Transitland – Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989 – 2009
Transitland – Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989 – 2009.
100 single channel videos.
Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989 – 2009
Transitland is a collaborative archiving project initiated on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Its main outcome is a selection of 100 single-channel video works, produced in the period 1989-2009 and reflecting the transformations in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. Transitland is not only the widest-spanning presentation of video art from Central and Eastern Europe but also a unique attempt to address and reflect upon an extensive period of transformation and changes.
Wishing and wishing but I don’t see how any future travels can shift time just enough that they will allow me to europe in february next year. Will have to live vicarously through the web media once again…ah, the tyranny of distance. But then again, this is my point about antipodean media utopias they are always happening over the other side of the world!
transmediale.
Opening 2 Feb 2010 | Festival 2 – 7 Feb 2010 | Award Ceremony 6 Feb 2010 | Haus der Kulturen der Welt | CTM 29 Jan – 6 Feb 2010
‘But my mind was too confused to attend to it, so with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity.’ The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
FUTURITY NOW!2010.
It is a year which has been synonymous with past images of the future. Writers and commentators throughout the 20th century strove to depict 2010 as a shining example of a future framed by technological progress and social harmony. But as 2010 draws nearer it is clear that global society is neither the utopia nor the dystopia traditionally presented in these fictions, architectures and theories of the future. Rather, it is an increasingly complex web of economic, political and cultural systems dependent on the convergence of rapidly evolving technologies. With the ubiquity of digital practices and social media firmly entrenched as an intrinsic part of our cultural code, we have caught up with our own notions of the future. The future is experiencing an identity crisis.
Futurity is a concept that examines what the ‘future’ as a conditional and creative enterprise can be. At its heart lays the intricate need to counter political and economic turmoil with visionary futures. With FUTURITY NOW! transmediale.10 explores what roles internet evolution, global network practice, open source methodologies, sustainable design and mobile technology play in forming new cultural, ideological and political templates. transmediale.10 invites artists, scientists, media activists, thinkers and visionaries to ask not what the future has in store for us, but what do we have in store for the future?
The copyright-remix project has had it’s funding confirmed through AKO Aotearoa. So Pam and I are beginning the process of thinking through the ethics angle first before we collect some original case studies from students. As Linda Wilson (the head of the Polytehcnic Ethics committee put it “your problem is thinking about how to ethically deal with students’ potenitally unethical work”. I’m really interested to work these ideas through. Somewhere I think ethics (that implies a sense of care and negotiation) seems a much more crucial framework for remix than copyright that tends to still default to commercial imperatives.
Copyright remix – Fair Dealing in Image Resources for a Digital Age
Practical solutions for the use of the digital image in a diverse range of teaching and learning contexts that will be available to all educators in New Zealand
The southern hub is delighted to support this exciting project that investigates the use of the digital image and the associated delivery of software and copyright information in the tertiary classroom.
Dr Susan Ballard of Otago Polytechnic and her team will draw on scenarios from student work to review current practice as it applies to the digital image (both still and moving) on and offline, examine digital images within the nexus of copyright, privacy and IP and recommend steps for evaluation and host outcomes in a digital hub. This information will enable the development of an open online and accessible for all electronic database (d*hub) of information about the use of the digital image.
We wish Susan and her team well and look forward to May 2010 when we expect d*hub’to ‘go live’.
Just found a mystery seller selling the ADA book for $1047.51 (US$) on Amazon — a nice digital art project in its own right — but if you want a copy for something a lot more reasonable, contact clouds. http://www.clouds.co.nz/012/
Nice to stumble across this when searching for something else.
It is always amazing where digital events travel, and yes I agree with the author, it was a remarkable moment of cooperation between institutions, but not just within New Zealand. The original habitation of Koru was initiated by Eric’s team at De Baile in Amsterdam. The point of the whol exercise was to see if we could experience the presence of a conversation through these multiple screens. I’m currently working on the transcript and as I read through am amazed by the fluidity with which we toss ideas around. I’m feeling a sense of a second life renaissance…
The SLENZ Update – No 111, July 08, 2009
Posted on July 8, 2009 by johnwaugh
New spirit of NZ tertiary ‘cooperation, collaboration’ across virtual worlds
ADA Symposium Poster
With New Zealand tertiary institutions – polytechnics and universities – sometimes at loggerheads with each other its good to see a spirit of cooperation and collaboration in their working with and within virtual worlds.
