The Art of the Overhead - CALL FOR OVERHEADS

[linda hilfling]

The Art of the Overhead: Call for Overheads
30 Sept – 4 Oct 2005 Copenhagen, Denmark.
www.overheads.org 
Submission deadline August 25, 2005.

The Art of the Overhead is a small festival
celebrating artistic expression in a medium that is
almost forgotten in the age of digital reproduction:
the overhead projector. Both an exhibition and a live
event, the project is a part of a series of events in
Sweden and Denmark by the EAT (Sweden) – Experiments
in Art & Technology group.

Keynote speaker: Siegfried Zielinski, professor of
Media Archaeology and founding director of the Academy
of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany.

We are calling for works that engage in the art of
overhead Presentation, Remediation, Illusion and
Interaction. 

The way that Microsoft's PowerPoint application owes
its concept to the Overhead is a schoolbook example of
remediation. Yet, is it possible to re-capture this
"old" media through artistic interpretation in order
create something neither simply "new" nor nostalgic,
but a medium for telling meaningful stories today? 
 
EAT - The Art of the Overhead calls for artists,
designers, academics, media professionals, business
managers, culture producers, professional presenters
and storytellers of all kinds to contribute. 

SUGGESTED THEMES AND KEYWORDS
PRESENTATION
Keywords: bullet-lists, clip-arts, flow-charts,
diagrams, statistics, formulas, to the point, results,
conclusions, quotes.
INTERACTION
Keywords: games, fill in the blanks, hangman,
labyrinths, insinuation. 
REMEDIATION
Keywords: remixes, analogue/digital, old and new,
media archaeology, history, PowerPoint.
ILLUSION
Keywords: interference, optics, layers, patterns,
overlays, traces, double-vision, split-images,
distortions, deformations.

You may submit a single or a series of overhead slides
or send us proposals for installations and
performances that incorporate the use of overhead
projection. 

Please send your overhead-contributions directly to:
The Art of the Overhead 
Att: Kristoffer Gansing
K3 - School of Arts and Communication, Malmö
University 
205 06 Malmo 
Sweden

OR e-mail proposals for installations and performances
to submit at overheads.org 

If you are interested in presenting your submitted
overhead live during the event please state this. The
location of the exhibition and event will be Basement
in Copenhagen (next to Vega concert hall & night
club). 
Dates are set to September 30 – October 4, with
special event and party on the Saturday of October 1. 

Submission deadline is 25th of August 2005.

Background Concept Statement
In the thinking about the history of different media,
the logic of digital or “new media” have been
described in terms of “remediation”. Using this
perspective, it becomes clear that Microsoft’s
PowerPoint application is a digital remediation of the
Overhead slide. In regards to such analyses, the
approach of later new media theory has not been
without its critical benefits. However, it is also
characterised by a paradoxical return to a modernist
agenda. Only by denying new media forms any autonomy
as being radically new, instead showing their
dependency on older forms, could they be established
as truly specific and thus “new” subjects whose own,
now multifaceted, workings could be explored. This
modernist turn was a welcome escape from the
libertarian techno dreams of the interactive .commers
and the Wired cyberspace neo-hippies that had
dominated the scene for some time. 

However, now might be the time to put the talk about
new media at a distance and look for alternative
paths. The Art of the Overhead calls for a more
dynamic approach to media practice with an explicit
historic reference – one that is in line with what
media historian Siegfried Zielinski has called a media
“an-archaeology”.

An approach that looks for loopholes in time and bring
forth visions of older media technologies’ occasional
superiority over newer ones. The focus on the now
nearly archaic medium of the overhead as a means for
artistic expression provides an alternative to the
technological development race of today’s consumer
driven media industries. Only by applying non-linear
models of thinking media history, can the depressing
commercial and industrial state of media production
today be challenged. 
            
The aim of the Overhead festival is to be an open
platform for collective experiment with a common
starting ground - to put all participants’ focus on
one medium, which will only serve as a common
framework for artistic expression that is inclined to
find its way elsewhere. 


Contact Information
See our website at www.overheads.org for program and
details on our other overhead activities!

To subscribe to our newsletter please send an e-mail
to: 
oh-news-request at labbs.net
and write subscribe in the subject line.

You are also welcome to contact us at
info at overheads.org

About E.A.T. Sweden – Experiments in Art & Technology 
The Art of the Overhead is brought to you by EAT
Sweden, a group of artists and engineers based in
Sweden and Denmark that in its name pays homage to the
projects of the late pioneer Billy Klüver and which
works with a critical rethinking of the relationship
between art and technology.