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XII Festival VideoDanzaBA 2010

September 4 to 12, 2010
DEADLINE: June 15, 2010

| Call for entries 2010
DEADLINE: JUNE 15, 2010
The International Festival VideoDanzaBA opens its call for selection for its twelfth Edition, to be held from September 4th to 12th, 2010.

The call opens in two categories:
• Video-dance as an art form
• Documentaries on dance

For entry form and regulations, please visit www.movimiento.org/profile/VideoDanzaBA

Pieces must be sent by regular mail up to June 15th, 2010 to:
FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL VIDEODANZABA
CENTRO DE INVESTIGACION CINEMATOGRAFICA
Benjamín Matienzo 2571 (C1426 DAU)
Buenos Aires – Argentina
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On March 26, Parsons and MoMA with IFF, Seed, and Coty present Headspace: On Scent as
Design.


Headspace is a one-day symposium on the conception, impact, and potential applications of scent. This event gathers leading thinkers, designers, scientists, artists, established perfumers as well as
"accidental perfumers" (a selection of architects, designers, and chefs
invited to experiment with scent) to acknowledge scent as a new
territory for design and begin to draft the outline of this new
practice. The event marks the establishment of a new MFA
in Transdisciplinary Design
at Parsons.
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Medialab-Prado issues a call for the presentation of projects and papers to be developed and presented during Interactivos?'10: Neighborhood Science workshop (June 7 - 23, 2010).

With the participation of: Platoniq, Douglas Repetto, and the working team formed by Andrés Burbano, Alejandro Araque, Alejandro Duque and Alejandro Tamayo.

Deadline: April 19, 2010
List of selected proposals: April 28, 2010
Call for collaborators: May 4 - June 4, 2010


More info here:

http://medialab-prado.es/article/interactivos_ciencia_de_barrio

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ACDFA Reflections

ACDFA Central Region's 2010 conference is now over, and was a great time for our class! On Saturday, March 20th, we presented "Snack Time", an interactive presentation/demonstration of our explorations in telematic dance performance.

The presentation was great success, and the students who participated really enjoyed learning about the ideas and technologies, and mostly they enjoyed the DANCING! Some highlights of our two-hour workshop:

Interactive activities:
-"Herd" score exploring motion-based control of stage lighting
-Improvised score with two spatially displaced (far away) musicians (Felipe and Justin) from SARC in Belfast (http://www.sarc.qub.ac.uk/main.php), and one local (in the dance space) musician (Jeff).

Demonstration modules of the session:
-An off-site introduction to the session by Melissa via skype
-Introduction to DMX lighting control
-Video motion tracking with Isadora (http://www.troikatronix.com/isadora.html)
-Programming of interactive lighting and video visualization using MAX (http://cycling74.com/products/maxmspjitter/)
-High-quality, low-latency, two-way multi-channel audio tranmission via JackTrip (http://code.google.com/p/jacktrip/)

The students enjoyed exploring the interactive creative environment made possible by digital technologies. Both students from our class and those visiting for ACDFA are now challenged to imagine new ways that movement can create meaningful, engaging experiences for audiences and participants alike.
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Screen Moves

Launch: 18h00, 18 March 2010

At: DanseHallerne – Copenhagen Denmark

Curators: Jeannette Ginslov & Maia Sørensen


"Whose lens are we looking through?"

Representation of Politics - Politics of Representation.

Screendance works from Africa selected by dance video makers Jeannette Ginslov and Maia Sørensen. A discussion and presentation after the showing will be broadcast live on MoveStream, a co-production with www.dance-tech.net and Walking Gusto Productions.


Videos

Walking in Plastic 2009 07’39 (South Africa) Kai Lossgott - Director

Nora 2008 35’00 (Zimbabwe) Alla Kovgan & David Hinton – Directors

Sanctum I 08’ 43 (Africa)

Jeannette Ginslov – Director, choreographer & editor

Exotica 2009 05:10 (Mozambique)

Sergio Cruz – Director, camera, editor and sound designer

Sanctum II 2009 04’45 (Africa)

Jeannette Ginslov Director, choreographer & editor

Karohano 2008 08’55 (South Africa & Madagascar)

Jeannette Ginslov – Director, camera & editor

Despotica 2008 20’00 (South Africa)

Mlu Zondi – Concept & performance. Video Loop on TV monitor outside.


