FIVE KEY DAYS OF THE FESTIVAL:

1. OCEAN. Dolphin Watching. It's unusual: you are looking at them, but you are listening carefully to what goes on inside of you. Otherwise, you won’t be able to see anything.

2. LAND. Human Watching. We will set down on the shore in a flying saucer and will look around through the eyes of Martians who encounter this form of life for the first time. Do these beings have intelligent minds? Do they have self-awareness? What are their values, their culture, language, and worldview?

3. MIND. To identify it in the life that we encounter on the shore or in the ocean, we need some criteria of intelligence. In modern science, they are vague and contradictory. But without them, we cannot do much. Can we formulate them?

4. CONTACT. What are the conditions for contact with another mind? How to establish or recognize a contact? How (and is it necessary) to prove to skeptics that what sometimes happens beyond words and [physical] dimensions represents that very contact? We are faced with the task of developing experiments for which no definitive approach does yet exist.

5. HUMAN BEING. In this picture of the world - what is our real address? What are we here for, what and how can we really do right now - on the edge of the island and the ocean, the solid and the fluid, the past and the possible? And again: if we find something important, how do we make ourselves heard in the deafening noise of everyday life? How do we find words, images, means of expression for these ideas, in order to utter them for the first time - and to fulfill them?

The Festival is an environment created by all its participants, in which everyone draws out answers to the most important questions from within. Many strong and interesting people will be there. However, it’s not them or their knowledge that is of key importance for you personally, but YOU (your own self) and what happens to you. This treasure trove can be unearthed only with one's own hands, and an expert's ramblings about what one should expect to find in the chest are of little if any help. The only key that unlocks it is your fingerprints and retina pattern. Treasures are at stake, not an autograph of some guru with wishes of success. This is not about a lesson in geography, but about slashing your way through and out of the jungle. Not information, but a transformation.

There will be no formal keynote speakers at this Festival, as there will be no idle spectators. There will be premieres, concerts, debates, parties in the wardroom - but none of this will offer any proven recipes because there is nothing proven any more. No information delivered by a visiting professor has ever become a transformative experience for the listener. Only when you search out the path by feel, you learn to walk it, not being afraid of the electronic navigator breaking down. It won’t be possible to sit it out - all participants, no matter how different, are equally thrown out beyond the limits of their usual perceptions.

We cross the line of warning flags and go off the beaten track - beyond of what has already ended anyway. There are no readily available solutions, tourist directories or helpful guides who always know the best route. Here we need acute attention, not the rules of existence customary in the place we start from.

This is another planet. A terra incognita. A sentient ocean. A new world.