On Transmediale

[A. G-C]

So what?

(...)
> Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 22:57:47 +0100
> To: <rekombinant at liste.rekombinant.org>
> Subject: [RK] Good Bye Reality! How Media Art Died But Nobody Noticed

[ the only report i found about transmediale 2006. /m ]

http://www.mazine.ws/node/230

Good Bye Reality! How Media Art Died But Nobody Noticed

Subjective notes about Transmediale 2006

by Armin Medosch on Tue, 2006-02-07


The festival Transmediale is one of the oldest and biggest of its
kind in Europe. Held annually since 1988, it started out as a video
festival. In the early days the VideoFest, as it was called then,
featured works which did not fit into the programme of the Berlin
Film Festival - the star studded - drum role, fanfare - Berlinale. In
the early 1990s the festival started presenting interactive works on
CD ROM - I think this was called multi-media at the time. With
changing technologies - adopting net art and generative and software
art in the late 1990s - the festival kept true to its beginnings by
maintaining the notion of critically engaging with new technologies
and presenting a broad spectrum of alternative currents in art,
technology and related theoretical production.

Until 2005 the festival carried the strap line 'international media
art festival'. This year, for the first time, the notion of 'media
art' has been silently dropped. For the diligent observer of the
field of media art this does not really come as a surprise but merely
represents the ongoing confusion and blatant opportunism which marks
contemporary production in the digital culture industry.

Since 2001 Andres Broeckmann has been artistic director of
Transmediale. The task given to him was to sharpen the profile of the
festival by inventing specific themes each year. His record, in that
regard, is rather mixed, to put it politely. In 2001 Transmediale was
devoted to do-it-yourself media which we are not really in a position
to critizise (given that we are in the process of organizing Takeaway
- festival of do-it-yourself media). What followed since then were
'go pulic!' in 2002, 'play global!' in 2003, 'fly utopia!', 2004 and
'basics!', 2005.

Sebastian Luetgers, Berlin based artist, programmer and activist,
said in an interview I did with him for Austrian Radio O1 programme
matrix that he thinks that those were not really proper themes but
catch-all terms which vaguely tried to catch the spirit of the time
without committing themselves to anything in particular. What
Transemdiale really was about in terms of the legitimisation of the
funding it gets, was, according to Luetgers, to strengthen Berlin's
image as a place of cultural innovation. This strategy is contained
in the untranslatable German phrase Hauptstadtkultur. A word by word
translation would be, "culture of the capital city"; but this does
not really express well the German discourse on its unloved and
underfunded old/new capital city.

The once divided city was a bullwark of Western style freedoms - the
combined freedoms of market style economies and democracy - divided
from its eastern half by a wall and surrounded by the GDR and the
tanks of the Red Army. Once the wall had come down the realization
was that Berlin had, for its relatively large size, very little in
terms of productive industries. The answer to this problem should be,
first, to make it the capital of Germany again which would be
bringing with it large scale building projects and jobs, and second,
take a gamble on the 'creative industry' coming to the rescue of a
city offering little else in terms of economic growth prospects.
Hence, festivals such as the Berlinale and the Transmediale are of
vital interest for marketing the city as a place to work, live, study
or visit.

On my daily journey from the appartment where I stayed in East
Berlin, Prenzlauerberg, to the Academy of Fine Arts in the Hansa-
Viertel, Tiergarten, the contradictions of this city in
transformations unfolded before my eyes. Only 10 years ago city
bouroughs such as Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte had been the throbbing
heart of The New East where the bars and clubs never closed and young
creatives lived along the motto of 'live hard, party hard'. In the
meantime Prenzlauerberg has been gentrified and converted into an
area favoured by the well heeled cultural middle class - called BoBo
in Germany (Bohemian Bourgeoise), while the bourough of Mitte has
become a charmless touristic area littered with grand government
buildings and the hubris of Potsdamer Platz - a completely new city
centre built within just a decade and dominated by the towering
corporate centres and logos of Mercedes and Sony.

