Transmittance explores collaboration which is local, global, networked and broadcasted. It involves an artistic group of performers, visual artists, musicians and computer programmers to research performative possibilities of streaming, broadcasting and telepresence forging new types of performance and audience. With focus on critical and socially-aware artistic languages this work is based on asking questions about body, self and society - opening non-dualistic perspectives.

The project tries to rethink the notions of spectatorship and spectacle, ways of watching and seeing and the audience as spectators from the outside. In framework of free telepresence technologies it is a quest to open new spaces of visibility for performance and new media art and while critically deconstruct also actively bypass power structures that have a hold on physical spaces of artistic representation. Emphasis is made on creative use of free and open source software and its impact on artistic process and collaboration.

The project develops a specific method of improvised performance which allows compositional freedom beside specific prepared scenes at the same time and in the process collide different specifics of various artistic media (performance art, expanded cinema, sound art, new media realities).

Transmittance is a project proposed by Maja Delak & Luka PrinÄŸiÄŸ.

Transmittance_#2 is in collaboration with: Loup Abramovici, BoÅ¡tjan BoÅ≤iÄŸ, Maja Delak, Matija Ferlin, Jakob Leben, Ana PeÄŸar, Luka PrinÄŸiÄŸ, Maja Å orli, Igor Å tromajer, Jelena Å∏drale and NataÅ¡a Å∏ivkoviÄΩ.

Produced by: Emanat Institute, Ljubljana
Coproduced by: Galerija Kapelica (Zavod K6/4), Tobacco 001 Cultural Center (MGML), Ljubljana
Financial support: Ministry for culture of Slovenia, City of Ljubljana

Previous Transmittance phases:

Transmittance #1.5, Ljubljana/Graz [26/8 2011] with Maja Delak, Luka PrinÄŸiÄŸ, ESC Gallery, Graz, Reni Hofmueler and “mur.sat” project // organized by Emanat Institute, ESC Gallery Graz

Transmittance #1 Pula,.hr [27/5 2011] with Marko BolkoviÄΩ, Maja Delak, Matija Ferlin, Luka PrinÄŸiÄŸ, Messmatik, Rea Korani, Mauricio Ferlin, Marcel Mars/Nenad RomiÄŸ // executive production by: Egle VoÅ¡ten // produced and organized by: Polis Jadran Europa Pula, Emanat Institute Ljubljana // financially supported by: Ministry of Culture Croatia, Municipality of Pula, Ministry of Culture RS, City Municipality of Ljubljana // supported by: Region of Istria, Tourism Office Pula

Transmittance #0, Teatro Petrella, Longiano, Italy [19/12 2010] Maja Delak & Luka PrinÄŸiÄŸ (Wanda & Nova deViator) // preparation of the tools / open rehearsal // with Adele Cacciagrano, Tihana Maravic, Silvia Mei, Fabrizio Zanuccoli // program VIA DEL CONFINE, The East Side (of the moon) // curator: Nhandan Chirco // organized by: YANVII, Rad’Art Project/Artéco, Teatro Petrella, Emanat Institute

Dirty Dozen BodyLab, Berlin, Ljubljana [28/8 2010] Luka Prinğiğ & Maja Delak - research of streamed interactive performance by invitation of Kathleen Reynolds (Berlin team: Michel Abdoul / Pascal Baes / Joao Costa / Awatef Fettar / Oscar Garcia / Dusan Pejcic / Kiril Bikov / Kathleen Reynolds / Aï Suzsuki / Gill Viandier / Raphaël Vincent / Vero Mota)

http://transmittance.si || http://wndv.si || http://emanat.si

Mapping the Local presents an overview of the major phenomena, trends and issues of contemporary art based on various subjects in each semester; a special emphasis will be placed on the East European region, in the form of seminars, presentations held by invited lecturers, field trips to museums, institutions and artist studios. The course is primarily directed towards Erasmus students as well as local students of the Intermedia and Fine Art Theory and Curatorial Studies departments.

While offering an insight into the Hungarian contemporary art scene, one of the course’s main intentions is to develop personal contacts and cultural interactions between local and foreign students fostering an emerging intercultural dialogue. It combines both theoretical and practical methods and is led by Zoltán Kékesi and Szabolcs KissPál, a scholar and an artist.

Site Specific Interventions in Public Space is a survey of the evolution of the different art practices relating to site specific and other public art projects or interventions which take place outside of the traditional museum environment, including sculpture, installations, graffiti and performances specifically conceived of as forms of artistic discourse situated in public spaces and/or within the routines of everyday life.

The class is taught by artist and author Allan Siegel and includes a discussion of selected theoretical works well as an analysis of significant specific projects and art work. Additionally, drawing upon the discussions and readings, students will apply their ideas to situations and locations throughout the city.

