ecopolis

Merce’s Isosurface (Excerpt) from Golan Levin on Vimeo.

EMAF ‘09
22-26 april 2009
Osnabrueck, Germany

Productions by internationally renowned media artists and the innovative works of new masters from the academies will be presented at the 22nd European Media Art Festival. The EMAF is one of the most influential forums of international Media Art. As a meeting point for artists, curators, distributors, gallery owners and an audience of specialists, the festival has a great impact on the topic and aesthetics of Media Art. Each year the festival offers its visitors a current overview of new experimental films, performances, lectures, an exhibition and the Media Campus. Around 250 current contributions will be selected this year for the festival from a total of 2400 submitted works, offering a comprehensive insight into the latest tendencies in Media Art.

An international jury will present the “EMAF Award” for a trend-setting work in Media Art and the “Dialogpreis” of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the promotion of intercultural exchange. Furthermore, the jury of the German Federal Association of Film Journalists will award the prize for the best German experimental film of the year.

EXPLODING CAVE
Giornate di libera ricerca tra cinema, suono, video e digitale

17 – 18 Aprile 2009
C.S.O.A. Cox18
Via Conchetta 18 – Milano

Info: cox18@inventati.org ; info@digicult.it
Info: http://cox18.noblogs.org ; http://www.digicult.it/ExplodingCave.asp

A cura di: Marco Mancuso, Marco Lorenzin, Claudia D’Alonzo Trafficando con le forze tecnologiche emergenti, tra il 1966 e il 1967 Andy Warhol crea l’Exploding Plastic Inevitable, formando uno spazio contradditorio e sperimentale. Invece di una loro naturalizzazione, produceva un montaggio che scomponeva lo spazio nel quale diversi media interferivano ed entravano in competizione gli uni con gli altri (…). Improvvisamente, il ritmo della musica suonata dai Velvet Underground e dall’attrice/cantante Nico, i giochi di luce, i movimenti dei diversi film di Warhol, le performance dei ballerini si univano per creare qualcosa di significativo, ma prima di cogliere il senso di quello che stava avvenendo, tutto diventava nuovamente confuso e caotico. Il rumore ti colpiva. Volevi urlare, o lanciarti in una danza sfrenata, dovevi muoverti, agire (…). Nell’apparente oscurità e nel caos dell’Exploding Plastic Inevitable, si poteva trovare una possibilità di trasformazione, se non di liberazione”. – [Branden W. Joseph, My Mind Split Open]

Conosciamo una Milano che dagli anni Cinquanta è stata progettata “a somiglianza dell’organizzazione generale del lavoro, i quartieri sono divisi per ceti, si calcolano le distanze tra luogo di lavoro e abitazione. Si progetta una specifica famiglia. Si pianifica un certo tipo di abitazione (…). La sensazione generale era quella di un futuro bloccato, dominato da eventi in gran parte incomprensibili e a cui non si poteva partecipare (…). Nella ‘cava esistenzialista’ della Milano degli anni Cinquanta, ai codici tradizionali della sala da ballo meneghina si sostituisce la sperimentazione di nuovi generi musicali e nuove modalità di scambio tra suoni e visioni che comportano a loro volta dinamiche specifiche. Il rapporto di seduzione si manifesta attraverso la liberazione del corpo mosso dai ritmi musicali e non più dalle ‘figure classiche’ della danza da balera. Il look delle persone si libera dell’estetica borghese del ‘giacca e cravatta’ (…). – [John Martin, Primo Moroni, La Luna sotto casa ]

http://www.digicult.it/ExplodingCave.asp

MAY 20-23
Preservation techniques for digital and audiovisual records
With Richard Wright (UK) from BBC, Dalit Naor (IL) from IBM, Richard Rinehard (USA) from the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California, Don Foresta (USA/FR), Research artist and theoretician in art, Oliver Grau (DE), Head of the Department at Danube University and other lecturers from 7 countries. In Prague (CZ).

JUNE 17-20 during the Arts and Film Festival.
Distributed post-production techniques in the field of visual and special effects
Workshop with Viktor Antonov (USA/FR/BG): Art director of Half Life 2/designer for Renaissance. In Telc, (CZ) registered on the UNESCO list.

http://transistor.ciant.cz
Application deadline: APRIL 15

Roy Ascott || The Syncretic Sense
4 April – 24 May 2009
Opening Friday 3 April, 6.30–8.30pm

Plymouth Arts Centre and collaborators i-DAT invite you to the exhibition opening of The Syncretic Sense, the first UK retrospective exhibition of the pioneering cybernetic artist Roy Ascott.

Long before email and the internet, Roy Ascott started using online computer networks as an art medium and coined the term telematic art. Parallel to his artwork, Roy Ascott is a highly acclaimed teacher and theorist of art pedagogy. The exhibition explores Roy Ascott’s work, mapping the impact, history and development of technology. The exhibition also looks back at his experimental years of art education: in particular the 1960s Groundcourse at Ealing College of Art.

Roy Ascott studied under Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton at King’s College, Newcastle. His exhibitions include Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica Linz and Biennale do Mercosul, Brazil. He was Dean of San Francisco Art Institute, Professor for Communication Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and is currently President of the Planetary Collegium, the international art and technology research network based in the University of Plymouth.

The PATH —– Launch Trailer from Tale of Tales on Vimeo.