Two minutes before we went up we found out we got funding from the Danish Arts Council!

The discussion that followed the screening will be posted onto movetream next week as well as interviews with the video dance makers.





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I witnessed a strange travel as a spectacle.

A spectacle with an installation as a scenography but also as a structure, almost a dramatic structure.

Imagine an audiovisual installation, where you can listen to music and poems, where you can watch images through video, and see and listen to people who are interviewed about their past, a terrible one.

Imagine a dancer as a poet who sometimes dances, but most of the time he moves his body in slow motion, pushing buttons which turn on music, video or a microphone. The poet recites his poems in a quickly and monotonous way, poems with hard images of his past and images from his last travel to Indochina.

Imagine this poet as a dancer who dance beautifully, in some moments doing it only with his hands with a dark background, then you can only see his hands in movement, like in a photographs with lines of light of a city by night.

Rachid Ouramdane dances very little his poetry, exposes his past through words, through images, in a travel to his father's destiny in Indochina; he exposes all about this travel and its origins as in an art gallery, exhibiting it.

Imagine that we can not feel any identification with him because he never opens the door to it. Even without identification there is no place for a Brechtian theory, this spectacle is only an exhibition, far from theatre and drama, but it is an installation in movement, an installation on stage which speaks and dances.

This is the first time I got this experience from a dance spectacle and I'm interested in what will happen with this strange structure.

Should I say I liked it?


No video allowed inside Enwave Theatre but you can see a video in Youtube with some images of this dance (Loin) and other works.

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TenduTV announces the launch of the digital Dance on Camera Festival on Hulu, at www.hulu.com/network/tendutv. The digital Dance on Camera Festival is an extension of the Dance Films Association's Dance on Camera Festival (DOCF), which it has produced annually for the last 38 years, the last 14 of which have been co-presented with the Film Society of Lincoln Center.


"This new venture presents an exciting opportunity for dance film artists to expand their audience. The bulk of today's viewers consume their media digitally. Our partnership with TenduTV widens our distribution while offering an excellent, new venue for our participating artists," said Deirdre Towers, artistic director of Dance Films Association.


"We're excited to take this first step forward towards meeting the needs of the dance field. Finally, dance audiences can begin to get the access they eagerly desire. The Dance Films Association is a great partner and we're looking forward to doing all we can to help them fulfill their mission," said Marc Kirschner, General Manager of TenduTV.


TenduTV will be adding new films on a regular basis, providing viewers with a diverse range of dance on screen. While the initial films primarily represent contemporary works from prior editions of the festival, the Dance Films Association and TenduTV will also curate focused collections of dance films. Planned themes include "Past Masters," "Africa" and "Animation."


The first six films are available now, and feature dancers from some of thedance world's most renowned companies, including Tanztheater Wuppertal, Frankfurt Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and Armitage Gone! Dance.


These films are:

Arcus, a jury prize nominee, DOCF 2004
directed by Alla Kovgan and Jeff Silva

Arising,from DOCF 2009
directed and choreographed by Ben Dolphin

FoliesD'Espagne, a jury prize nominee, DOCF 2008
directed by PhilipBusier
choreographed by Austin McCormick

Madrugada,from DOCF 2005
directed by William Morrison
choreographed byDeborah Greenfield

Vanishing Point, DOCF 2009
directedby Patrick Lovejoy

Wiped, Jury Winner, DOCF 2002
directedand choreographed by Hans Beenhakker

TenduTV also announced the addition of Cory Greenberg to its advisory board. Ms. Greenberg is Director of Operations & Special Projects for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, as well as Ailey's in-house counsel. She received her undergraduate degree cum laude in Art History from Duke University and her law degree from New York University School of Law, where she was an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow and a recipient of the Vanderbilt Medal for Public Service.


About TenduTV

Founded in 2008, TenduTV seeks to deliver dance to audiences through the highest quality digital distribution network available to the art form today. Through TenduTV's platform partners, dance artists and organizations will be able to transport their vision beyond the physical theater and engage audiences through computers and 200 million digital devices including internet-enabled televisions, portable video players and mobile devices. By empowering artists to connect with audiences on a global scale, TenduTV believes that the dance field can be as strong financially as it is creatively.


