Tackling the conundrum of the future’s relationship to the present through the prism of digital culture, this year’s Transmediale festival strayed into some chaotic philosophical territory. In her review, M. Beatrice Fazi dismisses conceptions of the future as linear effect of the present, instead embracing models of ‘atemporality’ and untimeliness

From the main stage of Transmediale, Berlin’s annual international festival for art and digital culture, one of the keynote speakers, information technology businessman Conrad Wolfram, tells an anecdote: ‘My four-year old daughter enjoys making paper laptops by folding a sheet, drawing a screen on the top and a keyboard on the bottom. I asked her,’ he continues, ‘”When I was your age I didn’t make paper laptops. Why do you think that was?” After one or two minutes of reflection she said “No paper?”‘ The audience laugh.

Most, if not all of the people in the auditorium were able to find the humour in this little anecdote. They could, in fact, trace back a chronology of materials and inventions according to which technological developments in media and communications have eventually resulted in the specificity of our fast-paced, hyper-tech and very digital times. The joke, however, showed that this will not always be the case. At some point, the contemporary experience of the ‘technologically new’ can and will, if not for age reasons, be thought as a given. The 23rd Transmediale festival chose to investigate exactly this nexus of presents, pasts and futures. Under the captivating slogan of ‘Futurity Now!’, the event sought to expand the question about technological temporality through a varied and rich programme of exhibitions, talks, performances, screenings and workshops. This choice of topic was opportune since for last couple of years what has become one of the main European, new media events opted to focus on the rather worn out analysis of the apocalyptic fringes of technological ubiquity. These debates have sometimes got stuck in paralysing conspiracy paradigms, running the risk of flattening the complexity and urgency of contemporary socio-political and environmental situations into simplistic, well rehearsed templates. In the 2010 edition Transmediale proposed instead a somewhat broader and less explored theoretical agenda, bringing to the fore a critique of the critique itself. Or, in the words of the event’s press release, ‘an era beyond futurist rhetoric, interwoven with the unstable and complex web of economic, political and cultural systems dependent on being perceived as “future worthy” without having been there yet.’ Continue reading >>

Zach Lieberman: Interactive Art from PopTech on Vimeo.

Ondrej Brody (CZ) & Kristofer Paetau’s (FIN) work, Painting China Now (2007), is the starting point for their new work on display at Open Source Gallery. Painting China Now is a collection of 30 oil paintings depicting violence inflicted by the Chinese government on Falun Dafa members. The paintings were rendered with varying degrees of realism by Chinese craftsmen* specializing in copying pictures sent via e-mail. These pictures, censored and forbidden in China, were painted with oil on canvas in China and then exported to Europe for exhibition display.

For their first Brooklyn exhibition at Open Source Gallery: Wang Bin Torture in Commercial Quality, High Quality, and Museum Quality, the artists chose an explicit photograph of the massacred torso of Falun Dafa member Wang Bin**. Although the original photograph is unsharp, there is no doubt about what it is depicting. Using the Chinese painting companies’ own product quality grade system, Brody & Paetau commissioned the image to be painted in three grades: Commercial Quality, High Quality and Museum Quality. To compound the political with the aesthetic, these will be shown side by side, as a triptych.

What at the first glance appears as cynical artistic exploitation can also be seen as a shock of realities revealed through a conceptual artistic process. On one hand, most civilized countries condemn torture and censorship, on the other, they are eager to profit from Chinas’ cheap production forces and ruthless commercialism. The marketing of art in ‘Commercial Quality, High Quality, and Museum Quality’ is alien to general gallery practice as the artistic and monetary value of a painting is usually not relative to labor time or technical skill.

*This company and its details will be not named at their own request for fear of reprisals.

** Wang Bin, born on August 2, 1956, was a computer software engineer at the Institute of Exploration and Development in the Daqing Petroleum Field. He had received science and technology awards on many occasions, and for three sessions in a row, he had been a representative of the employee’s assembly at the institute.

Open Source is a participant-driven art initiative in Brooklyn, NY that provides space, community and conceptual context for creative play and critical commentary.

A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty is a performative talk framed around the question “can a formal and stimulating adherence to a prescribed set of hypothetical conditions be seen as choreography even if there is no learned movement?” Hay was a member of a group of experimental artists that was deeply influenced by Merce Cunningham and John Cage. The group, later known as the Judson Dance Theater, became one of the most radical and explosive 20th century art movements. Her ground breaking research and performances continue to influence new generations of artists throughout the world today.

Deborah Hay performs her first solo in six years as part of Danspace Project’s guest curated series PLATFORM 2010: Back to New York City curated by Juliette Mapp. In addition to Hay, who will present No Time to Fly March 25-27 at 8pm, Mapp has invited seven artists with deep ties to New York City to present work in this series. March 18 -20 at 8pm, Intermedia artist Elaine Summers presents a retrospective weekend of film and dance installations, Improvisation with Sun, Moon & Stars: An Evening of Intermedia Works.

