AHA Media

At the core of this year’s inaugural Surge Festival program are four exhibitions, plus weekly live DJ and VJ events, film screenings, workshops, parties, and youth summer camps.

More than 50 artists are showing including: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Indigo, Take5, the dark, Bracken Hanuse Corlett, Ange Sterritt, Frederick Brummer, Shawn Chappelle, Su-an Ng, Sepideh Saii, Justin Sekiguchi, Rupinder Sidhu, Lenke Sifko, Cease Wyss, …Krista Lomax and Sammy Chien.

Opening night reception July 30th, 8-11pm, free
After-party 11pm with DJ Kilocee, Take5 & The Phonograff, part of the W2 Summer Nights series, $5 at door.

The centrepiece of the Surge Urban Digital Culture Festival is a massive mural installation for ‘All our Walls’ (opening July 30) by the dark, Take5, Sensr and Indigo, alongside a graffiti & street art exhibit featuring established and emerging Canadian artists. Coast Salish-based Aboriginal artists represent the urban experience for the 50% of First Nations living off reserve in Rezilliance (opening July 30). Facing the Wind: Whey-ah-Wichen looks at 20 years of the Under the Volcano Festival taking place on Tsleil-Waututh Nation Territory (opening July 30). StoryBox makes inner-city voices digital in this collaboration between 80+ residents and professional media artists (opens one week later on Aug 6).

Formerly street-wise and counter-culture, urban art has found its way into powerful institutions, advertising, and art market galleries. This mainstreaming also exposes that street art traditions are connected globally across borders, and open up space to contest the privatization of public space, battles for free speech, while building creative inner cities. Urban art has its roots in the undercurrents of social alienation and resistance to power, and artists can create relevant and transformative cultural experience for neighbourhoods and people of all ages.

Surge exhibition viewing hours are Wednesday to Sunday, 12-6pm. W2 Summer Nights kick off at 10pm. The Festival takes place in one of Vancouver’s best exhibition and festival venues, W2 Storyeum at 151 W Cordova, just steps north of W2’s future media centre site in the Woodward’s Atrium. Program subject to change. For updates and new screening and workshop announcements check our website.

Weekly performances in our W2 Summer Nights series feature some of Vancouver’s most innovative urban DJs and VJs, with all proceeds supporting the development of W2’s inner-city community media programs.

For more information on the exhibits RSVP on the Facebook event or read:
http://www.creativetechnology.org/profiles/blogs/surge-first-annual-urban

Time: July 30, 2010 at 8pm to August 28, 2010 at 11:45pm
Location: W2 Storyeum
Street: 151 W Cordova Street
City/Town: Vancouver
Website or Map: http://www.facebook.com/event…
Phone: 604-689-9896
Event Type: festival, exhibition, party