“Without A Trace” by Jody Zellen
http://turbulence.org/works/without_a_trace

In July 2007, Jody Zellen began saving the daily online version of the comic strip “Real Life Adventures”, removing the text so that all that was left were the empty thought bubbles. She has also been tracing the print version of the New York Times every day, often combining the front and back of a single page (by holding it up to a window). “Without A Trace” takes the idea of this daily ritual as its point of departure.

Each day for a year, a comic image, a trace drawing, and three words from the original comic strip will be randomly selected from an archive. These will be juxtaposed with live text and image feeds from the New York Times online.

A trace is an action. A trace is what remains when almost everything else disappears. “Without A Trace” draws from an archive of traces, presenting them with ephemeral data to provide a fleeting memory, challenging the title and the notion, without a trace.

“Without A Trace” is a 2008 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

Galerija Škuc is proud to announce “RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting”, the exhibition of the works realized in the last three years within the platform “RE:akt!” produced by the Slovenian cultural institution Aksioma.

During recent years the term re-enactment and the practices it refers to have enjoyed increasing success in the artistic context. On one hand, the success of re-enactment appears to be connected to a parallel, vigorous return to performance art, both as a genre practiced by the new generations, and as an artistic practice with its own historicization. On the other hand the term re-enactment accompanies two phenomena that at least at first glance have very little in common: re-staging artistic performances of the past, and revisiting, in performance form, “real” events – be they linked to history or current affairs, past or present.
“RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting” tries both to research on the complexity of this concept and to get rid of it, approaching re-enactment not merely as “live action role-playing” or “living history” but rather as a strategy for cultural critique, analysis and artistic expression. “RE:akt!” – meaning not only “to act again” but also “to respond to / to react upon” and “Regarding: act!”– confronts current ideological and intellectual canons, power structures, policies, and distribution channels by re-enacting selected historical and culturally relevant events. Through processes of analysis, deconstruction, re-enactment and re-reporting, the intermedia research and presentation project “RE:akt!” examines media’s roles in manipulating perceptions and creating postmodern historical myths and contemporary mythology.

Thus, “RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting”, curated by the Italian art critic and curator Domenico Quaranta, will collect ten different approaches to the concept of enaction: from Ich Lubbe Berlin! (2005, SilentCell Network), a take on the 1933 burning of the Reichstag building in Berlin, which explores the contemporary meaning of symbols such as the Reichstag itself, and of concepts such as “communism” and “terrorism”; to Das KAPITAL (2006, Janez Janša), a performance which re-stages the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces with the languages of popular street artists; from C’était un rendez-vous (déja vu) (Janez Janša in collaboration with Quentin Drouet), a project that plays with the paradigmatic history of a well known artwork, the film C’était un rendez-vous by Claude Lelouch, from “cinema verité” to “media fiction”; to VD as VB (2007), a series of actions in which Vaginal Davis, the “grande dame” of the queer underground in Los Angeles, dialogues with Vanessa Beecroft’s performances. In Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav (2007), the three artists Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša re-stage a well known performance of the OHO group from the late Sixties, recently appropriated by the IRWIN group for their Like to Like Series (2004), performing it on the Mount Triglav itself, and then translating it into a monumental golden sculpture; while in Slovene National Theatre (2007), Janez Janša translates an infamous fact of recent racism against Gypsies – known in Slovenia as “the Ambrus case” – into a piece of theatre, re-invoicing it as it was featured by the mass media. In their Synthetic Performances (2007), Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG reenact on the virtual platform of Second Life a series of historical performances that are all but virtual, raising issues such as body, violence, sex and pain, thus exploring the meaning of these very issues in a virtual world. In SS-XXX | Die Frau Helga (2007), Janez Janša (in collaboration with Dejan Dragosavac Ruta) again adds details and proofs of evidence to an “urban legend” recently circulated on the Net and mainstream media, concerning the presumed creation of a cyber-sex doll by the Nazis. Thus, performance and reenactment are far from being the only strategies adopted in “RE:akt!”, which also involves strategies such as documentation, remix, re-invoicement, reconstruction and remediation (such as in the project The Day São Paulo Stopped 2009 by Brazilian artist Lucas Bambozzi), and media such as photographic print, video, media installation and even architecture (such as in the project Il porto dell’amore, by Janez Janša (in collaboration with Bor Pungerčič), an homage to Fiume as an example of pirate utopia).

RE:akt!
Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting
curated by: Domenico Quaranta
www.reakt.org

Galerija Škuc
Stari trg 21, Ljubljana, Slovenia
25 March – 17 April 2009

Presentation of the book: 25 March 2009 at 19:00
Exhibition opening: 25 March 2009 at 20:00

Featured artists: Lucas Bambozzi, Vaginal Davis, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.ORG), SilentCell Network (Mare Bulc, Janez Janša, Bojana Kunst, Igor Štromajer).

On Wednesday, March 25, Škuc will host the presentation of the book RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting featuring the co-editors Janez Janša, artist and director of Aksioma and the italian theoretician Antonio Caronia. The book was published on March 2009 by FPeditions and includes contributions by Rod Dickinson, Jennifer Allen, Jan Verwoert, Antonio Caronia and Domenico Quaranta. More: www.reakt.org/book

On Saturday, March 28, SS-XXX | Die Frau Helga (2007), by Janez Janša will be presented in a solo show at the Fabio Paris Art Gallery in Brescia, Italy. More: www.fabioparisartgallery.com.

On May 22, the exhibition will travel to MMSU – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka (Croatia).

FREE IMAGES FOR PRESS and MORE INFO:
www.reakt.org/press

Production:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
www.aksioma.org

Galerija Škuc
http://www.galerija.skuc-drustvo.si/