This was brought home to me 10 days ago when The 6th Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium, Critical-Digital-Matter, supported by the Victoria University School of Design, of Wellington, New Zealand, and by Creative New Zealand, Enjoy Public Art Gallery, None Gallery, De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam, Leonardo Education Forum, and Otago Polytechnic, chose Mike Baker’s (SL: Rollo Kohime) Wellington Railway Station build on the Nelson-Marlborough Institute of Technology’s Second Life island of Koru, as one of the venue’s for a keynote international debate.
This was as part of the three-day symposium’s examination of the critical intersections between digital materials and art practice in a bid to determine the relationship of the digital to matter. Other issues explored, included: How do we forge connections beyond art practices? And, what is the role of critical discourse in contemporary art practice?
The symposium featured a keynote presentation by internationally-renowned sound and intermedia artist Phil Dadson, and a remote conversation with London-based media theorist Matthew Fuller via De Balie, the centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam.
The “Keynote Conversation” was distributed through real life and Second Life as a live broadcast between London, Amsterdam and Wellington with projections screened at ‘Debalie’ in the centre of Amsterdam, on a screen at Goldsmiths College in London and Victoria University in Wellington. Interestingly, Victoria University leases space in the real life Wellington Railway Station, looking down upon the concourse space in which Baker have been carrying out his dance work for the past two years.
The initiators of this event were Eric Kluitenberg (Amsterdam) , Su Ballard (Wellington) and Matthew Fuller (London) with additional guests.
The other conference sessions included materiality in digital art; developing critical discourse in a small digital arts community; and forging connections beyond art. A wide range of artists and researchers from Wellington and around New Zealand presented their current projects.
Conversation across the world.
The new spirit of collaboration between tertiary institutions in the virtual world field in New Zealand was noted by the joint leader of the SLENZ Project, Dr Clare Atkins (SL: Arwenna Stardust) at a recent regular SLENZ team meeting on Koru.
But it is also expressed in the cooperation and collaboration taking place in what is scheduled to become the new New Zealand national virtual world grid, ONGENS, a development virtual world project which was initially launched by Otago and Canterbury Universities.
Although still virtually just out of OpenSim embryo the ONGENS virtual grid’s collaborators already include Auckland University (12 sims), Weltec, NMIT and SLENZ among others.
The ADA symposium followed another successful Second Life presentation by Mike Baker to the PSI#15 conference, in Zagreb, Croatia, from Koru’s Wellington Railway Station (Baker as Rollo pictured below) which is becoming known in academic and dance circles around the world for his “In the Company of Strangers – Negotiating the parameters of Departure in Urban Spaces; a study of Indeterminacy and the Roaming Body.”
The title of his Zagreb presentation with participants both in Second Life and real life was: “Misperformance: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading.” The title appeared rather fitting given the trauma of a previous presentation at Stanford where Second Life crashed during the key part of his address. Fortunately he was able to finish in Skype.
there is something here about a person sacrificing their life for empire and a band that works against the copyright regulators… another empire… but i’m too tired to work it out tonight…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8184000/8184802.stm
http://download.waste.uk.com/Store/did.html
I heard about this work at last year’s ISEA in singapore, (that I unfortunately missed due to charlotte’s impending arrival), so its great to read more about it.
again chopped from empyre archive.