About Dance Films Association, Inc.

Dance Films Association, Inc. (DFA) is dedicated to furthering the art of dance film. Connecting artists and organizations, fostering new works for new audiences, and sharing essential resources,
DFA seeks to be a catalyst for innovation in and preservation of dance on camera. DFA was founded by Susan Braun in 1956, and included Ted Shawn, the founder of Jacob's Pillow, as its charter member, as well as modern dance pioneer Jose Limon and ballerina Alicia Markova as members of its first Board of Directors. A tireless advocate, Ms. Braun devoted her life to finding, showcasing, preserving dance films and videos until her death in 1995. Today, DFA seeks to carry on her spirit of creativity and collaboration in a time of extraordinary transformation.


For more information, visit www.dancefilmsassn.org and www.tendu.tv.

#

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At the 6th international internet dance festival SideBySide-net 2010, artists get the unique opportunity to present their work on an interdisciplinary and intercultural platform and to a broad international audience for a longer period of time. The audience’s favourite artists (watch&vote-principle from August to November 2010) receive prizes summing up to 3.000 Euro. Crucial criteria for nominations are the quality of dance, an individual style, and an innovative realisation of an interesting topic.

Application forms can be downloaded at www.side-by-side.org/en/festival/2010
Application deadline: June 15th 2010. The postmark’s date is relevant.
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Hi there!


From La Marato de L’espectacle (www.marato.com) we are working in a new European Commission Grant Application

for Cultural projects in Egypt,
Cairo.


To be able to develop our project, we are looking for a local partner, to be able to work with. We are seeking for a

Dance Company, a Cultural association…based in Cairo.


If you know any institution or someone that could be interesting for us to get in touch with, replying to this post.



Thanks!


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Hello dance-techers,
Have your written some books, made movies or music that is available in amazon.com?
what books and movies do you recommended for our community...?

As you might have noticed we have an online-bookstore tab in the
menu.The Idea is to provide our member who are writers and film makers
the possibility of increase the sales of their authored material.

http://astore.amazon.com/dancetechnet-20

This on-line store is created in association with Amazon.com and
provides you with the same shopping experience you would receive
through the normal Amazon.com (soon to develop to serve the UK and
later for Germany)

If you buy products in our page, dance-tech.net will receive a
commission on all sales through our store. So, this is a way to help
the network and its projects (well we will have to sale a lot..!
Your items cost exactly the same and the range and features are no
different. In this store, when you are ready to finalize your purchase you will be
taken to Amazon.com to complete your transaction safely and securely.


I have created the on-line store and the idea is allow our community to purchase:

-Books and DVD's written by our members. I have created the initial pages with some books from members that I knew.
-Books and DVDs that are relevant and recommended by the community.
-Other items that are relevant for our community: game controllers, sensor systems, software, etc.

I would like to ask you send me your recommendations of your own books
(authored or published by you), books and DVD that you consider
necessary reading and inspiring, and of course other articles. The they
have to be available in amazon US and the UK.

Please, write a comment in this post with your recommendations or questions (name of the item and authors)

Marlon

PS: more information soon about how to help dance-tech.net
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"Snack Time!" at ACDFA!

Our class will be presenting "Snack Time!" at the Central Region Conference of the American College Dance Festival Association (http://www.acdfa.org) on Saturday, March 20th, 12:30-2:30pm, in the Krannert Cetner for the Performing Arts (KCPA), on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Our presentation will be a introduction and participatory experience in telematic dance performance and will include a performance featuring real-time exchange between dancers in Illinois and musicians at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) in Belfast, Northern Ireland (http://www.sarc.qub.ac.uk/main.php). The collaboration with SARC will happen via video feeds from each venue to the other, and via low-latency, high quality (16bit, 44.1kHz) 4-channel audio from SARC to KCPA. The scores for this dance and for the audience participation portion of the class are currently being developed by the students.

This promises to be a unique, interesting experience for the students and participants alike - Hopefully one that will inspire further creativity in spatially-displaced artistic collaboration!

Hope to see you there!
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Hello colleagues and friends on dance tech,

I am glad to announce that EMPAC's DANCE MOViES Commission is open for another round.

Forward and distribute the announcement below as you see fit. Please note that the deadline is only a month away!

