CENTRAS4

Our eyes moves through usual forms - crosswalk, cafe, and gallery - it's like repeating scenario, permanent gathering place. It's like an everyday rhythm. Yes, you are inside CENTRAS (CENTER) - the place with no limits for your fantasy, the place full of labyrinths of ideas, the place where everyone finds his or her own reality.

Here are welcome everyone who wants to satisfy virtual fantasies and to free visions. In this world all the lines are crossing with each other and all the dots are blurred. Your journey may last somewhere from infinite Cosmos to the Great Chaos. No censors for the flooding ideas - the bodies rebels and pulsates!

2004 October 1-3, the section of National art museum of M. K.Ciurlionis, Information Centre for Contemporary Art (ICCA) presented the third annual festival in Lithuania for multimedia art and music CENTRAS4. Let's have a small journey back to it.

Entrenched in the center of Kaunas city multimedia art and music festival CENTRAS4 stimulates and presents the use of new technologies for expressing creativity. In resistance to the stereotyped attitude, nearly raised and euphoric, to the new technologies, mainly integrated in the sphere of the businesses and research plus the coordination of the information society the organisers tend to overstep the limits.

The aim of this festival is to stretch the line in search for the new, creative environment with the new ways of expression and new unacquainted perception and philosophy; to induce the artists spurt out the steady ways of produce with the using the new technologies as the main tool of the expression.

The main theme for this years festival was interpretations of BLACK vs WHITE. The participants could speculate on this theme and follow their own philosophy of the BLACK vs WHITE message. You could decode BLACK vs WHITE as you wanted - DARKNESS vs LIGHT, SADNESS vs HAPPYNESS, NEGATIVE vs POSITIVE, NOISE vs SILINCE, etc.

The third multimedia art and music festival Centras4 presented the bigger scale of the art sections and ways of expressions. The awaited musicians and visual artists's list were supplemented by the video, digital graphics, photography, media design artists' works, looking for the new possibilities of the expression of the new technologies.

The festival seeks to strengthen the roots of Lithuanian multimedia creators, but as being open event it searches for the input from all over the world. This year among Lithuanian artist festival lineup was filled with creators from Latvia, Italy, GB and Finland.

For the first time children were involved in new media creating process in CENTRAS4 festival. They had opportunity to express their fresh visions with the help of digital forms by using software. In some cases these were their first steps to the world of multimedia. Almost 200 works of children reached the organizers of the festival.

The festival has a tradition to relocate the main ideas, participants and their works outside Kaunas. This year will not be an exception and CENTRAS4 should visit Vilnius, Klaipeda and maybe some other cities of Lithuania.