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.
Socialize