Looking beyond the evolving alarmist scenarios of environmental catastrophe prevalent in the global warming debate, transmediale.09 shifts the focus of this challenge to the broader cultural, societal and philosophical consequences that the collapse of the northern ice barrier reveals.
the tagr.team at this years festival will be bigger than ever over ten peole are on their way from vienna to berlin to cover the exibition, write about the lectures, capture performances and provide an artist interview every day – it’ll be worthwhile to check tagr.tv for new post every day during the festival!
i did an interview with the artist mikhael a crest sator ArXeNeKrOHeN who is the creator of the bragophone – a roboter look alike distillator with an charming alchemic touch – creating secret sounds of braga. he did the final distillation on the closing day of roboexotica. watch the interview and parts of the final distillation….
the full frame festival is a small but powerful festival in vienna. the motivation of the founders was to bring art films (who are normally screened in exhibitions on video monitors) cinemas screens. astonishingly also that size was too little for the organisers so the last full frame festival took place in the vienna planetarium. in a cupola projection. wow! how titanic! after the presentation we had the pleasure to stroll with felix kubin thou the prater. under a umbrella…how kubi(n)stic!
Glow is a dusk to dawn performance and media art festival which took place for the first time on July 19th 2008 in Los Angeles. It is envisioned as a museum without walls, a way of bringing contemporary art to the public. “Media art meets the masses”, that sort of thing. The public in question for this particular event consisted of 200,000 people passing through a stretch of beach and an old historic pier all in a single night. The massive scale of the event probably left many of its commissioned artists wondering how they could ever go back to the narrow confines of the gallery again.
My favorite installation is by New York based Taiwanese American Artist Shih Chieh Huang whose recent exhibitions have taken him to the Venice Biennale, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan and the Shanghai MOCA to name only a few. His process-orientated work transforms mass produced objects and everyday detritus into kinetic sculptures which seem infused with life.
Before receiving the commission from Glow, he happened to be doing a two-month residency at the Smithsonian in Washington which allowed him to study the Smithsonian’s collection of iridescent marine life forms. For Glow, he filled the walk way under the historic Santa Monica pier with slow-moving sculptures of marine creatures intricately constructed from zip-ties, power adapters, plastic bags, wires and plastic tubes… To me his work is always very much about material. There is a lot of aesthetic discipline in the way he juxtaposes one piece of recycled waste and the next.
I missed most of the works displayed that night, but I especially regret not seeing Usman Haque’s ‘Primal Source’ up close. A giant water screen is conjured up on the sand. The sound created by the nearby audience constantly changes the light patterns projected onto the water screen. At some point during the night there were thousands of people surrounding this piece. If Glow is all about public spectacles, then this was certainly the showpiece. Usman Haque has a background in architecture and has been responsible for a number of impressive large-scale interactive installations recently. Check out his website for more.
You can just make out Usman Haque’s upside down waterfall on one side of this picture, the bright spot on the other side is my piece Moon Theater created in collaboration with Michael Kontopoulos and based on code by Andres Colubri. Moon Theater is designed to address issues of scale and social performance in a public setting. In the context of Glow, it is realized as an opportunity for communication and expression between members of a large crowd.
The piece successfully sustained a community around itself throughout the night, transforming strangers into collaborative performers.
Shadow puppets are mapped onto the movement of people’s hands and projected onto our artificial moon using code written in Processing.
The Japan Media Art Festival is now accepting submissions on different categories. It’s the biggest in Japan about media art and definitely worth a try – entries must have been produced or released between October 6th, 2007 and September 26th, 2008, Deadline is September 26th.
About twenty motivated comic painters met last friday at the brick5 in Vienna where they stayed 24hours together and produced as much as they could or wanted to… the results will be shown as an exhibition at the Brick5.
24h Comics – exhibition Opening: 8th July – 6pm Exhibition opening hours: 9th July to the 13th July; 3pm to 6pm Brick5: 15., Fünfhausgasse 5
The concert was part of the programme of the Donaufestival08 and completely sold out – not even the press pass got me in, i was very lucky to find someone who sold me his ticket in the very last minute in order to sneak in a minute before the concert started. I realized that “Gustav” was discussed in the media, but i didn’t realize the hype that was going on, nor i understood it… until the concert started.
Then the microphone gave completely up, this youtube video provides better audio quality of this scene.. within a minute i was amazed by Eva Jantschitsch’s performance and voice, and all of a sudden i understood why the Minoritenkirche in Krems – a former chruch & great venue btw. – was completely packed and sold out since weeks.
This video clip starts with the appearece f the Trachtenkapelle (traditional band) of Dürrenstein which was the spezial feature of the night, which i think was great, but see for yourself:
The first weekend of the Mapping Festival in Geneva past by too fast… and i tried to see and document every event… but to be honest it was not possible! What i saw… or let’s say experianced was great and all the different kinds of performances gave a good overview of how and in which context av technics might be used. This ranges from the classical VJ set going along with a DJ playing or live audio visual sets in a night club to more experimental audio visual performances and installations shown in a museum of contemporary art. The Festival still goes on till Sunday! So get your things packed and come!
And have a look at those videos…. even if the quality is not the best! i am gonna work on that… when i am back home, I promise.
Dimitri Delcourt & Nicolas Field Swiss based artists. Visuals by Dimitri Delcourt. 11.04.2008 | Centre d’art Contemporain
Olga Mink & Scanner Visuals by Olga Mink from the Netherlands. Music by Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner from United Kingdom. 11.04.2008 | Centre d’art Contemporain
8GB 11.04.2008 | Zoo 8GB is an audio visual performance of Akira from Argentina who also works as VJ kiken.corporation. GB like GameBoy and that’s what it is: 8-bit GameBoy Music – well known gaming sounds combined with dark beats and individual visuals for each song… great party performance!
AntiVJ is a VJ Label founded by four VJs francophone – VJ Crustea, VJ Emovie, VJ Aalto and VJ Legoman. Their aim is to leave the traditional work area of a VJ … the lonley screen somewhere in a club… Well, what they do so far is to create new surfaces for their VJ Sets – that range from unconventional screens in night clubs to installations in public spaces (a market place or a garage) and lightsculptures – as well as developing their own VJ Tools to play on these 3d shapes.
I saw them playing visually with their own installation objects – a bunch of white cubes in a darkend room. I gotta say… it was awesome!You even got the feeling those objects were moving or shivering a bit! Enjoy the video!
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