December 06, 2006
transmediale.07
unfinish!
transmediale.07: unfinish! :: Berlin, January 31 - February 4, 2007 :: Akademie der Kuenste :: Berlin, Hanseatenweg 10 :: Open (only during the festival!): Daily 10.00-21.00 hrs :: Admission: 3 Euro (reduced 2 Euro).
Exhibition unfinish! :: The festival's motto relates to artistic works with digital media, in which 'unfinishing' is either the inherent drama of being eternally open-ended, or highlights the possibility of continuous transformation and advancement. In the context of this theme, transmediale.07 explores the conditions of finiteness and presents a range of artistic means and strategies through which seemingly fixed situations can be kept in flux and open to change.
The exhibition of transmediale.07 deals with the motto unfinish!, too, and presents works by David Rokeby (ca), Herwig Weiser (at), Kurt d'Haeseleer (be), Herman Asselberghs (be), Antoine Schmitt (fr), and others, in the Akademie der Kuenste in Berlin (Hanseatenweg).
David Rokeby (ca) - 'Taken' :: Interactive Installation, 2002 :: 'Taken' is an interactive video installation which provides two readings of the activities in the gallery space using surveillance cameras and a double projection. 'Taken' suggests a critical reflection on the methods of observation and classification of people in public spaces. On one side of the projection, gallery visitors are extracted from the ground of the gallery floors and walls and then looped back onto themselves at 20 second intervals. This image stream provides a kind of seething chaos of activity. The other side is a catalogue of the gallery visitors, their heads are zoomed in on and adjectives such as 'unsuspecting', 'complicit' or 'hungry' are attributed to them. These individual head shots are collected as a set of the last 200 visitors and occasionally presented as a matrix.
David Rokeby is a sound and video installation artist based in Toronto, Canada. He studied at the Ontario College of Art where he began to use technology to make pieces that directly engage the human body, or that involve artificial perception systems. His works address issues of digital surveillance, while engaging as well in a critical examination of the differences between human and artificial intelligence.
Herwig Weiser (at) - 'Death Before Disko' :: Installation, 2006 :: Herwig Weiser has built a machine which confronts us with its technical elements in a particularly clear and alienating way. 'Death Before Disko' uses an online data stream from space observation and translates it into simple yet spectacular sound and light events. With the growth of digital technology, users become more and more distant from the physical hardware of their laptop or hi-fi units. 'Death Before Disko' aims to come back to the roots of the hardware, and shows how our relationship towards technology is more often emotional than rational.
Weiser is a interdisciplinary artist in the broadest sense - his long term investigation of the relationship between electronic systems, sound and material environments and the representation of the raw hardware stock that drives these technologies, draws on aesthetic, engineering and programming disciplines, as well as a wider spectrum of scientific principle.
Kurt d'Haeseleer (be) - 'Scripted Emotions' :: Installation, 2005 :: Honourable Mention, transmediale Award 2007 :: 'Scripted Emotions' is a pseudo romantic drama for two tourist binoculars: The installation consists of two binoculars with built-in screens. The spectators can roam with the binoculars through a digital landscape where the nocturnal drama takes its course…
D'Haeseleer is a Belgian video artist who has been associated with the Brussels collective De Filmfabriek, doing the videography for multimedia theatre and dance projects. His work applies state of the art digital montage and production techniques. From seemingly everyday shots he creates organic and associative images.
Herman Asselberghs (be) - 'Proof of Life' :: Video (30'), 2005 :: Nominated for the transmediale Award 2007 :: The video image shows the interior of an empty, open space: the borderline between inside and out is thin. Human presence can only be felt through the adjoining sounds: a male voice recalls horrendous TV-images, a popular disaster movie, a long-term imprisonment or hostage-taking. The radical rift between sound and image reveals a film which needs to be listened to. The described scenes come uncomfortably close to the visitors. A sound movie with empty images which testify to their own, problematic redundancy.
Asselberghs is an artist and an art critic. He writes about audio-visual culture in 'De Tijd', and he teaches in the 'Transmedia' department at Sint-Lukas College in Brussels. He is a founding member of Square vzw and a co-curator of [sonic]square, an ambulant concert series for electronic music. His installations have been shown, among others, by the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and documenta X (Kassel).
Antoine Schmitt (fr) - 'still living' :: Installation, 2006 :: Nominated for the transmediale Award 2007 :: To Schmitt 'still living' inaugurates a new personal artistic language. The project revolves around the concept of 'living' graphics. The graphics are using immediately readable visual codes: pie-charts, bars, curves, etc. But instead of transmitting information about specific developments and alteration, they produce vague and imprecise images. Instead of strict rationality we see metaphors of a type of indecision which is not supposed to exist in our world dominated by precise numbers.