For more information on PLATFORM 2010 please click here
For tickets to Deborah Hay, No Time to Fly, March 25-27, 2010 call 866.811.4111, or click here
Admission: $18 ($12 for members)

For more information please contact The School of Art at The Cooper Union at artschool [at] cooper.edu or 212.353.4200 or Danspace Project at 212.674.5856

Many themes and discussions emerged during the single day of the Summit that I was able to attend – we were exposed to a wide swath of interrelated issues and topics that are central to the research axes of DOCAM: conservation, documentation, cataloguing, terminology, pedagogy and the history of technology. I thought I would bring to your attention two projects that reflect a new and important area of inquiry in preserving media arts: the documentation of audience experience and its relationship to artistic intent. Two documentary case studies were presented which highlight the importance of recording visitors’ subjective impressions of their interactions with a work. Rolf Wolfensberger of the Museum of Communication of Berne presented a case study of Paul Sermon’s work Telematic Vision (1993-) and Katja Kwastek, formerly of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Media Art Research, presented a case study of Tmema’s (Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman) The Manual Input Workstation (2004-2006). The methodology used for capturing the audience experience of these two works was developed by Lizzie Muller and Caitlin Jones during their earlier work for the Daniel Langlois Foundation on a documentary case study of David Rokeby’s Giver of Names, and includes techniques such as observational videos, video-cued recall interviews and questionnaires. Information about how audiences interact with a work has seldom been included in the official documentary record of a work, yet the identity and authenticity of a work is often closely tied to the nature of the interactions that occur. The information gathered from audience members provides valuable context for conservators who wish to preserve and possibly re-present the work at a future date. To read more about the role of documented audience experience in preserving new media art, see Lizzie Muller’s publication Towards an oral history of new media art. You can also browse through the documentary collections for these and other artworks in the Publications section of the Daniel Langlois Foundation website here.

The Hacksaws group had its first meeting today in the Seminar Room of the Digital Arts Division. The group has 16 members to date and anyone with an interest in art and technology is welcome to join. This group is made up of professionals (not necessarily artists) who have an interest in Art and Technology. We hope that the group will be a place to form collaborations for new projects and exhibitions; work towards the generally uplifting and furthering the practice of art and technology in South Africa.

The Situated Technologies Pamphlets series, published by the Architectural League, explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism. How are our experience of the city and the choices we make in it are affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics and other “situated” technologies?

In response to the rise of pervasive information technologies and the privatization of the public sphere, Situated Technologies Pamphlets 6 proposes hybrid architectural programs called MicroPublicPlaces (MPPs). MPPs combine insights from ambient intelligence, human computing, architecture, social engineering, and urbanism to initiate ways to reanimate public life in contemporary societies.

The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

“Art is a tool of empowerment and social change, and I consider myself blessed to be able to create and use my work to promote health reform, bring awareness about ALS and help others.” – Tony Quan, aka Tempt One

Networked Derive is a collaborative performance that takes place simultaneously between two geographically-separate locations. Using mobile phones, twitter feeds and a simple mapping system, performers in both locations engage in a series of geographical occupations that coincide with the movements through the other city.

Participants follow a shared map that has one city per side. While the maps will be printed on the same scale, they will be placed slightly askew. The derive starts when one team reports its location to the other. The other team uses a pushpin to mark the location of the first team on the first team’s map, and then turns the map over and travels to the spot indicated. The second team then reports their location to the first team, who will repeat the same process, leading them to a different site.

The choreography of the piece will be created by the variations in the two maps, and the speed in which information is exchanged, and will be documented by the patterns of holes created in the maps.

For more details, or to participate, please visit http://networkederive.tumblr.com/

To follow us online, visit:
http://twitter.com/ntwrkderivebuf
http://twitter.com/ntwrkderivewmr

Presented by Jessica Thompson in conjunction with the Media Architecture Colloquium, University at Buffalo.

As towns and cities are increasingly overwritten by the needs and desires of globalized capital, so public spaces and the behaviors they support are becoming evermore shrunken and controlled. At the same time however, everyday examples of common usage – a skate boarder curving past a crowd, a girl chopping and bagging melon on the sidewalk, a child dancing up a mountain of steps – counterpoint homogenization and regulation.

Curated by Owen Driggs, Performing Public Space (PPS) is both a celebration of artists who consciously adopt such tactics and instrumentalize their bodies in an effort to bend, expand, or puncture dominant spatial narratives, and an inquiry into the ways in which public space is articulated through real use.

Like tumbleweed, the inquiry is designed to pick up more material as it roams. Understanding that, despite the strategies of corporate commerce, local spatial conditions vary, at each place it visits PPS will work with local citizens to create a city-specific archive. Documenting both quotidian uses of public space and witting artist interventions the archives will be included in the exhibition and become part of a growing website that considers local, national, and international interpretations of ‘public space’ and approaches to its preservation, generation, and augmentation.

Lauren BON, FALLEN FRUIT, FINISHING SCHOOL, John GEARY, Anne HARS & Bill, WHEELOCK, Ari KLETZKY, Paul PESCADOR, Nancy POPP, PORTABLE CITY PROJECTS, Jane TSONG, L.A. URBAN RANGERS.