[syndicate] On Transmediale

[Frederic Madre]

off topic

f. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sympa Owner [mailto:sympa at kilby.copyleft.no] On Behalf Of A. G-C
> Sent: Saturday, February 18, 2006 5:31 PM
> To: syndicate at anart.no
> Subject: [syndicate] On Transmediale
> 
> 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
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