Artist and programmer Antoine Schmitt uses programming as a essential artistic material, to create installations, online exhibitions, performances and CD-Roms, in which he confronts abstract artificial systems with visitors or performers. His work has been shown at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), at Sonar (Barcelona), at Ars Electronica (Linz). In 2001 he received an Honorary Mention for his work 'Vexation 1' at transmediale.01.
Other Works
Herwig Turk / Guenter Stoeger (at) - 'setting 04_2006' :: Video-Installation :: The installation 'setting 04_2006' is part of the Blindspot-Project which aims at investigating the interface between science and art. The installation shows the hands of a scientist who performs the movements of four consecutive throughputs of the same experiment - without the necessary instruments. This demonstration of gestures highlights the ambivalence of repetition and the theatricality of scientific experiments. Herwig Turk and Guenter Stoeger are founding members of HILUS (Intermedia Research Project) in Vienna, and of the Blindspot project.
Moon Na (kr) - 'Against God by Water Pistol' :: Video (1'40), 2006 :: The protagonist (the artist herself) is armed with a water pistol and 'shoots' it into the sky on a rainy day. The act of rebelling against god with only a toy is deliberately paradoxical and underlines the implicit failure: A strong gesture of not accepting given rules, including the force of gravity, and a poetical defiance concerning one's place in this world. Moon Na lives and works in Seoul. After her degree in Fine Arts in Fine Arts at Saint Martins College in London, she took part in several group exhibitions, including 'About Beauty' at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and the Gwangju Biennale in Korea.
Aram Bartholl (de) - 'Random Screen' :: Installation, 2006 :: Honourable Mention, transmediale Award 2007 :: 'Random Screen' is a mechanical, thermodynamic screen working without electricity. Conventional tea candles illuminate and generate the changes on the 4x4 pixel screen. This work is part of a series of low-tech screen projects that were originally inspired by the Blinkenlights media facade of the Chaos Computer Club in Berlin. Aram Bartholl comes from Bremen and has lived and worked in Berlin since 1995. He studied architecture at the University of the Arts in Berlin. His graduation thesis as an engineer won him the Browserday competition 2001. He is a permanent member of the 'Urban Media Salon'.
Roman Kirschner (at) - 'Roots' :: Installation, 2006 :: 'Roots' is a dreamlike screen that follows an old Persian image: A bush growing heads... In a green and brownish fluid iron crystals grow steadily... Bubbles ascend like jellyfish… Branches break off and sink to the dark ground… Thick clouds hovering over the scene. Roman Kirschner comes from Vienna, where he studied philosophy and art history. He continues his studies at the Kunsthochschule fuer Medien in Koeln. He co-founded the artists collective //////////fur////.
Christoph Korn (de) - 'Sorge und Kapitalismus' :: Sound and Web Installation, 2005 :: The sound installation confronts precise time data pronounced by one voice with another one offering poetic and associative words. Every hour a time engraving is produced randomly, and is stored in an archive accessible on the website. From this archive the machine reads time engravings, and - at the same time - it selects simple terms describing human existence, phrasing different possibilities of 'Sorge' (care, concern, sorrow) under capitalism. Christoph Korn studied political science and philosophy in Frankfurt/Main. In the Eighties he did political work. In the early Nineties he started working on artistic projects, including composition, radioplays, installations, text and web-based works, dealing with language and time. 'Sorge und Kapitalismus' was commissioned by the German public broadcaster Hessischer Rundfunk.
Richard Chartier / Taylor Deupree (us) - Specification.Fifteen :: Sound piece 2006 :: Honourable mention transmediale Award 2007 :: Sound artists Richard Chartier and Taylor Deupree created 'Specification.Fifteen' as a commission for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of renowned Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. His series of Seascapes inspired Chartier's and Deupree's live piece which premiered in March 2006 in front of the panoramic window of the Museum's Lerner Room as the sun set across the city's skyline. 'Specification.Fifteen' evokes the stillness and opposing yet related spaces of Sugimoto's Seascapes which suggest infinitesimal change under a seemingly uniform surface. Richard Chartier (born 1971), sound and installation artist, explores in his work the interrelationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, and the act of listening. In 2000 he formed together with Taylor Deupree the recording label LINE, presenting compositions and installations by international sound artists and composers. Taylor Deupree (born 1971) is a sound artist, graphic designer, and photographer residing in New York. Founder of the music labels 12k, LINE and Happy, he devotes his work to the aesthetics of the contemporary and the development of the digital minimalism, often in collaboration with other artists.
transmediale.07
unfinish!
festival for art and digital culture berlin info[at]transmediale.de
Posted by jo at December 6, 2006 12:32 PM