Invited speakers for the classes include:

Andreas Fogarasi - Golden Lion Award 52nd Venice Biennial; solo shows among others at Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Grazer Kunstverein; Georg Kargl - Fine Arts, Vienna; Lombard Freid Projects, New York; Ludwig Museum, Aachen; Ernst Museum, Budapest. Tamás Kaszás - Recipient of Smohay Prize 2010 and Studio of Young Artists Association; exhibitions at W139, Amsterdam; NBK, Berlin; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Istambul Biennial 2011. Eszter Lázár - art historian and curator of many international group exhibitions with a focus on Contemporary Central and Eastern European Art, lecturer on the Dept. for Art Theory and Curatorial Studies, former curator of kArton Contemporary Art Gallery. Little Warsaw - Collective name for artists András Gálik and Bálint Havas. The duo exhibited at the Venice Biennial; the Berlin Biennial; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; GfZK, Leipzig; ApexArt Gallery, New York; and the 7th Manifesta. Their work is featured in Art After Conceptual Art published by MIT Press. Ilona Németh - Munkácsy-prize beholder, exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford; Kunsthalle Budapest; 49th Venice Biennial; Expo Hannover 2000; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; etc. Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Intermedia Dpt. Bratislava. János Sugár - Exhibitions among others at Annely Juda Fine Arts, London; Kunstverein, Stuttgart; Exit Art, New York; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Anthology Film Archive, New York; Documenta IX, Kassel; etc. professor at the Intermedia Dept. of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. János Szoboszlai - art historian and curator, adjunct lecturer and head of the Dept. for Art Theory and Curatorial Studies, chief curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Dunaújváros (ICA-D), former director of acb Contemporary Art Gallery. Tibor Szemző - graduate of the Hungarian Music Academy, musician, composer and filmmaker, founder of the acclaimed Hungarian ensemble Group 180 and The Gordian Knot Company.

The Hungarian University of Fine Arts joined the Erasmus Program in 1998. Over the past thirteen years the number of our partner institutions has grown to 48. Each year 40 students are selected to travel abroad on scholarship and nearly as many international Erasmus students arrive to study at the HUFA. Students studying at the HUFA, besides course work in areas such as sculpture, painting, Intermedia or photography, participate in, and organize, projects and exhibitions on an off campus.

Contact information for the International Office of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts: Zsófia Rudnay / International Coordinator / Hungarian University of Fine Arts / email: foreign [at] mke.hu / tel: +36 1 478 0980 / web: www.mke.hu

This panel, then, seeks to push this area fur­ther, par­tic­u­larly em­pha­siz­ing the role of media and me­di­al­iza­tion: Brian Mas­sumi’s and Mark Hansen’s work, for ex­am­ple, de­spite its sig­nif­i­cance, con­tin­ues to em­ploy an un­dif­fer­en­ti­ated no­tion of “em­bod­i­ment“ to de­scribe in­ter­sen­so­r­ial per­cep­tion.

In­ter­art Stud­ies has es­tab­lished it­self as a field wherein schol­ars from a va­ri­ety of dis­ci­plines an­a­lyze the in­ter­re­la­tion be­tween dif­fer­ent art forms based on his­tor­i­cally di­ver­gent con­cepts of mono- and in­ter­me­di­al­ity. In­ter­me­di­al­ity, in turn, de­notes in­ter­re­lated strate­gies of dif­fer­ent media de­signs that gen­er­ate new forms of pre­sen­ta­tion and re­cep­tion modes – modes that amount to more than just an ac­cu­mu­la­tion of the media in­volved. To cite one ex­am­ple: the in­te­gra­tion of film/video in some the­atre per­for­mances today merges 3-D-(the stage) and 2-D-(the screen) tech­nolo­gies. This in­ter­re­la­tion not only changes the stage de­sign, but also af­fects the ac­tors’ per­for­mances as they in­ter­act with each other while main­tain­ing vis­i­bil­ity in front of the screen. This si­mul­tane­ity de­mands in­creased at­ten­tion to both nat­ural (the co-ac­tors) and tech­ni­cal media (film/video) – and, by de­fault, the same ap­plies to the re­cep­tion modes of the au­di­ence.

Con­se­quently, the no­tion of in­ter­me­di­al­ity com­prises media pre­sen­ta­tion strate­gies and in­ter­sen­so­r­ial per­cep­tion modes. This new phe­nom­e­non or trend is, as of yet, barely ac­counted for in In­ter­art Stud­ies, ex­cept­ing a few no­table mod­els such as Car­o­line A. Jones’s con­cept of “sen­so­rium” that re­lates sen­so­r­ial per­cep­tion to cul­tural me­di­al­iza­tion. In­ter­sen­so­r­ial per­cep­tion, nonethe­less, is cur­rently emerg­ing as a promi­nent area in var­i­ous dis­ci­plines, show­cas­ing new phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal ap­proaches.

This panel, then, seeks to push this area fur­ther, par­tic­u­larly em­pha­siz­ing the role of media and me­di­al­iza­tion: Brian Mas­sumi’s and Mark Hansen’s work, for ex­am­ple, de­spite its sig­nif­i­cance, con­tin­ues to em­ploy an un­dif­fer­en­ti­ated no­tion of “em­bod­i­ment“ to de­scribe in­ter­sen­so­r­ial per­cep­tion. As a re­sult, they ig­nore the dif­fer­ences of sen­so­r­ial data, which an­chor sense per­cep­tions in di­verse cul­tural con­texts. Ad­di­tion­ally, the me­di­ated and hence cul­tur­ally pre-formed char­ac­ter of sen­sual per­cep­tion is mostly dis­re­garded in favour of a con­cept that em­braces a dif­fuse, im­me­di­ate sens­ing process that seems to be ‘pre-me­dial’ or ‘ex­tra-me­dial’. At its core, and to high­light the cul­tural dif­fer­ences of sen­so­r­ial data, this panel seeks to ad­dress cur­rent re­search un­der­taken by the cog­ni­tive sci­ences to em­pha­size the in­ter­sec­tions of in­ter­art and in­ter­sen­so­rium as processes of per­cep­tion that are in­ter­locked with cul­tural for­ma­tions – a tri­an­gu­lar con­t­a­m­i­na­tion or rec­i­p­ro­cal process much in need of fur­ther ques­tion­ing and ex­am­i­na­tion.

