Next Thursday, February 17th, at 8:00 pm, the Cultural Management Department of the Vice-Rectorate of Culture, Communication and Institutional Image at the Polytechnic University of Valencia will inaugurate the exhibit: “La falla: un artefacte tecnològic” (The Valencian “Falla” Celebration as a Technological Artifact), which will be on display at the UPV Exhibition Hall (ground floor of the Rectorate Building) until April 12, 2011.

Organized in coordination with the Associació D’Estudis Fallers (ADEF, an association for the study of the Valencian Fallas celebration) and with the collaboration of workshops on the Fallas, taught by José Ramón Espuig Escrivà, José Latorre, and Gabriel Sanz, this exposition is a continuation of the line of the exhibit “Falles i art: 40 anys en la frontera” (Fallas and Art: 40 years on the Border) which was featured at the UPV in 2008. Following that project's same approach and purpose, the ADEF wants to present to the audience "the use of digital technology" as one of the current mainstays of the industry of the Fallas celebrations.

In short, the exposition poses "the conscious distancing of the most traditional assumptions about the world of Fallas and its approach to the more industrial and/or technological cases”, and it does so not as an historic display, but through the idea-sketch-model, its technical reproducibility, the altering of scales in terms of the system of representation and the concepts of mechanization and automation used in today's digital technology.

In addition, as a complement to the display, Fet D'Encàrrec, with the collaboration of the workshop by Manolo García, a special falla—an Instalación General de Localización Urbana (combustible) IGLU©—related to this celebration will take place on February 17. It will be the first falla celebration with ninot figures created using augmented reality (AR) technology, and the grand finale is set to take place at the UPV campus on Wednesday, March 9, 2011.