5th Floor

Last November, the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève launched its 5th Floor. Conceived as a virtual extension of the institution, the 5th Floor is a radio station, a digital production platform, and a new tool for artists’ voices and ideas. The 5th Floor has been visited more than 55,000 times over the last eight months and has presented new works by Ian Cheng, Joo Young Hwang, Sophia Al-Maria, Cheryl Donegan, Sabrina Röthlisberger, Johanna Bruckner, and Bek Hyunjin, the majority of which were produced by the Centre and shown exclusively on the platform.

A new project by Carola Bonfili is now online!
3412 Kafka is an asteroid that provides the base for a personal investigation into the radical nature of make-believe, marking the beginning of Bonfili’s dynamic invention 3412 Kafka. 3412 Kafka—First Chapter (2018) consists of a series of landscapes inspired by the process in which our memory reconstructs and organizes recollections and the changing nature of the latter. With computer graphics generated by an unreal engine, the video features a 360° interactive landscape.

Six Doors: the last “door” by Shadi Habib Allah is now online!
For the project Six Doors, the curatorial duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi investigates how images are gradually shifting from horizontal to vertical format (9:16), the most commonly used aspect ratio on social media. Like a revolving door, the works are rotated monthly on the 5th Floor, offering access to six takes on the mass video and personal cinema culture of today. In Trim, a video produced for the platform, Shadi Habib Allah films a vibrating portion of reality, the identity of which can only be guessed at by the viewer.

The next project for the 5th Floor will be a unique long-term project by Bahar Noorizadeh called Weird Economies that will be inaugurated next fall
As a think tank and database centered on economic futurisms and speculative politics, Weird Economies will primarily enact a curatorial role. Writers, creators/designers, and thinkers will be invited to respond to the initial call set by the project, pooling content from the various disciplines of art, economics, finance, ecology, philosophy, political science, technology, design, architecture, etc.

Web Radio. No words, no advertising, no comments: just good music to discover
Offering a 250-hour random journey through rarities, soundscapes, installation soundtracks, avant-garde pop, and (unfairly) unknown classics, the 5th Floor radio station is a one-of-a-kind musical flux, embedded in a daily music listening context. Guillaume Sorge, curator of this radio station, states, “I like the idea of a flux guided by chance. I like the idea that one can live and listen to music without necessarily paying attention to it, or that one can remain ‘stuck’ on it for hours (…). This radio is everything I love. Music of course, but also sounds from everyday life, field recordings, installation soundtracks, audio memos that I have accumulated over the past ten years, as well as cartes blanches that musicians sensitive to our approach have been kind enough to produce for us. Obviously these little gems are well hidden so you will have to lose yourself in this radio to find them.”

Special summer guest: Bryce Hackford
Each month, the radio is enriched by several hours of music selected track by track, and features a special unreleased track produced especially for us. The exclusive tracks are by guests including Etienne Jaumet, I:Cube and John Cravache, or R. Stevie Moore.

This summer, Bryce Hackford has created an exclusive 50-minute piece for the 5th Floor. This production is an automatic composition, a recorded group improvisation performed by Camilla Padgitt-Coles (cat hair, singing bowls, wall objects, wind chimes), Dominika Mazurová (cat hair, singing bowls), and Bryce Hackford (piano, smartphone) at Pineapple Reality, Brooklyn.