Wishing you a happy and productive spring (northern hemisphere) or fall (southern hemisphere),

Helene Lesterlin
Curator, EMPAC





FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EMPAC DANCE MOVIES COMMSSION 2010-2011
OPEN CALL FOR PROPOSALS
deadline APRIL 15th

- General inquiries: 518.276.3921 / dancemovies@rpi.edu (please publish)

- Emily Zimmerman (Curatorial Assistant, EMPAC): 518.276.4547 / zimmee3@rpi.edu (do not publish)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Troy, NY – In April, while artists propose new works to be made for this round of the DANCE MOViES Commission, the five projects currently in progress will be finishing up post-production for a premiere at EMPAC in the fall. Projects from past years continue to tour to festivals and film venues around the world.

EMPAC (the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) is now accepting proposals for its 2010-2011 DANCE MOViES Commissions. The deadline for the proposals is April 15, 2010. This year, selected artists will receive awards ranging up to $30,000.

In addition to the funding, artists can also apply to create their works in conjunction with the Artist-in-Residence program at EMPAC. Works commissioned may take advantage of EMPAC’s spaces and technology, using infrastructure such as computer-controlled rigging or large-scale immersive studio environments.

As the first major US-based commissioning program available to dance-film artists in the Americas, the DANCE MOViES Commission represents an important opportunity for those working at the intersection of the moving body and the moving image. The commission has funded thirteen projects in the last four years, with four of them also winning residencies at EMPAC.

There are up to 150 submissions per year, with four to five winning proposals. Artists selected can be from North or South America: a majority of recipients have been from the US, some working in international teams, with other winners also coming from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Canada.

Backed by the Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts, the DANCE MOViES Commission supports works for the screen including film, video, installation and other audio-visual formats. The works may be narrative in nature or abstract; they may range in length (up to 20 minutes); they certainly vary in style, technique and expressive intent.

The DANCE MOViES Commissions encompass a wide range of projects. They may take advantage of a variety of tools, such as computer processing, motion capture, simulation, animation, image processing and post-production technologies. Some may not portray “dance,” per se, at all. All will, however, reflect or refer to the power of movement unfurling in time.

DMC APPLICATION PROCESS

The EMPAC DANCE MOViES Commission is a competitive open proposal process, in which eligible artists or groups from North or South America submit a project proposal. The initial proposals are reviewed and a small number of artists are invited to submit a detailed proposal to an international panel. The panel assesses the quality and feasibility of the proposed project and submits its recommendations to EMPAC. The commissions are awarded by EMPAC after review.

Upon awarding of the commission, the artist or collaborative team has one year to complete the project, at which point the work is premiered at EMPAC, and shown at dance film festivals around the world.

The deadline for the proposals is April 15, 2010.

For more information on the DANCE MOViES Commission, including new guidelines and how to apply, please visit http://www.empac.rpi.edu/commissions/DMC/. Guidelines and information also available in Spanish.

About EMPAC

The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) opened its doors in 2008 and was hailed by the New York Times as a “technological pleasure dome for the mind and senses… dedicated to the marriage of art and science as it has never been done before.”
Founded by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, EMPAC offers artists, scholars, researchers, engineers, designers, and audiences opportunities for creative exploration that are available nowhere else under a single roof. EMPAC operates nationally and internationally, attracting creative individuals from around the world and sending new artworks and innovative ideas onto the global stage.
EMPAC’s building is a showcase work of architecture and a unique technological facility that boasts unrivaled presentation and production capabilities for art and science spanning the physical and virtual worlds and the spaces in between.
About Rensselaer Polytechnic University

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1824, is the nation’s oldest technological university. The school offers degrees in engineering, the sciences, information technology, architecture, management, and the social sciences and humanities. For over thirty years, the Institute has been a leader in interdisciplinary creative research, especially in the electronic arts. In addition to its MFA and Ph.D. programs in Electronic Arts, Rensselaer offers Bachelor degrees in Electronic Arts, and in Electronic Media, Arts, and Communication – one of the first undergraduate programs of its kind in the United States. The Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies and EMPAC are two major research platforms that Rensselaer has established at the beginning of the 21st century.