Paper Ab­stracts

Un­medi­ated Ex­pe­ri­ence? Re-Me­di­at­ing Phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal Ap­proaches
by Dr. Chris­tiane Heibach

Phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal ap­proaches have be­come very promi­nent within the last few years. One rea­son for that might be that mul­ti­me­dia art de­mands mul­ti­sen­sory modes of per­cep­tion that chal­lenge the tra­di­tional epis­te­mo­log­i­cal mod­els that focus on vi­sual per­cep­tion and inner imag­i­na­tive processes. They rely on dis­tant per­cep­tion and ne­glect the in­ter­re­la­tion be­tween sen­sory data and their in­di­vid­ual in­ter­pre­ta­tion in the per­ciever’s mind. Fur­ther­more per­cep­tion is the re­sult of the in­ter­re­la­tion be­tween mul­ti­sen­sory per­cep­tion and emo­tional, sub- and pre­con­scious processes – and this is em­pha­sized by some con­tem­po­rary phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal ap­proaches. But their con­cepts mostly un­der­stand phys­i­cal/sen­sory ex­pe­ri­ence as im­me­di­ate, that means: un­medi­ated. From a me­diathe­o­ret­i­cal point of view un­medi­ated ex­pe­ri­ence doesn’t exist as we only per­ceive through media – be it the human body or the air which trans­ports sound waves and light or the tech­ni­cal media we use for com­mu­ni­ca­tion and in­for­ma­tion dis­tri­b­u­tion. The ques­tion my pre­sen­ta­tion will ad­dress is the fol­low­ing: How can mul­ti­sen­sory and bod­ily ex­pe­ri­ence be com­bined with con­cepts of media with­out falling back into the clas­si­cal epis­te­mo­log­i­cal sub­ject-ob­ject di­vi­sion? And what kind of per­cep­tion model is needed to be able to ex­plain the com­plex­ity of our daily mul­ti­me­dia en­vi­ron­ment?

In­ter­me­dia and the Aware­ness of Synes­the­sia
by Dr. Cre­tien van Campen

Synes­the­sia has re­ceived much at­ten­tion in sci­ence, art and in par­tic­u­lar in the over­lap­ping fields of dig­i­tal art and in­ter­me­dia in the last decades. Artists and sci­en­tists in these fields share a com­mon in­ter­est in human per­cep­tion. In the arts, synes­the­sia refers to a range of phe­nom­ena of si­mul­ta­ne­ous per­cep­tion of two or more stim­uli as one gestalt ex­pe­ri­ence. In neu­ro­science, synes­the­sia is more strictly de­fined as the elic­i­ta­tion of per­cep­tual ex­pe­ri­ences in the ab­sence of the nor­mal sen­sory stim­u­la­tion.

About one in twenty-three per­sons has a type of ‘neu­ro­log­i­cal’ synes­the­sia. Over 60 types have been re­ported, and peo­ple dif­fer in in­ten­sity of the ex­pe­ri­ence. The most com­mon type of synes­the­sia is col­ored week­days, while the type of per­ceiv­ing col­ored let­ters and num­bers is most stud­ied by sci­en­tists, and the type of col­ored sound and music is most ex­plored by artists.

The neu­ro­sci­en­tific de­f­i­n­i­tion of synes­the­sia lim­its the num­ber of so-called ‘synes­thetes’ to 4% in the pop­u­la­tion. This num­ber con­trasts with the large amount of peo­ple who are in­ter­ested in art forms that pre­sent synes­thetic ex­pe­ri­ences to the pub­lic.

This raises ques­tions like: is synes­the­sia ge­net­i­cally fixed at birth? Or is there a range of types of synes­thetic per­cep­tions in which a ge­net­i­cal dis­po­si­tion for synes­the­sia can be de­vel­oped? How wide is that range? How do bi­o­log­i­cal, so­cial and cul­tural fac­tors in­ter­act in this process? How do peo­ple de­velop dif­fer­ent synes­thetic sen­si­bil­i­ties? Slightly dif­fer­ent from the cur­rent neu­ro­sci­en­tific view on ‘neu­ro­log­i­cal synes­the­sia’, I will pro­pose a view on synes­the­sia that also in­cludes so­cial and cul­tural in­ter­ac­tions, which I as­sume will ac­count bet­ter for in­di­vid­ual dif­fer­ences in the aware­ness of synes­the­sia.