From: ccp9@cornell.edu
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Loitering Strategies (Participatory cultural Pedagogy)
Date: 10 June 2009 2:57:52 PM
To: empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Reply-To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Begin forwarded message:
would recommend looking into the work of the PUKAR collective from
Mumbai. The project was on view at ISEA last year as a lonely example of a
localized activist project that focus on collaborative research and the
development of pedagogic public art works that incorporate videogames as
one of the tools in its practice. The activities of PUKAR revolve around
examinations of the relationships between state interventions in urbanism
and the outcomes of these processes vis-a-vis their impact on the
conditioning of individual and collective subjects.The following is an excerpt from an essay that I am writing about the work:
Gendered Strategies for Loitering (2008) is a videogame installation by
three associates of PUKAR, a non-profit Indian urban research initiative
led by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. The project was directed by Shilpa
Phadke, a social sciences graduate student, Shilpa Ranade, a practicing
architect, and Sameera Khan, a free-lance journalist and writer, in
collaboration with students at the University Scholars Programme Cyberart
Studio, at the National University of Singapore. The piece consists of two
video projections showing video footage of public spaces in Mumbai and
Singapore, interwoven with ethnographic and poetic texts, and a videogame
interface. The footage is manipulated so that audiences are able to note
the flows and patterns of human occupancy of the spaces shown. The texts
projected on screens are ethnographic observations and materials gathered
by the researchers. The design of the game interface proper is based on
drawings produced for the project as well as syntheses from interviews
with women living in Mumbai and Singapore, who provided accounts of their
everyday experiences navigating the public spaces of these cities. The
project is part of ongoing research and activities by PUKAR around issues
focused on articulating the relationships between gender norms, public
space, and official discourses, particularly in relation to the issue of
safety of Mumbai and Singapore urban spaces.By encouraging players to experience women’s inability to loiter in these
cities, the videogame ironically comments on the exclusionary premises of
official safety discourses. The game lets the player choose from four
‘real’ female characters (i.e., represented as photographic cut-outs of
four women). Age, class, and clothing, frame each of the characters’
access to public space. The goal of the game is to successfully transverse
a street in order to meet a particular person or reach a location.
Navigation triggers a series of text boxes asking the player to respond to
hypothetical scenarios; for instance: “you are standing in the corner
waiting for a friend, would you like to stay here, or wait at the bus
stop? A: stay, B: wait at bus stop,” or “You see a police man, would you
like to ask for directions or continue on? A: ask for directions, B:
continue on” (this particular question references the rise of reports by
women sexually assaulted by Mumbai police men). The game ends with a
birds-eye-view map of the city block showing the plotted points that the
player passed through, and a suggestion to continue play as one of the
other characters in order to further explore the various strategies
employed by the women represented. As the designers acknowledge, these
women represent the middle-classes, and as such are judged within
restrictive moral values that equate the height of female respectability
with public absence (conversely, public female presence justifies male
verbal and physical harassment, as you are considered a ‘loose’ woman).The game reflects the group’s overall research and activities which are
largely informed by theoretical examinations of the relationships between
cultural constructions of space and control of individuals and
populations. The work of French sociologist Henri Lefebvre around the
relationships between spatiality and contemporary capitalism has in
particular been drawn upon and re-articulated by PUKAR’s ‘gender and
space’ group to contest women’s public regulation as exclusionary and
victimizing. Lefrebve’s argument about the contingency of the ‘meaning’ of
space with emergent process associated with its experience in everyday
life lends support to the collective’s rejection of purely functional
approaches to urban design, and demands for official urban policies that
account for gender questions in relation to urbanism.Videogames are however but one element of the multimedia approach employed
by the Pukar collective for what they term “participatory research
pedagogy.” Though the videogame medium has proven to be particularly
useful “to sensitize” youth in classrooms, the streets, and art festivals,
“to the issues of gender, the built environment and the city,” as one of
the members stated, the collective also takes part in public protests and
performative interventions in collaboration with women’s groups, among
them sex workers and human rights organizations in India, organizes
conferences, and produces publications, films and audio documentaries, as
well as postcards and photo-exhibits. The urbanist focus of these groups
is representative of contemporary activist movements addressing the
transformations associated with globalization processes from a localized
perspective. In India, “The attention paid to the city,” according to
historian Gyan Prakash writing for the New Delhi based SARAI urban
collective, “is a product of two interlaying processes—the erosion in the
authority of the historicist narrative of India modernity,” which he
associates with Ghandi’s conceptualization of the city as a site of evil
and injustice and Nehru’s city as a symbol of modernization, and “the
emergence of a new politics of urban space,” which he sees ensuing from
counter practices and discourses of “the struggle for modern identity and
justice.”
chopped from a much large conversation on empyre.
but a fantastic summary of the use of multiple platforms and how they variously archive a practice.
