[syndicate] On Transmediale

[marc]

why not?

>So what?
>
>(...)
>  
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>>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
>>    
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>[ 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
>
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>-------------------------------------------[  RK  ]
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