The Artist as Sen­sory Ma­chine in the Post Re­al­ity
by Ran­dall Packer

In what I have come to refer to as the post re­al­ity, we have be­come a so­ci­ety of “su­per-par­tic­i­pants” – ap­pro­pri­at­ing, am­pli­fy­ing and redi­rect­ing in­for­ma­tion via the so­cial media. In the post re­al­ity, the su­per-par­tic­i­pant feeds on user feed­back, in which every­thing they do, think, and say is cap­tured and processed and remixed and re-broad­cast – their every sen­sory im­pulse is con­nected and re-con­nected to the un­blink­ing eye of the elec­tronic media. As a re­sult, I have con­cluded it is im­per­a­tive in the cur­rent epoch that the artist must now find new tech­niques and method­olo­gies to more fully em­brace mul­ti­me­dia and its per­va­sive­ness or else be­come in­ef­fec­tual as an artist. This ne­ces­sity is akin to László Mo­holy-Nagy’s ur­gent view of the gesamtkunst­werk in the early 20th cen­tury when he de­clared: “What we need is not the gesamtkunst­werk along­side and sep­a­rate from which life flows by, but a syn­the­sis of all the vital im­pulses spon­ta­neously form­ing it­self into the all em­brac­ing gesamtwerk (life) which abol­ishes all iso­la­tion, in which all in­di­vid­ual ac­com­plish­ments pro­ceed from a bi­o­log­i­cal ne­ces­sity and cul­mi­nate in a uni­ver­sal ne­ces­sity.” There is now the ne­ces­sity for a cur­rent day gesamtkunst­werk, or gesamt­daten­werk as Roy As­cott has called it, in which the artist moves be­yond ab­strac­tion, be­yond rep­re­sen­ta­tion, be­yond the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief: the artist be­comes, in ef­fect, fully en­gaged as a sen­sory ma­chine. To demon­strate this idea and its im­pli­ca­tion, I will or­ga­nize and pre­sent a multi-sen­sory read­ing – a rhyth­mi­cal, vi­sual, tex­tual, ges­tural read­ing – that re­flects on cur­rent artis­tic thought con­cern­ing the artist’s role (and re­spon­si­bil­ity) in re­spond­ing to and com­ment­ing on the trans­for­ma­tive ef­fects of the post real con­di­tion.

Sen­so­r­ial Transcod­ing. Hy­per­modal Con­fig­u­ra­tions of Per­cep­tion and Ex­pres­sion in Elec­tronic Art
by Bir­git Mers­mann

The novel trans­me­dial as me­dia-trans­gress­ing qual­ity of elec­tronic in­ter­art forms is rec­i­p­ro­cally re­lated to their grow­ing mul­ti­modal po­tency. As Brian Mas­sumi has high­lighted when re­flect­ing on the sit­u­a­tion of media in cri­sis, “the dig­i­tal isn’t a medium. (…) Dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy is an ex­pand­ing net­work of con­nec­tive and fu­sional po­ten­tial. You can take an input in any sense modal­ity, and trans­late or trans­duce it into an­other.” (Mas­sumi 2008) Draw­ing upon this trans­me­dia ap­proach, the paper stud­ies inter/ac­tions of sen­so­r­ial transcod­ing as fun­da­men­tal con­di­tion of dig­i­tal­ity.

On the basis of con­tem­po­rary elec­tronic art by artists from dif­fer­ent cul­tural back­grounds (among them Golan Levin, Hung Keung, Kim Kichul), it will in­ves­ti­gate the si­mul­ta­ne­ous trans­la­tions and mu­tual tran­si­tions be­tween sen­sory per­cep­tions and ex­pres­sions on dif­fer­ent modal com­plex­ity lev­els such as speak­ing and writ­ing, lis­ten­ing and read­ing, sound­ing and hear­ing, vi­su­al­iz­ing and view­ing, touch­ing and sens­ing. The pur­pose of this sen­so­r­ial transcod­ing analy­sis is three­fold: 1. to pon­der how a new the­ory of dig­i­tal synaes­thet­ics can be built on the cat­e­gory and con­cept of hy­per­modal­ity, 2. to ex­plore the con­nec­tiv­ity mode be­tween dig­i­tal ab­strac­tion and dig­i­tal em­bod­i­ment, and 3. to dis­cern the uni­ver­sal and cul­ture-de­ter­mined com­po­nents of the cod­i­fi­ca­tion of (multi)sen­sory ex­pe­ri­ence.

Beauty and the brain
by Prof. Semir Zeki

Sub­jec­tive ex­pe­ri­ences, which have not been amend­able to ex­per­i­men­tal mea­sure­ments in the past can now be mea­sured in terms of brain ac­tiv­ity and re­lated to the in­ten­sity of the de­clared ex­pe­ri­ences. This in­flu­ences a new chap­ter in the study of the brain and its ac­tiv­ity in re­la­tion to ex­pe­ri­ences such as love, hate, de­sire and beauty in ad­di­tion to the study of per­cep­tion, which is it­self a sub­jec­tive ex­pe­ri­ence

The Avant-Gardes’ Every­day Sen­so­rium: On Tast­ing and Smelling Mod­ernism
by Anke Fin­ger