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DRHA 2010 Conference: Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts
Sunday 5th September - Wednesday 8th September 2010
Brunel University, West London
www.drha2010.org.uk


CONFERENCE THEME: Sensual Technologies: Collaborative Practices of Interdisciplinarity

The conference’s overall theme will be the exploration of the
collaborative relationship between the body and sensual/sensing
technologies across various disciplines. In this respect it will offer
an interrogation of practices that are indebted to the innovative
exchange between the sensual, visceral and new technologies.
At the same time, the aim is to look to new approaches offered by
various emerging fields and practices that incorporate new and existing
technologies. Specific examples of areas for discussion could include:

• Delineation of new collaborative practices and the interchange of knowledge
• Collaborative interdisciplinary practices of embodiment and technology
• Integration/deployment of digital resources in new contexts
• Connections and tensions that exist between the Arts, Humanities and Science
• Notions of the ‘solitary’ and the ‘collaborative’ across the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences
• eScience in the Arts and Humanities
• Use of digital resources in collaborative creative work, teaching, learning and scholarship
• Open source and second generation Web infrastructure
• Digital media in time and space
• Music and technology: composition and performance
• Dance and interactive technologies
• Taking inspiration from SET: imaging, GPS and mobile technologies
• Evaluating the experience among providers and users / performers and audiences
• Interface Design and HCI
• Performative Practices in SecondLife or other virtual platforms
• New critical paradigms for the conference’s theme

The DRHA (Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts) conference is
held annually at various academic venues throughout the UK. This year’s
conference is hosted by Brunel University, West London. It will take
place from Sunday 5th September to Wednesday 8th September 2010. It
will be held across various innovative spaces, including the newly
expanded Boiler House laboratory facilities, housed in the Antonin
Artaud Building, and state of the art conference facilities plus high
standard accommodation.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers
- Richard Coyne - Professor of Architectural Computing at the University of Edinburgh.
- Christopher Pressler: Director of Research and Learning Resources and
Director of the Centre for Research Communications, University of
Nottingham.
- Thecla Schiphorst: Media Artist/Designer and Faculty Member in the
School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Simon Fraser University,
Vancouver, Canada.
- STELARC, Chair in Performance Art at Brunel University and Senior
Research, Fellow in the MARCS Labs at the University of Western Sydney.

We invite original papers, panels, installations, performances,
workshop sessions and other events that address the conference theme,
with particular attention to the ‘Sensual Technologies’ focus. We
encourage proposals for innovative and non-traditional session formats.

DRHA 2010 will include a SecondLife roundtable/discussion event, led by
performance artist Stelarc, which will enable international
participants to present performative work via Second Life. For this
event, we particular encourage submission of Machinima works that can
be screened as part of this panel.
Short presentations, for example work-in-progress, are invited for poster presentations.
Anyone wishing to submit a performance or installation should visit http://www.drha2010.org.uk for information about the spaces and technical equipment and support available.
All proposals - whether papers, performance or other - should reflect the critical engagement at the heart of DRHA 2010.
The deadline for submissions will be 31 March 2010. Abstracts should be between 600 - 1000 words.
Letters of acceptance will be sent by 15th of May 2010, when the conference registration will be opened.
Please see http://www.drha2010.org.uk more information and a link for online submission.

Franziska Schroeder
DRHA 2010 Programme Chair
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On Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010, our class had a Skype session with Prof. Ellen Bromberg of the University of Utah. Prof. Bromberg raised many challenging questions and interesting ideas regarding telematic performance (TP) which I think will be very helpful in guiding our future collaborations with SARC and others.

Ideas and thoughts:
-Delay, Distance, Decay - Elements of TP to be overcome, or embraced(?)
-Sound and alternative sense of space are results of telematic experiences
-Simplify - Complex dance can muddy the overall intention of a TP
-Camera choreography as critical part of TP experience (including specific ideas for artistic use of camera in TP)

Challenges:
-WHAT - Is TP a screen dance?
-WHERE does TP take place? On the screen? In the spaces?
-WHERE is the audience?
-WHO is the audience? IS THERE AN AUDIENCE?
-Discovering the "plie" of telematic dance - Will there be such a thing?
-WHY does any of this matter? Couldn't we just dance to a recorded video and have the same experience?

...are we feeling the "Telematic Embrace" yet?

