In the next edition of The Overkill festival, under the title “The end of the world as you know it” we are focusing on exploring hopeful futures. We want to look at communities and collaborative platforms that are experimenting with new ways of living together in a catastrophic environmental and economical context. If video games are often about saving the world, we want to explore the different scenarios of gaming and movies and see how this can stimulate a social debate.
Relayed in fiction and often enough in the news stories of heros; saving this person or surviving this dangerous situation, helping this poor community are filling our screens… In games we often take on the role of the “hero” who must somehow save the entire world, whatever the way. Social media platforms are full of petitions, messages and pictures to share, and donation links asking for our support. In a few clicks you can become part of a group and be “engaged” in the political stage. We are wondering what is the impact of this engagement when translating into physical action or not.
In a reverse way, more and more communities and minorities feel unrepresented by the media, the governments and the culture they live in. When online platforms offer to regroup, to socialize and organise yourself, does it give these groups tools to express their ideas and opinions? We are wondering how these communities are/could transform these online social tools for their own reappropriation.
In this new trajectory towards the festival instead of presenting the alarming situation of the Anthropocene, we want to focus on realistic utopias, the youth and growth of a symbiocene (“antidote to the Anthropocene”), AI collaboration proposals etcetera. We believe it is time to imagine a world in which humans are not the center of everything, but part of a circle of natural and artificial beings that try to live in a balanced environment.
We believe that playfulness, interactive and participatory art and fiction are necessary tools to explore these alternatives for our (present) future. Not only the content of this media can help us, but also the creative gameplay, the collaborative modes, the use of VR as a medium of empathy, the personification of non-speaking elements in films, etc.
This theme is based on the environmental and identity crisis, our ongoing quest to “save” the world, the apocalyptic perception of the future, the movement of social collapse, an urgent need to reinvent ways of being together, a necessity to deal with our emotions toward nature and non human entities and so on.
In these times when corona virus is spreading worldwide It is even more urgent to work on these alternatives in as many creative ways as possible. The momentum of solidarity we are seeing now in such a crisis must continue to become change.