From: ccp9@cornell.edu
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Loitering Strategies (Participatory cultural Pedagogy)
Date: 10 June 2009 2:57:52 PM
To: empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Reply-To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Begin forwarded message:
In a recent conversation with Iraqi American artist Wafaa Bilal the topic
of the archival trace as an active constituent of tactical resistance came
up in relation to the problem of ephemerality of his experimental media
practices in the realm of ‘interventional games’ if you will. According
to him, he does see the fleeting temporality of digital interventions as
an obstacle to engage audiences. For his three digital games, “Domestic
Tension” (2007), “Virtual Jihadi” (2008) and “Dog or Iraqi” (2008), which
deal respectively with issues around mediated representation of Iraqis and
the rise of militancy and militarism within the U.S. and in Iraq, Bilal
not only resorts to the engagement of a wide scope of media, including
live camera appearances, chat rooms, the habitual website postings, and
most recently a book about this projects, but also with ongoing archives
online. He assiduously reserved 10 mn. of each of the thirty days he
performed daily in a gallery space in which he played the target for the
paintballs of random audiences (in “Domestic Tension”) to speak of his
experiences. The resulting recordings were placed on YouTube, a popular
video posting site where as he recounts they aim at reaching a wide scope
of audiences that would otherwise not likely engage with “political art.”
The thread also contains videos and commentary by the artist and others
around the controversy ensuing from the censorship of “Virtual Jihadi” by
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (where the artist was invited for a month
long residency). Most disturbing is the short video of Bilal’s
waterboarding (he stated that he finds it equally painful to watch) which
was shot at an undisclosed location in upstate New York “with the help of
one of the Yes Man among other friends” in the aftermath of “Dog or
Iraqi,” and online game that allowed audiences to vote on who would be
waterboarded, Bilal or the dog (a pug). The piece was especially contested
by animal rights activists, a fact that the artist feels is especially
telling. The point however (beyond the piece’s playful commentary on the
much touted democratic potential of digital technologies) is that the
video ‘connects’ to a long thread of videos on waterboarding of overall
detached tone (either as ‘parodic’ reenactions or as earnest short
documentary style commentaries against torture). The digital archive here
raises the possibilities of an “associative art” (as Hugo Ball once
remarked on the relationship of Bergson’s ‘duration’ and the cabaret
voltaire) that attracts attention precisely because of its ‘misplacement’
among simulated waterboardings (such an euphemism for induced suffocation)
and sincere rationalist arguments against torture. Amidst these
representations Bilal’s is disconcerting (and twistlingly appealing to
YouTube audiences) perhaps foremost because it refutes categorization.Bilal gauges the success of his “attempts at dialogue” by the amount of
e-mails that he receives commenting on his work. In response to questions
relating to the reactions of audiences, he gestures in protest, “at this
point I don’t see any value in engaging in discussions about the
relationship between art and politics. In Iraq it is implied that such a
relationship is real. My shows under Saddam were censored, first because I
painted in a realistic style and the authorities did not like what they
saw, then my work was again confiscated because I painted nothing. I did a
series of white paintings and hung them at the University of Bagdad and
was arrested on suspicion of mockery. I was charged for being a terrible
painter basically. I had been given free training as an artist (university
education was free under Saddam) and all I could come up with was these
empty canvases… The question is for me of how to keep dialogue alive
and at this point we have nothing to lose.”
I’ve just had an essay published in “The Enlightenments” catalogue about Susan Norrie’s ‘enola’. the essay is based on a longer piece I wrote in 2006.The exhibition ahs just opened in Edinburgh as part of the Edinburgh festival.
Read more here:
Susan Norrie
Presented in partnership with Edinburgh International Festival as part of The Enlightenments. Collective present two video works by Susan Norrie; Enola and SHOT.
Norrie’s acclaimed video project, Enola, pictures a world that has become mummified as a result of nuclear trauma, whilst Norrie’s new project SHOT, explores aspects of outer space and our quest for enlightenment beyond our fragile, precarious world.
Read more about The Enlightenments