This paper adds to an in­creas­ing trend rein­ves­ti­gat­ing mod­ernism on the basis of the ‘or­di­nary’ or the ‘every­day’. How­ever, based on the schol­ar­ship of Madalina Di­a­conu, Yuriko Saito, Car­o­line Jones, Ce­cilia Novero, John Roberts, and oth­ers, the pur­pose here, ex­plic­itly, is to un­cover an every­day ais­thetic within avant-garde move­ments and to high­light and ex­am­ine those senses, those modes and media of per­cep­tion that, in a long aes­thetic and philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tion, have been mar­gin­al­ized: the senses of taste and smell. While a West­ern ma­te­r­ial cul­tural stud­ies focus de­tected many in­spir­ing con­nec­tions be­tween mod­ernism and con­sump­tion, cor­re­spond­ing analy­ses of avant-garde move­ments and their prod­ucts have been bur­dened by an overem­pha­sis on the vi­sual and the au­di­tory. Over time, they also hardly ques­tioned the method­olog­i­cal an­gles by which a cer­tain epis­te­mo­log­i­cal tra­di­tion of avant-garde schol­ar­ship has taken place. This paper, in work­ing with se­lect art prod­ucts from Fu­tur­ism (Marinetti’s cook­book), Ex­pres­sion­ism (Claire Goll), Sur­re­al­ism (Guil­laume Apol­li­naire) and a num­ber of lesser known works and artists, em­pha­sizes an in­ter­sen­sory and in­ter­arts ap­proach to the avant-gardes and their media. It will show that the ques­tion of every­day aes­thet­ics in mod­ernism is in­vari­ably in­ter­twined with the cul­tural habits or rup­tures of every­day ais­thet­ics and should in­spire ex­plo­rations into an at­mos­pher­i­cally ori­ented mod­ernism of over­lap­ping life-worlds (Lebenswel­ten) that re­mains to be de­fined.

Bios of the Par­tic­i­pants

Cre­tien van Campen is sci­en­tific re­searcher, au­thor and ed­i­tor in so­cial sci­ence and fine arts. He is af­fli­ated as a se­nior re­searcher at the Nether­lands In­sti­tute for So­cial Re­search and mod­er­a­tor of Synes­thet­ics Nether­lands, the web com­mu­nity of synes­thetes in the Nether­lands. He is ed­i­tor of the Leonardo on­line bib­li­og­ra­phy Synes­the­sia in Art and Sci­ence. His lat­est book is The Hid­den Sense: Synes­the­sia in Art and Sci­ence (MIT Press 2007). He has pub­lished in the fields of the senses, per­cep­tion & art and health, hap­pines & well-be­ing.

Anke Fin­ger is As­so­ci­ate Pro­fes­sor of Ger­man Stud­ies and Com­par­a­tive Lit­er­a­ture at the Uni­ver­sity of Con­necti­cut. Her re­search in­ter­ests in­clude Ger­man and Com­par­a­tive Mod­ernism, In­ter­art Stud­ies/Lit­er­a­ture and Other Arts, Avant-Gardes, Aes­thet­ics, Media The­ory and Phi­los­o­phy, In­ter­cul­tur­al­ity and Com­par­a­tive Lit­er­a­ture. Re­cent pub­li­ca­tions: The Aes­thet­ics of the Total Art­work: On Bor­ders and Frag­ments (ed., with Danielle Fol­lett, 2011); Das Gesamtkunst­werk der Mod­erne (2006); Vilém Flusser: An In­tro­duc­tion (with Rainer Guldin and Gus­tavo Bernardo (2011)). She is co-ed­i­tor of the on­line-jour­nal “Flusser Stud­ies: Mul­ti­lin­gual Jour­nal on Cul­tural and Media The­ory”.

Chris­tiane Heibach is a re­searcher in aesthtics, media and lit­er­ary stud­ies at at the Karl­sruhe Uni­ver­sity of Arts and De­sign. Since 2009 she is con­duct­ing her own re­search pro­ject “Epis­te­mol­ogy of Mul­ti­me­dia”, funded by the Ger­man Re­search Foun­da­tion and is Re­search Fel­low at the HfG-Re­search In­sti­tute. In 2007 she com­pleted her ha­bil­i­ta­tion on mul­ti­me­dia per­form­ing art forms at the de­part­ment of Com­par­a­tive Lit­er­ary Stud­ies and Media at the Uni­ver­sity of Er­furt where she worked as as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor until 2008. Re­search fields: Me­di­aepis­te­mol­ogy, aes­thet­ics of new media, his­tory and aes­thet­ics of in­ter­me­dia and mul­ti­me­dia art forms, his­tory of aes­thetic com­mu­ni­ca­tion, mod­ern and con­tem­po­rary media and lit­er­ary the­o­ries. Web­sites (Ger­man): www.​christiane-heibach.​de, www.​medienepistemologie.​de; www.​netzaesthetik.​de

Bir­git Mers­mann holds a pro­fes­sor­ship in non-West­ern and Eu­ro­pean Art at the in­ter­na­tional Ja­cobs Uni­ver­sity in Bre­men since 2008. From 2005 to 2007 she was a se­nior re­searcher of the Na­tional Com­pe­tence Cen­tre of Re­search “Iconic Crit­i­cism” at the Uni­ver­sity of Basel, Switzer­land, in­ves­ti­gat­ing “icono­scrip­tures” as hy­brid sym­bolic forms and in­ter-me­dia ex­pres­sions be­tween image and writ­ing. From 1998 to 2002 she taught as DAAD (Ger­man Aca­d­e­mic Ex­change Ser­vice) Vis­it­ing Pro­fes­sor at the de­part­ment of Ger­man lan­guage and lit­er­a­ture at Seoul Na­tional Uni­ver­sity in South Korea. Re­search foci in­clude image and media the­ory, vi­su­al­ity and nar­ra­tion, art the­ory and aes­thet­ics, con­tem­po­rary East Asian and West­ern art, global art his­tory, tran­scul­tur­al­ity, trans­la­tion stud­ies, in­ter­re­la­tions be­tween script and image.

