Don Satijn is a Dutch visual artist and educator. Tagr.tv helped M. Eugenia Demeglio realising the project of interviewing him.
The interview took place between Rotterdam and Amsterdam, the 6th and 7th of June 2013. It featured: a walk in Rotterdam, a drive to Amsterdam and a visit to the artist’s exhibition in Gallery Nine in Amsterdam.
As a collaborative program of transmediale and ctm-festival several audiovisual and audio performances were presented at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt to merge the ideas behind both festival themes:
“The synchronicity of different temporalities, the increasing blurriness of terms such as near and far, natural and synthetic, and the paradox of simultaneous excess and scarcity are all seen as effects of a dissolution of boundaries fomented by the digitalization of cultural artefacts and their production.”
At the previous evening Vanessa Ramos Velasquez performed together with A Guy Called Gerald “Coded Narratives” a retro-furistic, campfire type of experience for the audience as active participants. Articulated by the proto-programming language of Morse Code the audience was generating live the Sound via text input, handing around a tablet. The written words or just letters were screened at the front of the auditorium, so that everyone was able to read the messages, while A Guy Called Gerald was doing the composition.
After a miscarried attempt to get conversation through Skype with the infamous Chilean author, comic book writer, esoteric and filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, two sci-fi inspired performances were shown:
Demdike Stare were appropriating Jodorowsky and Moebius imagery especially for this night.
The second performance by Gatekeeper takes us on an otherworldly tour through their fictive ecosystem “Exo”, a music and game environment.
Both are also engaged at the Donaufestival in Krems this year.
Ray vibration explore in their performance WMSWF (We Make Sound With Fire) through heating, inflammation and cooling-down audio-visual qualities of various materials, remaining to an alchemical laboratory. They are working with candles, Bunsen burner and beeswax, also producing projections, made by overhead projectors, of heat-driven windmills, which simultaneously function as solar synthesizers.
Fluorescene, an improvised light and sound performance by Phillip Stearns, investigates the transmutability of sonic and visual medium through electromagnetism into trans-sensory experiences. Using energy saving light bulbs, light and electromagnetic interference is captured by different sensors and converted into sound. The amplified sound is then used to drive electricity back to the compact fluorescent lamps, completing an audio-visual feedback circuit.
Caution for epileptics: This performance contains strobe light! (Some people had to leave the room during the presentation. I myself was not so much affected, hiding behind the cam.)
BWPWAP-Back when Pluto was a planet: This years transmediale took Pluto and it’s reclassification as a metaphor for how quickly cultural imaginaries can change and be contested in a world driven by parallel and shifting paradigms.
Under the main title ” The Miseducation of Anya Major” three different exhibitions engaged with new interpretations of effects, uses and development of contemporary media, investigating questions of knowledge, learning and education.
As an initial point macintosh’s commercial for their first computer in 1984 was taken, where the actress, and real-life athlete, named “Anya Major” played the heroine. The exhibition series makes reference to her as a way of remembering and reimagining the rebellious spirit she embodies and took her “miseducation” not as a jeremiad about how she has been deliberately fed with false informations and withheld important knowledge in order to keep her in a subordinate and passive position. On the contrary, it’s the vision of the reemergence of a critical and creative media literacy that, like Anya Major, escapes the forces of control to express disobedient engagement with the media of contemporary society.
“Tools of Distorted Creativity” presented a series of contemporary works that expands the notions of software tools and their affordance of creativity in nonconformist and even dysfunctional directions.
A retrospective show of Sonia Landy Sheridan revealed her experimentations with machines of technological society as instruments of the philosophical mind and artistic imagination from inside educational institutions.
The Installation “Evil Media Distribution Centre”, by the duo YoHa (Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji) is an artistic response to the book “Evil Media” (2012) written by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey.
66 authors were invited to choose a “grey media” object, whose mediations “facilitate and amplify the creation of troubling, ambiguous social processes, fragile networks of susceptible activity, opaque zones of knowledge – the “evil media”, and to write a short text about it.
These texts were presented together with “evil media” objects (palletts, forklift, plastic bags, clipboards and projectors) in the setting of a curiosity cabinet designed as a distribution center.
Ideas and materiality were consolidated as a working condition for developing reflective engagement with the evil of media, to encourage an expanded notion of those and how it operates on our participatory behavior.
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