Pléiades is a digital art festival held in Saint-Étienne, France, that combines art, science and technology, offering interactive, visual and sound installations throughout the host city. The works presented during the festival celebrate the city’s historical and architectural heritage, as well as its urban space, shops and cultural institutions, showing them through the prism of new technologies and digital artistic expression.
The first edition of the festival took place in 2019, and the event gradually gained international recognition as a venue for innovative presentations in the field of digital art. Thanks to this, the festival attracts artists and participants from various countries. Although it is a relatively new event, Pléiades is considered an important stop on the map of cultural festivals in Europe, especially for lovers of contemporary art and new technologies.
Mateusz Kokot, PhD, lecturer at the University of Silesia, was the only Pole who had the opportunity to present his art during this year’s edition of the Pléiades Festival in Saint-Étienne. His exhibition ‘Remembering Places’ deals with contemporary technological forms of commemorating and extending life through digital forms of memory of the deceased, in particular animals. The project proposes an alternative to virtual cemeteries, offering users the opportunity to commemorate animals in an innovative way that familiarises and ennobles the topic of death. The inspiration for ‘Remembering Places’ is thanatopsia, i.e. the fascination with traveling to places associated with death, traces of which can be found in both romantic and contemporary interests.