Last pub­li­ca­tions: B.M., Alexan­dra Schnei­der (Eds.): Trans­mis­sion Image. Vi­sual Trans­la­tion and Cul­tural Agency, Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Schol­ars Pub­lish­ing, 2009; B.M., Thomas Weber (Eds.): Medi­olo­gie als Meth­ode, Berlin: Avi­nus, 2008; Got­tfried Boehm, B.M., Chris­t­ian Spies (Eds.): Movens Bild. Zwis­chen Af­fekt und Ev­i­denz, München: Fink, 2008; B.M., Das Bild als Spur. Trans­gres­sio­nen und An­i­ma­tio­nen, in: Hans Belt­ing (Ed.): Bild­fra­gen. Die Bild­wis­senschaften im Auf­bruch, München, 2007; B.M./Mar­tin Schulz (Ed.): Kul­turen des Bildes, München: Fink, 2006; B.M., Bild­kul­tur­wis­senschaft als Kul­tur­bild­wis­senschaft? Von der Notwendigkeit eines in­ter- und tran­skul­turellen Iconic Turn, in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und all­ge­meine Kunst­wissenschaft, Heft 49/1, Ham­burg 2004.

Ran­dall Packer is an in­ter­na­tion­ally ac­claimed mul­ti­me­dia artist and com­poser, cre­at­ing works that have pi­o­neered the in­te­gra­tion of in­ter­ac­tive media, in­stal­la­tion, and live per­for­mance. His work has been per­formed and ex­hib­ited at gal­leries, mu­se­ums, the­aters, and fes­ti­vals through­out the world. In 2001, he founded the US De­part­ment of Art & Tech­nol­ogy in Wash­ing­ton, DC and was ap­pointed as its first Sec­re­tary. Most re­cently, he re­ceived a com­mis­sion to debut his mul­ti­me­dia the­ater work, A Sea­son in Hell, at the ZER01/01SJ Bi­en­nial in San Jose, Cal­i­for­nia. Packer holds an MFA and PhD in music com­po­si­tion and has taught mul­ti­me­dia at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, Mary­land In­sti­tute Col­lege of Art, and Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity in Wash­ing­ton, DC. He is now on the fac­ulty of the Ad­vanced Aca­d­e­mic Pro­grams at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity where he teaches the his­tory, the­ory and prac­tice of mul­ti­me­dia. Packer is a writer and scholar in the field of new media, most no­tably the co-ed­i­tor of Mul­ti­me­dia: From Wag­ner to Vir­tual Re­al­ity. He cur­rently lives and works in Wash­ing­ton, DC.

Pro­fes­sor Semir Zeki is now Pro­fes­sor of Neu­roes­thet­ics at Uni­ver­sity Col­lege Lon­don, after hav­ing served for many years as Pro­fes­sor of Neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy there. He pi­o­neered the study of the higher vi­sual areas of the brain, and dis­cov­ered, among other things, its colour and mo­tion cen­tres and hence the func­tional spe­cial­iza­tion within it. More re­cently, he has ex­panded his work to en­quire into the neural cor­re­lates of aes­thetic and artis­tic ex­pe­ri­ence. In ad­di­tion to his pub­lished sci­en­tific pa­pers, he is au­thor of A Vi­sion of the Brain, Inner Vi­sion: an ex­plo­ration of art and the brain, and Splen­dours and Mis­eries of the Brain, and co-au­thor with the late French painter Balthus of La Quête de l’es­sen­tiel and with Lu­dovica Lumer of La bella e la bes­tia: arte e neu­ro­scienza. His artis­tic work is cur­rently on ex­hibit at the Luigi Pecci Mu­seum of Con­tem­po­rary Art in Milan: Bianco su bianco: oltre Male­vich (White on White: Be­yond Male­vich). He is a Fel­low of the Royal So­ci­ety and a For­eign Mem­ber of the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal So­ci­ety. He was awarded the King Faisal In­ter­na­tional Prize in Bi­ol­ogy in 2004 for his work on the brain, and founded the In­sti­tute for Neu­roes­thet­ics in Lon­don and Cal­i­for­nia.

A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty is a performative talk framed around the question “can a formal and stimulating adherence to a prescribed set of hypothetical conditions be seen as choreography even if there is no learned movement?” Hay was a member of a group of experimental artists that was deeply influenced by Merce Cunningham and John Cage. The group, later known as the Judson Dance Theater, became one of the most radical and explosive 20th century art movements. Her ground breaking research and performances continue to influence new generations of artists throughout the world today.

