Digital art pioneer, Jonathan Harris, is IDFA guest of honor

Harris

Internet artist Jonathan Harris will be this year’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) guest of honor. Harris is one of the most significant artists and innovators to emerge in the digital era. He has achieved widespread recognition for projects such as the interactive We Feel Fine, The Whale Hunt and I Love Your Work.

During the DocLab program Uncharted Rituals, IDFA will present the world’s first ever retrospective of Harris’ work in an exhibition space specially constructed for the purpose in Amsterdam’s De Brakke Grond venue.

In addition Jonathan Harris will present his personal Top 10. This is the first time IDFA’s annual Top 10 will not be compiled by a documentary filmmaker, but an interdisciplinary documentary artist.

Harris is known principally as an internet artist, even though he also moves freely between classic media such as photography, painting, performance art and design.

Over the past ten years, he has produced a range of major works that are now seen as classics of the internet art genre. His work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou and Sundance New Frontier, for example, and is included in the permanent collection of MoMa in New York.

In 2013, he won the IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling for his interactive documentary I Love Your Work. Digital Journal, David Silverberg: “Whether you want to explore today’s zeitgeist with Universe or take society’s emotional temperature with We Feel Fine, Harris’s work should resonate with anyone curious how offline affairs can translate into bold artistic visions on the Web.”

As the festival’s guest of honor, Jonathan Harris will present a Top 10 of his favourite films and documentary artworks which can be seen in different ways during the festival.

His selections include not only the classic documentary, Koyaanisqatsi, but also the visionary book on building The Nature of Order and the video platform YouTube. As guest of honor, he follows in the footsteps of renowned filmmakers such as Agnes Varda, Werner Herzog and Rithy Panh.

Harris will explain the choices in his Top 10 during a special Filmmaker Talk.

The retrospective and the Top 10 will be presented during IDFA both in the cinemas and in the broader context of the focus program Uncharted Rituals by DocLab.

This program will show, in a continuous exhibition and various live cinema events, the best new interactive works – many of which correspond closely in terms of their themes and form with the work of Jonathan Harris.

Audiences can therefore get to know Jonathan Harris’ oeuvre, classic works that have inspired him and important works by new, contemporary talent as well as interdisciplinary makers from all over the world.