About Plektrum

Plektrum Festival takes place once a year in Tallinn and its goal is to present and render meaning to the confluences of people, technology and contemporary culture. Plektrum’s fields of activity include: technology, art, music and education. It is also interested in the processes between those fields and possibilities of using technology socially.

MAIN TOPIC OF THE FESTIVAL 2009  – “DO YOU LIVE IN VIRTUALITY?”

The technology-driven everyday awareness and social processes influenced by science have reached the milestone where life in the virtual world or together with virtuality-interlaced phenomena has become commonplace and understandable for most people. We talk about e-government, social networks in the internet, life in virtuality and artificial realities as if they were an inseparable part of our everyday life and existence.

Although the concepts related to virtuality have become so natural to us and the transparency of computer technology assures us that by using technology we have entered virtuality, there are still many unclear issues. What is virtuality? Where does it manifest itself and what is it like on the border of virtuality and reality? Also, how has virtuality influenced our actions and opinions about the real world?

Plektrum 2009 searches for dependable argumentation on the existence, visualization and development of technological virtuality that seem so commonplace in computer societies. Plektrum seeks to discover and criticize the main myths about a world that is being controlled by virtuality and to provide answers to questions like where virtuality actually functions and also where it has become a naïve belief in the power of technology. The primary objective is to analyze the effects of virtuality on our experiences in reality.