Deborah Hay performs her first solo in six years as part of Danspace Project’s guest curated series PLATFORM 2010: Back to New York City curated by Juliette Mapp. In addition to Hay, who will present No Time to Fly March 25-27 at 8pm, Mapp has invited seven artists with deep ties to New York City to present work in this series. March 18 -20 at 8pm, Intermedia artist Elaine Summers presents a retrospective weekend of film and dance installations, Improvisation with Sun, Moon & Stars: An Evening of Intermedia Works.

For more information on PLATFORM 2010 please click here
For tickets to Deborah Hay, No Time to Fly, March 25-27, 2010 call 866.811.4111, or click here
Admission: $18 ($12 for members)

For more information please contact The School of Art at The Cooper Union at artschool [at] cooper.edu or 212.353.4200 or Danspace Project at 212.674.5856

It became a minor phenomenon during 2007. By September 2009 it was a virus out of control. Described in Wired as a “popular internet meme” (Wortham, 2008), the obsessive serial mash-up of a key sequence from Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film of the last days of Adolf Hitler, Der Untergang (The Downfall), is suggestive of the cultural logic of the contemporary formation known as remix. Remix culture is comprised of what could loosely be termed amateurs and professionals engaged in the practice of creatively re-using found material. The distinction is useful in identifying the aesthetic and material differences between dedicated intermedia remix artists (Negativland, Martin Arnold, Craig Baldwin, Soda_Jerk), artists who incorporate elements of remix into a broader audiovisual practice (Philip Brophy, Candice Breitz, Christian Marclay, John Zorn) and the vernacular audio-visual mash-up/remake/dub/scratch aesthetics associated with a broad range of online practices. The domestication of audio-visual literacies in the digital age has meant that the processes of sampling, editing and compositing — once the province of dedicated adepts — have become second nature for a generation weaned on computers and digital technology. Audio-visual remix attests to a utilitarian competence in “writing” for the communications paradigm of the internet and networked conditions that Gregory L. Ulmer famously termed “electracy”; a concept that prioritises the notion of the “remake” and the use of found material (Ulmer, 1989, 1994, 2005, Tofts, 1996). As well, this pervasive cultural competence (in Chomsky’s linguistic sense of the term) attests to the dramatic distribution of the material means of production into the hands of consumers.

The Downfall meme is a portrait in miniature of the doxa of contemporary remix; namely, the collaborative, socially-networked taste for creatively manipulating work made by someone else. These received ideas presume the assurance of an invisible yet simpatico audience of like-minded, DIY-capable remixers alive to the vertiginous pleasure of knowing that anything labeled a remix is one file in a conjugate (yours, mine, ours) Shareware .zip archive of infinite re-use. In other words, an assurance of many happy returns. [2] The Downfall meme is a weird internet event in that it has garnered the kind of concentrated anticipation on a singular event usually associated with cult television series, or, more distantly, the narrow band era of broadcast television (see Palmer, 2008). As remix artist and theorist
Dan Angeloro has suggested, we are witnessing a “popular movement of incredible momentum — the copy/cut/paste logic of contemporary internet cultur”? (Angeloro, 2006: 20).

Issue Editors: Darren Tofts (Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne)
and Christian McCrea (Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne)

Articles

The Renewable Tradition (Extended Play Remix)
Mark Amerika

Cultural Modulation and The Zero Originality Clause of Remix Culture in Australian Contemporary Art
Ross Rudesch Harley

How can you be found when no-one knows that you are missing?
Lisa Gye

Sputnik Baby
Ian Haig

James Brown, Sample Culture and the Permanent Distance of Glory
Steve Jones

Materialities of Law: Celebrity Production and the Public Domain
Esther Milne

Materiality of a Simulation: Scratch Reading Machine, 1931
Craig Saper

The Fibreculture Journal is affiliated with the Open Humanities Press.

The Fibreculture Journal is a peer reviewed international journal that encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media forms and their deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability. The Fibreculture Journal encourages submissions that extend research into critical and investigative networked theories, knowledges and practices.

ABSTRACT: Although machinima has grown exponentially, it remains a largely undefined digital artistic practice in-between existing traditions. Machinima makers freely sample/ combine/ and break elements of traditional media. They “play” their references. This essay does not attempt to fix machinima to any single definition but will identify the intermedia relations to better position machinima into the digital media landscape. The argument will target three main influences: film, television, and theatrical performance. To exemplify these points the essay will discuss exemplary and relevant machinima pieces. It puts emphasis on the real-time aspects in production and play back to highlight the key specifics of this relatively new format.

Studies in Movement is a series of intermedia études based in part on the unique visual legacy of the great French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904). From his pioneering work with graphical recording devices to his work with stop-action photography, Marey sought to break down locomotion in order to learn how humans and animals moved in the natural world. His experimental findings, which encouraged the development of both modern aviation and the film industry, not only offered new ways to perceive the fleeting movements of the body, but also left behind a remarkable visual legacy that offered visible traces of the ephemeral, and of the passing of time itself. Picturing time as discrete, frozen moments, Marey’s discoveries would anticipate the future of modern art and, in many ways, the digital age.