-Jeff Z.
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Today I post a first report of how our telematic collaborations are going. Our class is trying to collaborate on networked performance with musicians from SARC in Belfast and RPI in Troy, NY. The technologies we have decided to use for now are, with SARC, SKYPE for video with JackTrip for audio, and Max/MSP for sending data to affect the sound. So far we've been taking small steps each week, one week getting JackTrip to work, the next week getting it to work better, and finally this week achieving a short improv between us. Next week we will hopefully get the four-channel audio from SARC properly spatialized in the room so we can respond to that in our movement choices, and to get video of the musicians from SARC on the screen in addition to our video. It is a bit frustrating to have the setup take so much time, but I hope and believe that we will get faster and more fluent with it so that we can make art rather then deal with the technology for so much of the class period. It is GREAT to have partners willing to work with us on a weekly basis to get this going...and by the end of the semester I know we'll have something wonderful to show for it. We need next also to develop scores for dances over the Internet that will make some artistic sense.


John Toenjes, instructor of 362 Networking & Performance
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INVISIBILITY OF THE PRESENT - TRANSMEDIALE 2010

The speed of our times is accelerating, day by day the rhythm grows faster. We are doing more and more things at the same time. Our digitalized lives are virtually (social-)networked. Digital technologies and information last only for very short time. A computer is outdated within less than 5 years time, news are updated in a 5 second frequency and thus outdated within a couple of hours. Thanks to micro-blogs, messages get shorter and shorter, provide us with life search to keep up with the pace.

The huge amount of digital data processed per day makes it difficult to keep track of them. This also occurs to digital art projects, whose creators or buyers stand before the problem on how to archive them in a reliable way. Everything we do and use is more temporary than ever before. The present seems to get shorter and shorter. To be able to project towards the future, we'd need to be able to define presence more thoroughly. To know what the present is. BUT: The importance of thinking of the future helps us to give meaning to the present. A viscous circle then?

Contemporary visions and imagination of future have a big identity problem.

Future is no longer what it had been. Present is no longer what it had been. And the present is not yesterday's future... tm10 (Transmediale Festival 10, 2 - 7 February 2010) was dedicated to this contemporary identity crisis of the future. With its great varieties of installations, performances, conferences, workshops , etc., we had wonderful, very versatile and contrary discussions and approaches, not so much to tackle the problem of the future's identity crisis, but to name it and think about it, to raise new questions, to explore solutions for not being part of a disappearing past.

After an inaugural speech that shows us images of the moon landing (yes the original 1969 event), the tm10 opens officially with a flashback to "modern" vision of future. Charlemagne Palestine, modern composer, musician, bell expert (& whiskey lover), gives us a half hour concert, ringing bells of the Tiergarten's bell tower…. With this image of an ancient means of communication, the bell tower, we are prepared to travel towards a nearer past, the 1980s: At the same time Yvette Mattern's7-colored rainbow laser-beam was projected from Berlin's hkw, (with its' stunning 1950s architecture in shape of an oyster shell) to the 1960s architectural gem Fernsehturm at Alexanderplatz.

© Photographer: Frank Paul
hkw © Photographer: Frank Paul

© ANBerlin
Fernsehturm Alexanderplatz © ANBerlin

Two symbolic architectonic cold war signs of the former east and the former west part Berlin. A sign for the reunification of Berlin, she states. To me it seems rather a time travel to a period when two superpowers were competing to own the future. The whole opening ceremony was visually, sonically and conceptually a collective time travel towards a moment when
utopia and future vision were still intact.

Let's jump to more present times: tm10 invited — amongst many others - Bruce Sterling (placing him next to an overhead projector he unfortunately didn't use). Sterling, sci-fi novelist and a central figure in utopia and visions of future, gives us an entertaining but dark-visioned speech about atemporality [1], to place ourselves in the present, questioning the relations and concepts of past, present and future. His talk, full of pleonasms and contradictions gets confusing, as he seems to mix up art-historic terms. The difference in postmodernism and network culture/atemporality is, that the latter doesn't define the problem, gets overloaded by irrelevant information and stays completely disorganized. That's why we cannot define history or present.

He appeals to "creative artists" to refuse being driven by technology, refuse reverence to the past in order to move forwards; to become the vision of the future ourselves in order to be convincing with our art. To give a ••• about what others think of us and personify our utopia(s).[2] His visions will give you a chill….

