amber’08 will be the largest event in the field of Arts and Technology to be held in Turkey. It will take place in 7-16 November, 2008 in a variety of venues in Istanbul. amber’08 is organized by amber Body-Process Arts, an interdisciplinary association that focuses on artistic performance and technology. The concept Body-Process Arts points to the artistic possibilities at the conjunction of bodily performance and technological processes and constitutes amber's artistic program and foci.

The festival will house a variety of performances, interactive installations, seminars and workshops by an international group of artists and thinkers. The participating artists and researchers will come from various parts of the World. amber’08 will act as a ground of artistic exchange and cooperation as well as constitute an opportunity for Istanbul art audiences to view and experience a novel art form as executed by artists from different cultural backgrounds. In addition to the audiences who are already involved and interested in the digital art form, the festival seeks to attract a larger public that includes the general art audiences, students in diverse artistic and technological fields and children.

The primary objective of amber’08 is to promote the idea of an Art that is inseparable from technology and the human body. The incessant commodification of life, of technology and indeed of Art in the World today makes it difficult if not impossible to differentiate Art, Commodity, Technology and even the Body as autonomous spheres and ideas. Yet, the inseparability that we like to invoke is suspicious of this modern market logic. We advance an idea of Art that traces and retraces this logic and produces an artistic novelty out of this effort. We believe that the potential for artistic novelty remains and that the Art of today should respond to its own conjuncture with the help of technology and the body. The Festival aims to be one such response. In this respect, our objective is as much to explore and present an artistic novelty as to promote alternative, uncommon uses of common technology and the body.

amber’08 seeks to attract all lovers of art and technology in Istanbul. This includes the established contemporary arts audience, technology and design professionals, students of arts, design and technology, artists and technicians from various fields and the youth. Moreover, the festival will be an opportunity for people who work in purely technical fields such as robotics to connect their fields with art. Beyond arbitrary classifications of audiences, the festival’s combination of art, technology and the body seeks to create and attract its own public. As our lives are saturated with ever more digital technology, everyone is a potential viewer of this emerging art form.