I met Klaus Nicolai and Thomas Dumke in 2005 at Electronica, where I was showing several of my works. We had long conversations about art with new media and the CYNETAR-festival. Over many years Klaus Nicolai und Thomas Dumke shaped the profile of CYNETART, they often presented my work and it were usually premieres, hence, it was CYNETART that brought me to Dresden. Three years after I have been back here to Dresden, I am now - together with my fellow colleague Nadine Bors - responsible for this fantastic festival; it is its twentieth anniversary, a jubilee!

CYNETART is important. This is initially just a claim, that always needs to be honoured. To have been there always only proofs that indeed it was the case so far. As a festival for new media and digital art it needs to represent an attitude of departure and taking risks, this in a city that still slaves away itself on its past with broken core yet tireless. It is this past that seems to have caused injuries it hasn't got over. There lies the agenda that gives meaning to all and everything; a longing for recognition and significance in inhibited snugness, that's a concept doomed to fail and this is approved by those angry xenophobic Monday rituals in the centre of Dresden, a resurrection Disneyland with the ever so famous church "Frauenkirche" as the core fetish.

Art at CYNETART cannot be just a critical reflex towards the old the embodiment of the new and other by being a hip event, with some clubbing-add-ons to an exhibition featuring a kind of media-art that gives interactivity a VIP-status: smartly stranded between the aim of top notch technology and the fence work of politically correctness. Usually harmless it remains compatible to the notion of a saxonian silicon valley while it should be so much more than a tasty visualisation of data processing that serves first of all - and often only - theory-discourses flooding the banks.

There is a need for a stand beyond a "cool because its technology", a disturbing honesty and stillness, a senselessness refusing immediate contextualisation, an absence of event consume and self optimisation. The local club scene has already founded its own successful DAVE festival.

In this sense CYNETART is now open and at its very beginning again, the best one could wish for. The project space DIGIAL FEMINISM, Josef M. Gassners entirely non art related lecture about the threshold of discoverable, or Recombinant Sound-Labs’s, resurrection of a multi-channel sound-work of legendary composer Marianne Amacher, may at least be indications of a new search beyond the "fresh"-art.

It's the dreams of Klaus Nicolai and Thomas Dumke we tread on softly and forward. But there is a need for a new dream. It always needs a new dream.

Ulf Langheinrich
artistic director

Nadine Bors
managing director