This year, Transmediale took place at the old Academy of Fine Arts in
the midst of the Hansa Viertel. Here, Berlin-West had tried to become
a modern city with truly modernist architecture right after 1945. It
is an interesting irony that the failed modernistic adventures of the
1950s should be tried to get revived within the domain of media art
at the beginning of the 21st century. Transmediale 2006 was certainly
a success in terms of audience numbers. The old academy seemed to
burst at the seems occasionally. Getting a seat at the cafe or a
drink seemed near impossible at times. And the artistic director of
the festival, Andreas Broeckmann, equally seemed to be bursting with
confidence when I a aprroached him and asked for an interview. Even
the hint at the notion that there were some critical voices annoyed
him visibly. So it took some chasing until I was finally granted an
interview.

My line of inquiry, I need to explain, was a very particular one. I
was interested in what role such a festival plays a) within the field
of - lets still call it - media art, and b) within the bigger picture
of society, culture and politics. And the second question, which
partly should serve to answer the first one, was how the festival's
theme was actually dealt with in the festivals programme. It is one
thing to have a theme, another one to make it come alive in the
actual proceedings of lectures, discussions, screenings and
exhibition. This year's theme was, Mr.Broeckmann explained, 'Reality
Addicts' I quote from the position statement at the website:

"transmediale.06 is devoted to the Reality Addicts and their artistic
strategies, with which they subvert the technological paradigm of
reality. They demand more than the smooth surfaces of a mediatised
world, they enjoy the paradoxes, celebrate technical defects, and
play with the almost possible. They commit themselves to nonsense,
and seek to multiply reality by means of exaggeration, rupture,
distance, and ever new diversions."

A major inspiration for this main theme was the exhibition 'Smile
Machines' curated by Anne-Marie Duguet. The novelty of the approach,
according to Mr.Broeckmann, was contained in the notion of humour as
a subversive force. I found this quite startling in a number of ways.
First of all, if a festival which somehow relates to media art,
suddenly discovers humour as its unique selling point, this implies
that there had been no humour previously. This completely ignores the
fact that a lot of net art in the 1990s was all based on pranks and
hoaxes and subtle plays with notions of fixed identity. Luetgers
confirms my doubts and goes beyond. When you stress humour in such a
way, he said, you make it actually more difficult to deal with
certain issues. For instance, he continued, certain genealogies are
now constructed. A range of practices in the digital cultural domain
are now seen as having inherited the humorous spirit of Dadaism,
Surrealism and Situationism. Yet at the time, Luetgers claims, humour
may have been the least important aspect of those art movements.
Facing a rather grim social reality, the main message of those
movements was an obstinate Fuck You! addressed at the dominant powers
at the time. Only now the humorous aspects of those art movements
became more easily digestable, according to Luetgers.

Indeed, the best moments of the conference were involuntarily funny.
The first panel about humour politics was introduced by Paris based
theorist Brian Holmes. Quite eloquently he related the festival's
theme to the current outrage about cartoons printed first in a Danish
Newspaper. In his short summary Holmes referenced the use of humorous
tactics in the anti-globalisation movement, the gallows humour of
people in the Southern Hemisphere and the philosophical wit involved
in some advanced net art practices. From there on proceedings
descended into farce with Anne-Marie Duguet spending a good 20
minutes on failing to play a quicktime file. A pattern was
established. The most 'funny' moments came when some technological or
organisational problem disrupted or delayed proceedings. In between
we could hear some rather dry lectures by media art old timers such
as Jordan Crandall or Simon Penny, more suitable for a cultural
studies seminar at university rather than the grand conference
podium. A French professor drowned on about humour being actually not
funny at all. Marie-Louise Angerer sent everyone asleep with the
usual Freudian-Lacanian culture studies political correctness blah
blah. Katrien Jacobs, talking in net porn, and Shu Lea Cheang,
introducing her wide portfolio of art works and films, managed to
wake us up briefly again, before we descended into banalities such as
the iPod as the icon of the 21st century. The trade fair is next
month, this speaker should have been reminded.

