Goodpatch × Resonate × Belgrade
Ever since visiting Belgrade in 2014, I have been keeping an eye on what’s happening there design- (and football-) wise. End of last year I finally noticed a promising conference called Resonate. Immediately I decided to come back and booked a ticket. Even if the lectures don’t match my interests 100% I was very curious to see what’s going on in ex-Yugoslavia…
A few weeks later, I convinced my colleagues Qiao and Max that they decided to also join. On that point we already knew: this journey is gonna be good. After a more or less exciting trip via plane and train we arrived in our lovely apartment in the center of Belgrade. After 10 Ćevapi each we were prepared for 4 Days full of lectures about the “current situation in the fields of music, visual arts and digital culture”.
Resonate took place in a film archive and cinema called Kinoteka. The vibe was very calm even if the space was sometimes overcrowded. The lineup was a nice mix of some super nerdy tech stuff and very fun art experiments. I only missed some Serbian or east European speakers. I would have liked to learn more about the design scene around Belgrade.
To give you small impressions of our experience we wrote down some notes on our favourite talks:
Qiao
“Let’s talk about attitudes rather than a showcase of work.“
— Takram
“The deeper we get into the ground the closer we are to the stratosphere, bypassing gravity.”
“Beyond the Frontier lies the Wilderness in an era of Digital Grotesque.”
Max
Regine Debatty talking about swiss camouflaging bunkers as chalets.
Thomson & Craighead bringing back the fun in art and helping you with their collection of self-improvement tapes.
Geoffrey Lillemon & Anita Fontaine encouraging their audience in shaping their future worlds and therefore engage in VR and AR.
Felix
Alan Butler does street photography. In GTA 5. Seriously.
Ralf Baecker builds crazy huge machines where several components are interacting with each other. Although very hard to understand how it works, it looks very impressive.
Joana Moll is a an artist and researcher from Barcelona. The most impressive and shocking project she spoke about a web documentation of a Facebook group where people commented on CCTV recordings of the US-Mexico border.
Nightlife
Of course we also joined a lot of night events, also organized by the Resonate team. Especially the concerts on Thursday were very impressive. After two “interesting” noise gigs, our new favourite artists showed up in Belgrade’s current number one venue “Drug$tore”. We highly recommend: Gabber Eleganza.
Conclusion
Resonate and Belgrade are definitely worth to visit. It’s a summit for a quite small but high-skill community for digital art. It might be a bit compatible with Berlin’s Pictoplasma.
Even for guys like me who are not that into art — it’s a nice way of learning. To hear and understand the stories behind the artist’s work is always inspiring.
Thanks Goodpatch for giving us the opportunity to do trips like this one. Also shout outs to Teodora for bringing a sense of readability into my weird school english. ❤️
By the Way: We will visit some more conferences soon. Meet us in several transport situations on our way to Forward Festival (Munich) or dotprocess (Dortmund). ✌️