THE EXPOSITION

At Future Obscura, the festivals exhibition at hkw, the presented artworks are using language of the past to talk about the present situation. About a present that might have been future in the past. A nostalgic and historical presence. The artworks use any historic image making techniques (rather than THE state of the art) from photography, film-making and robotics to "create a collisions between the past, the present and future" [3], whereas I found future visions were lacking completely .

The artworks thematize already existing technologies, putting them in context with contemporary everyday life. They translate common digital situations and phenomena into the visual, sonic, into the artistic field. The little Paparazzi-Bot, a robot that recognizes movement and (if you're not too quick), shoots a photo of you, that is transmitted via a noisily disturbed wifi connection to a small flatscreen just behind it. The images shot by the robot will be uploaded to the webpage manually by human beings. Quite a 1970s manual work for nowadays…

Paparazzi-Bot © Jonathan Gröge
Paparazzi-Bot © Jonathan Gröge

The most impressive work at the exhibition was Gebhard Sengmüller's A Parallel Image. An electronic Camera Obscura, the installation uses 2500 copper cables connecting a photo sensor unit with a display unit, consisting of 2500 light bulbs. It illustrates how the composition of a digital image would look like if serial data transmission had never come to existence. The installation sends all pixel data in parallel. A very poetic way of reflecting the present, assuming past events didn't happen and offering a "new" solution to an old, already solved problem: how to live-project moving image.

A Parallell Image - © Gebhard SengmüllerA
Parallell Image - © Gebhard Sengmüller

A Parallell Image - © Jonathan GrögeA
Parallell Image - © Jonathan Gröge


SATELLITE EXPOSITIONS

[The User], with Coincidence Engines One & Two: Universal People's Republic Time translates the "atemporality" problem by using the time machine itself as part of his installations. The two-part installation, takes the clock out of context and uses it as a sound and light making machine. Coincidence Engine One is a tower of unsynchronized analogue alarm clocks whose tickings build up to a beautiful sonic environment. The second part is a wall of synchronized clocks, that are equipped with an external control, so each clock ticks only in response to instructions issued by the artists. Patterns of light and sound events move rhythmically across the vertical plane. Coincidence Engines is an actual reflection about the present, about time and atemporality with thoughts and play behind it.

the_user_part01_karla



One of the few women present(ed) at tm10, AgnesMeyer-Brandis surprises amusingly with an unimaginable imaginative piece of work: The installation Cloud-Core-Scanner – Inside the Tropospheric Laboratory [4] exhibited at Schering Stiftung. Agnes Meyer-Brandis explores the experimental edge between art, science and technology and borders between facts and fiction, which
you definitely will discover when looking at the installation. My first impression left me confused. You really have to confront yourself with the piece to dive into it's surreal narrative.

The installation Inside the Tropospheric Laboratory gives insights into material that Agnes Meyer-Brandis generated under conditions of extraterrestrial realities: it was developed in micro-gravity on a scientific flight in corporation with the German space agency. The oversized test tube construction consisting of a variety of elements that, one after another get into action at a certain point, has something theatrical, scenic about it.

A laser printer and a lit candle produce CO2 particles which are captured into a glass balloon. The number of particles are measured. At a certain amount, a noisy sound coming from a vacuum pump (that leaves the bowl in vacuum as you can imagine), announces the creation of a little cloud. This triggers (or seems to at least) subsequent events: a disc filled with objects is rotating. A video of one randomly selected object filmed in microgravity is projected on the wall and on a thick piece of plastic. At the same time a stone who seemingly lives in zero gravity, is being measured by a constantly moving aluminum bar.

Far away from artistic romanticism she wants to scan the cores of the clouds. To get into the heart of the object of investigation. As artistic science the results are images rather than formulas. Images and relations. A very poetic research-experimentation on how the future of art could look like.

She was also participant at tm10 salon talk: Destination Moon, where she made the listeners dive into her surreal scientific dreamlike narratives.[5]

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ROUND UP

A big trend in the exposed artworks at tm10 was the visualization of the invisible. In his audio visual performance Test Pattern, Ryoji Ikeda, pictures the invisible: Data-streams we are exposed to continuously are transformed into a stroboscopic optic attack of black and white barcode patters, flittering flickering and flashing in an almost unbearable speed (100s of frames per second), synchronized perfectly to aggressively electronic sounds that remind of an overlay of dozens of digitalized morse codes, morphing towards some very heavy beats. The system of Test Pattern is converting any kind of data (such as texts, sounds, images, videos….) into barcode patterns. A visualization of the immaterial in the most minimalistic and direct form.