Using Marey as a starting point, Studies in Movement reconsiders the creative potential of the gestures he captured in visible form, in order to explore the intimate connection between gesture, sound, and image. My work explores the polyphony of gesture embedded in live performance, striving to make visible the fleeting connection between thought and movement.

Part 1: The first movement, or étude, of Studies in Movement is Let Us Imagine a Straight Line, an interactive installation that reflects on the ideas of Marey along with those of Marey’s colleague, the French philosopher Henri Bergson.

Joseph Butch Rovan is a composer and performer on the faculty of the Department of Music at Brown University, where he co-directs MEME (Multimedia & Electronic Music Experiments @ Brown) and the Ph.D. program in Computer Music and Multimedia. Prior to joining Brown he directed CEMI, the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia, at the University of North Texas, and was a compositeur en recherche with the Real-Time Systems Team at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. Rovan worked at Opcode Systems before leaving for Paris, serving as Product Manager for MAX, OMS and MIDI hardware.

The Hyde Park Visual History Project, developed by artist Matthew Slaats, is a community centered artistic project that engages the elaborate evolution of the local landscape and its inhabitants through images and sound.

Conceived as a public art installation, the Hyde Park Visual History Project serves as a dynamic meeting point for the community, the arts, and the history of Hyde Park, New York. By gathering visual and auditory material from local residents, the project uses a community centered approach to understanding the complexity of context in America. Then further exploring these intricacies through the direct integration of the media into the landscape, using motion capture software, projection and speakers to allow the images, sound, audience and the environment to dynamically converse with each other. This interaction signifies the impact that people have on place and that a place can have on people.

The piece is a poetic, abstract, participatory performance. Part live intermedia cyberformance exquisite corpse, part virtual poetic installation, this work will explore the poetic, lyrical, polyvocal, participatory possibilities of the UpStage venue — collaging visuals, sound, text and live audience participation. Text and media contributions will be collected, produced for UpStage, and added to the mashup in the live event.

These elements, along with the live audience’s textual contributions, will be as necessary as the artists’ in the creation of an ephemeral, interactive, poetic, performance installation in UpStage. While the work will be presented multiple times during the festival, each instance of its existence will be irreproducible. This work explores the online venue and virtual space, as an art-poem space — always everywhere and nowhere — and the duration (20:09) as an ellipsis. This is a piece to collectively inhabit and create, a poetic experience, installation and/or poem, based in and on its own becoming.

Live audiences on September 9th will be able to participate in the piece via the UpStage venue’s text chat window; however, media to appear on the stage must be produced for the venue in advance. The artists are seeking contributions of text, image, sound, and small animation or Quicktime video files for inclusion in the
piece. Each contribution should be thought of as a single element in a game of exquisite corpse.

Contributions

The artists invite you to contribute:

• A line, fragment, phrase, word, etc. of text in any form (typed in body of email, contained in a digital image file, spoken, or otherwise sonically rendered, etc.)
• A digital image file (jpeg or png)
• Sound files (mp3)
• Small Flash animations (.swf or.fla, accepted in limited numbers) *
• Quicktime (we can accept a very limited number of QT files)**

All digital files should be 1 MB or less.

Email contributions (or a link to your file) to: contribute at tararebele dot com

* UpStage is a Flash-based venue with with its own particularities for serving Flash animation files (for example: movie clips will continually loop if placed on frame one of an animation, but may not function if placed on later frames in the timeline; animations in UpStage can function as loops or be advanced manually frame by frame, etc.). If you would like to submit a Flash animation that you have not already produced, you may email us for UpStage-specific production tips. We will do our best to successfully adapt submitted animation files to the venue’s specifications.

**UpStage is a Flash-based venue with limited video capabilities at this time. Please email in advance if you would like to contribute Quicktime video so the artists can work with you to determine how to best integrate or adapt your media contribution.

Nadav Assor: “I am greatly interested in theories and explorations of urban architectural, emotional and ideological sub-structures. One tactic I use in exposing and reshaping the structures around me is digitization, in the sense of reduction to a primal, reconfigurable matter. The transformed digital matter is recast into its original context, physically manipulated in an ongoing live process that ranges from the absurd to the violent. The outcome often presents various transgressions or inversions of the technological, socio-political structures that served as a starting point. Many of the mechanisms inherent in my work require palpable, physical effort or struggle to manipulate, thus exposing the constant friction between body and media. I do not want my devices to ‘run smoothly’.

My work has been shown in Berlin, Chicago, and in many Israeli venues, including several showings at the Israeli Center for Digital Art, the C.Sides International electronic media festival, the Laptopia festival, the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel-Aviv, The Haifa and Bat Yam Museums and more. I have received a 2006 Leumi (the Israeli national bank) award for excellence in the arts.
I am currently pursuing my MFA with full fellowship in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.”

Maria Bolivar was born in Caracas, Venezuela. She was significantly influenced by her father, Cesar Bolivar, who is a well-known film director in Latin America. After attending the most important design academy in Venezuela: El Instituto de Diseño de Caracas, Maria spent three years as a professional designer. Due to the violence and her involvement in the 2002 National Strike in Venezuela, Maria was forced to come to Milwaukee where she received her BFA in communication design from the Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) in 2006. Maria is currently pursuing a Master’s of Fine Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee with an intermedia focus.