7th Annual Festival of Live Digital Art Set For This June

SPIDERWEBSHOW PERFORMANCE will present the 7th annual Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA), the only festival of its kind in Canada exploring and presenting live performances integrated with digital technologies. FOLDA 2024 will be presented both in-person and online, June 13 to 15, 2024, at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts and Ingenuity Labs, Queen’s University (390 King St. W), and at The Broom Factory (305 Rideau St.) in Kingston, ON, and is produced by SpiderWebShow Performance.

FOLDA offers an eclectic and interdisciplinary mix of interactive theatre, music, aerial arts, storytelling, crafts, film, and more. The festival’s focus on accessibility cleverly complements its in-depth exploration of digital tools, including AI and VR. As always, programming for FOLDA shows how everyday digital technologies create opportunities for artists and audiences with disabilities to access the arts.

“The shows presented at FOLDA 7 illuminate an understanding that 2D livestreaming is a small, but still important, component of what ‘digital performance’ can be. Audiences and artists have so many new ways to create and engage now, it is creating new formations and ideas all the time.”   - Adrienne Wong, Michael Wheeler, and Marcel Stewart, Co-Curators.

This year’s Presentation Series launches with a performance by psychedelic multi-instrumentalist KaKaow at The Broom Factory on June 13, 2024. Over the next two days of the Festival, Adrienne Wong performs SmartSmart. This storytelling performance relies on the participation of audience members who are encouraged to leave their phones on. Toronto-based interdisciplinary performance collective bluemouth inc. and Montreal artificial intelligence company ReImagine AI collaborate to present LUCY AI, a touching interactive installation exploring the future of memory and the border between life and death and created by Lucy Simic, Stephen O’Connell, and iconic musician David Usher. Mash Up, a Disability-led collaboration explores creative accessibility in aerial arts and music with digital technologies and in-person tools. SESQUI will present their 20-minute marquee hemispherical film HORIZON. And in Immersive Wilderness, National Theatre School’s Indigenous Artist-in-Residence, Barry Bilinsky, in partnership with Montreal animation studio EDFilms, will offer a behind the scenes of a new VR performance by EDFilm’s latest technology “Puppet Tools,” which allows artists working in VR to manipulate 3D models in real-time.

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