Another approach to the data visualization: the Panoramic Wifi Camera by Adam Somlai-Fischer, Usman Haque, Bengt Sjölénvon, who illustrate the wifi-nets as colorful clouds and their physical behavior;

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Julius von Bismarck visualizes the camera movement of movies in his The Space Beyond Me [6], Agnes Meyer-Brandis with her Cloud-Core-Scanner the consistence of a cloud, Ken Rinaldo's Paparazzi-Bots the users that interact with it, Alice Miceli's Chernobyl Project the invisible radioactive contamination in Chernobyl…

On the contrary, the Artvertiser project un-visualises the visible by replacing (visual) data we usually consume on a daily basis. Julian Olivier and Clara Boj, Diego Diaz and Damian Stewart have developed a little binocular which, walking through the city, distresses our overcharged visual senses. Ads are detected by the machine and replaced by artworks of your choice (still images, video, animation…).


AWARDS

The aspects of Bruce Sterlings "atemporality" idea, the shallowness and disorder of contemporary (or atemporally) art are mirrored not only in this year'snominations, but also in the awarded work by Michelle Teran, "Buscando al Sr. Goodbar". Connecting the virtual and "real life," Teran uses geo tagged youtube videos in the city of Murcia, Spain, that automatically get displayed on GoogleEarth. The "participatory performance" offered a bus tour to explore the city's the geo-tagged places. The tour took simultaneously place on Google Earth and YouTube. With this (voyeuristic) work she wants to question the reason behind publishing intimate data with the exact geographic location. Her answers are not really convincing, seemingly shallow she states "people seem to have the urge to reveal and display their private lives." The award jury's statement didn't help to convince either. [7]

Connecting the (social) web and the physical space is in not so much a novelty and has been done in more interesting ways before.[8]

It seemed not to have undergone the filter of the artists' perception/opinion, world and future view, seems rather the ingredients for an uncooked meal. Take a youtube, take a google earth, travel to the place of investigation and invite some viewers to travel the map….

Should transmediale's future-barometer be the only truths, we'd face a mixture of a quite stressful, chaotic and indigestible digital era of consumption without time and space for reflection…. And a time of wild creation of new visual forms of anything you'd never known about…. It was definitely a very communicative, networked and entertaining event, and a big petty I couldn't stay for the whole event.

__________

[1] Atemporality is a "modern (I think he means contemporary) phenomenon… a problem in the philosophy of history. His definition is well worth checking out: The full transcript of the speech can be read on Sterling's blog

[2] The whole conference can be seen in video here. An interview with Bruce Sterling in german at de-bug

[3] Comment by Honor Harger, the curator of the exhibition in an interview with freshmilk.tv

[4]Agnes Meyer-Brandis' installation Inside the Tropospheric Laboratory looks for an answer to the question: "what are clouds made of"? By moving towards the clouds, on a micro-gravity flight with a German Space Agency plane, she leaves terrestrial realities behind, gets close to her subject of studies, trying to grasp it with her hands.

[5] here she was presenting various of her projects: the one I liked most was meteorites… a project in a siberian she organized public meteorite-crash-onto-earth-viewing event together with the museum.

[6] Old school film camera with a light source to convert it into projector. A software analyses the camera movement and makes the projection move accordingly. It is a mechanical version of a process that happens in the brain when watching a film with camera movement.

[7] Jury Statement:“Buscando al Sr Goodbar by Michelle Teran is a timely and considered exploration of synergies between online social space and physical urban spaces. Her work asks us to consider the hidden pockets of virtuosity that take place all around us. In her hands, online tools become not only a platform for display, but a method of discovery and reconnection to other people. She combines old methods (bus tours)and new (online tools) to create a work that is a complex commentary on our present moment, but also points the way to future layering of our digital and physical selves."

[8] Looking at works like Goldberg's 'The Robot in the Garden'[ link], and at [link], the builders association, Blast Theory, you will find a relevant use of the connection between the virtual and the "real"
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