Free tattoos by leading international artists like Jamie Cameron, a re-enactment of the bomb attack on Dutch artist Rob Scholte and an offline version of download site the Pirate Bay in a museum.

Piracy in the arts is the overarching theme of the sixth edition of the Incubate festival. With this theme Incubate will respond to the public debate that has been raging for quite some time now. Boundaries of copyright are questioned and creative and economical ownership, especially with the digitization of society, are no fixed rules anymore. The Piracy program consists of thirteen different projects that treat this theme.

In the tattoo world, not the person that creates the tattoo designs, but the one who handles the needle is considered the artist. From the perspective of the fine arts, this is a unique situation because the ‘tattoo artist’ merely makes a copy of an already existing image. Ten contemporary artists such as Ronald de Bloeme, Marc Bijl, Rob Scholte, Rafael Rozendaal and Jamie Cameron will create their own tattoo designs for Tilburg Ink. During the festival visitors can have the works tattooed by master tattoo artist Darko Groenhagen for free!

Within the Wildbeaming project Hester Scheurwater will temporarily seize the public space in the city of Tilburg. In the evenings during the festival her video projections will serve as temporary graffiti on different locations in the city.

Incubate will have the premiere of a re-enactment of the bomb attack on Rob Scholte. Scholte is one of the most famous contemporary Dutch painters. The re-enactment is created by artist Sina Khani and consists of video and photographic work. Scholte himself is also a guest at the festival and will among others give a lecture at the Pirate Conference.

The Pirate Kiosk is an offline collection of torrents from sites like The Pirate Bay. Visitors can bring their laptop (or desktop) and can download these torrents by hooking up to the network in the wooden kiosk.

New Jack 2.0 gives an overview of five promising and emerging artists from Brabant. For the festival these artists will create new work around the theme of piracy.

The Incubate Pirate Conference is a theme day on piracy in the arts. The conference takes place at the Midi Theater on Friday, September 17. Main guest at the conference is Matt Mason, author of bestseller The Pirate’s Dilemma, who will give a keynote speech on this theme.

Generation Bass presents the coolest dance grooves mixed with the hottest musical styles from all over the world. By downloading music and remixing it with local influences from countries like Angola and Mexico new innovative musical genres arise. These non-western forms of dance music are presented on the Generation Bass nights. The line-up includes artists like Bandish Project, Andy Kisaragi and Daniel Haaksman.

Other projects within the theme of piracy are Input / Output, Incubate Sweatshop, Constant Dullaart, Pirate Cinema and Educate. For a description of all these projects see www.incubate.org/2010/events.