The main reason for the trip was to visit the yearly Transmediale Festival which was held in the beautiful building "Haus der Kulturen der Welt" situated by Tiergarten near the centre of Berlin. The festival ran from Tuesday til Sunday and included exhibitions with installations and art pieces, seminars on different subjects related to art and digital culture and showings of films, documentaries, live performances and music.
This years theme was "conspire" and a lot of the conferences and work shown had taken a negative approach to the subject by looking at issues regarding the corporate world in relation to the identity of the individual and a culture as a whole. Below are some descriptions of a few of the seminars I attended which illustrates this.
CP02:Public Signatures Wed 30 Jan: 4pm (Theatresaal)
Public Signatures was two documentaries about 'Culture Jamming' and 'unauthorized street-art'.
The first documentary by David Schwerten was made as a result of two years research into European 'Culture Jamming'. I found it very interesting and key to many current paradoxes seen in media advertising and logo designs.
As described in the programme, "modern culture jamming is distributing viral information like fake media campaigns to 'jam' the mass media".
One of the people interviewed for the documentary described it as using the media itself to draw attention to how we are influenced my the media. We are all part of the system and we can't escape the system.
The idea of culture jamming dates back to the beginning of the 20th century looking at Marcel Duchamp and the French avant-garde group Situationist International.
In the documentary various cases of modern culture jamming were talked about, including a campaign by Nike where they travelled around placing a Nike infobox in various city's. People could enter the infobox which had a 3d sculpture displayed
giving information about a giant sculpture to be placed in the Karlsplatz or Nikeplatz the following year. The giant sculpture of Nike's famous logo, a "Swoosh", a 36 metre long by 18 metre high monument supposedly made from "special steel covered with a revolutionary red resin made from recycled sneaker soles". The information was obviously not true but visitors believing it were shocked and angry by the suggestion of a big corporation buying a piece of an old historic square to promote their identity.
Another example talked about was Hans Bernhard from ubermorgan.com who a few years ago created a website where people could bit in an online auction for Americans votes. voteauction.com This obviously caused a big stir.
One other point talked about, that I found interesting, was the idea of logos and signs being presented everywhere and in a sense being forced upon us, yet they have a copyright. I think one of the persons interviewed suggested that this was like having
copyrights on trees and other natural surroundings. He amongst others believed that public advertising should have no copyright as it is already being placed upon the individual unwillingly and should therefor be available for anyone to copy just like trees and buildings are.
The second documentary by Volker Sattel, Mario Mentrup was about a secret unauthorised street - art exhibition in the small city Wuppertal in 2006. The film follows the perspectives of artist who uses the industrial city walls as an exhibition space. One artist was using the dirty black walls along the monorail as a backdrop for his artwork, by cleaning lines on the walls rather than graffiting on to them, he could erase white from black. I found this fascinating as it made me think about the legal aspect of making art in urban spaces, usually it is illegal to paint on to something but if you are cleaning something is it a different matter? The documentary had a very slow and slightly gloomy feel about it which made it, at the time, not very interesting but looking back ,very memorable.
Session 2:Embedding Fear Thu 31 Jan: 1pm (Auditorium)
'Embedding Fear' was about the Internet as a platform for political, military and corporate propaganda and the perceived threat of terrorism. The discussion was based upon the freedom and access of web communication becoming a complex issue when confound with a corrupted image of what is real. especially in fighting against war on terror. The four speakers talked about the subject within four different caegories, the world wide risk society, Position of the individual, The Internet - terrorist spectacle, and the illusion surrounding people and the internet.
Faceless: Opportunistic infections of the surveillance apparatus
Fri 1st Feb:2pm (The Co-opting strategies salon)
Faceless was a presentation by Manu Luksch about her research into surveillance cameras and her ways of using them as an artistic tool. She did a small project in a housing estate in the UK using dancing teenagers in front of many security cameras, as a humorous response to Bushby Burkely's choreographies. After this project she became more interested in the legal aspects and spent some time in London seeing how many pieces of footage of herself on surveillance camera she could claim. She sent
hundreds of letters, but only 10% of her requests for footage were successful. In the received footage all other faces than hers were cut out. She then decided to try and make a film telling a story of a woman who lived in a faceless world dominated by time. However the further she got with her film the harder it became to claim footage, as regulations were tightened and most letters she sent came back with a negative reply saying the footage had unfortunately been deleted. Instead of finishing the film she tried to work on changes in movement within the footage that she did receive, such as movements of shadows, lighting etc.
Overall she works with the legal aspects of the image and the aesthetic which you don't have control over.
I found her project quite interesting and unusual. The ideas of using tools within public spaces as a personal mean for artistic expression is quite fascinating.
General opinion about Transmediale:
Overall I think the festival was a great experience with plenty of interesting input that I feel I can use in the context of the course and future projects. The one thing that disappointed me was the quality and attention to detail in some of the work presented at the festival. In one of the films the subtitles were unreadable, and in one conference the video didn't work. My opinion on this is that surely these things should have been tested beforehand especially as people pay a lot of money to attend these programs. Having said that I was really loving the overall atmosphere of the festival, the place seemed relaxed, friendly with families, many nationalities and people who new each other from previous years festivals.
At the time it was all very overwhelming, and trying to keep up with all that was going on could at times seem frustrating, but now that I have come away from it all, I can honestly say that I enjoyed it and would even consider going back one day.
Other interesting things I saw in Berlin:
The Bauhaus exhibition
The Holocaust Monument
The Aquadom
Panorama bar
(More to Come)
1 comment:
Hi there.
Just realised I forgot to chip in towards the wine on Friday. Don''t want you to think this was intentional, it just slipped my mind, so I'll give you a couple of pounds towards it when we get back from reading week!
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