So what about the exhibition then? Ms. Duguet curated a show which
explicitely set out to illustrate that certain positions have
actually a deep history by including 'historic' works by artists such
as Dara Birnbaum and Antonio Muntadas. It is certainly worth showing
such pieces for younger audiences, students and people not aware of
the many turns and twists first video art, then media art have taken
of the past 30 years. Nevertheless, the exhibition was really poor in
terms of showing contemporary work. In this area, the Google Will Eat
Itself project by our friends and guest lecturers Ubermorgen was one
of a few noted exceptions where the internet and the digital economy
actually played an important part. Another highlight was Burnstation
by Platoniq, shown behind the staircase. Maybe this was a Freudian
slip in terms of exhibition arrangement, but this Free Software and
Free Audio Culture project was the only project with some real street
credibility. Platoniq have realized a completely free and legitimate
environment for downloading and burning music under Creative Commons
licences. Both, Ubermorgen and Platoniq, had been nominated for the
Transmediale Award.

The winner of this year's award was Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Germany,
with the "SGM-Iceberg-Probe", a rather metaphorical and strangely
poetic project, while Platoniq had to share second place with Yuko
Mohri and Soichiro Mihara, Japan, for their "Vexations - Composition
in Progress", and a video work by Andres Ramirez Gaviria, Colombia.
Ubermorgen won the famous midnight sausage award, our commiserations
are with them.

Which brings us back to the main line of inquiry. Even before the
interview with Andreas Broeckmann I had the strange feeling that,
without making a big noise about it, Transmediale had distanced
itself from media art, and with it from postions and legitimation
strategies it had used for almost 20 years. The Smile Machines
exhibition showed a lot of video work, hardly anything digital or
networked there. The job of the exhibition was, according to
Mr.Broeckmann, to pull in a large non-specialist audience. While it
succeeded in doing that, it was a letdown for all those who had hoped
to see the latest and hottest digital works (apart from the two noted
exceptions, Ubermorgen and Platoniq). And then, on my repeated
insistence, Broeckmann confirmed that media art existed no more.
There was no such thing as a distinguished field of practice. It was
either art, where it did not matter which technology was employed, or
something else (he did not spell out the something else). In this day
and age, Broeckmann said, technology can not be the sole angle from
which an art practice can be looked upon.

Voila! Exactly my talking. Only that I had been saying that already
10 years ago, when the Broeckmanns of this world, the Svengalis of
the cultural buerocracy, were still promoting net art and the
'machinic' in cultural production. But as he looked rather smug after
he had said that I did not trouble him with any further questions.
Off he went to another reception. And I was left pondering the
implications of media art's sudden but not so unexpected death. The
signs had been up there already. Peter Weibel had been advertising
the age of digital everything for nearly 25 years before he abandoned
it, all in a rush, this year, by creating a show called "Post-media
Condition". What is going on? Are the former captains of media arts
now turning into rats who are the first to leave the sinking ship?
And what with all those newly founded faculties and MA courses of
media art worldwide? London, always being a bit slow in those areas,
only this year will have a media arts festival for the first time,
Node.London, thereby embracing a term which has not been too well
known on these shores.

To my opinion the talk about the end of media art is cheap and
conceptually lazy. If media art was understood as mainly being
determined by the technology, then this was a conceptual mistake in
the first place. It had always been about the intersections of
technology, culture and society, about where those different layers
meet and create interesting ruptures and points of interventions for
critical artists. The technologies might change but not the task of
critically engaging with new technologies and their role in society.
And in this respect not so much is different in 2006 from what it was
in 1996. As the industries turn out new hard- and softwares in ever
accelerating cycles and the big machines of war and business keep
using those technologies to control and determine our lives, we need
to keep being able to identify spaces where we can throw in the
spanner, create engagement, real participation and what I would call
real virtuality: not the empty promises of virtual worlds but the
virtuality or potentiality of utopian change in the real world, as
technologically enhanced as it may be. Pronouncing media art dead may
offer some short term advantages in terms of funding strategies but
is not of any help in the long term. And as we all know people
pronounced dead live longer.

http://www.transmediale.de




-------------------------------------------[  RK  ]
+ http://liste.rekombinant.org/wws/subrequest/rekombinant
+ http://www.rekombinant.org