Tag Archive for ‘medienkunst’

sonar the art experience: le zidane

official still

douglas gordon and philippe parrenos portrait of zinedine zidane left me with a profound impression.
the film has a length of 90 minutes and shows the football player, keeps close focus on him during the match of real madrid contra villa-real on april 23rd 2005. only very short wide shots of the stadium, the field and halls, and parts of the television emission interrupt the camera close-ups on zidanes feet and face.
this shift from the usual football match perception of the whole team as a unit and the ball as center point of attention towards the close-up observation of a single person acting and reacting to the happenings on the field has tremendous impact.
what at first seems like a steady close-up, including surprisingly clear sound from the field and clearly audible zidane, later develops into more and more layers of perception.
we see zidane not only playing the ball, after a while we notice that he remains highly concentrated, but then you can almost see his thoughts shifting as the attention level drops because theres nothing going on close by, or him getting very agressive due to a failed pass. and suddenly he also seems nervous, although he remains quite serious throughout the match.
through slowly noticed changes in the soundscape (main contributor to the soundtrack are british soundscaperock artists mogwai) or the minimally set subtitles gordon and parreno add even more layers to the portrait. suddenly the inner eye sees zidane as a boy playing backyard football, or we hear his reflections on the character of being a pro football player on the huge field with this humongous crowd.
for me this film can not merely be called a simple portrait, it is a carefully assembled composition of impressions, sounds and feelings, more reluctant that a conventional desription of a famous person but poetic in its narrative and developing unusual perspectives on zidane and football. maybe for this the addition: a portrait of the 21st century. a very poetic one.

watch a small portion of the film:


sonar the art experience

by ka and axolotl

even though sonar is mostly known for the electronic music part we are arty eneugh to almost skip the music part and go straight on to the multimedia section. clearly for our coverage we will focus on that “mostly” secret part of the festival!
the multimedia section was split into: sonarmatica, sonarama, sonarcinema, sonarextra and sonar a la carte.( wow what fantastic creativity of name creations) sonarmatica the multimedia exhibition features the topic magic. sonarama takes place in the casm (centro de arte santa monica) and shows high level multimedia live performances. sonarcinema: the name stands for itselfs and finally sonarextra presents external exhibitions.

now with the experience of all the different components of the festival, its quite clear that the day part is the much more sophisticated one. of course the nightly sessions have amazing names to offer, but the huge number of people and the humongous size of the stages (four) provokes nightmare-like impressions. you feel quite anonymous, lost and like a walking wallet. furthermore, to top the size of the halls they put an autodrom into the fetival area! no joke!

sonar autodrom

but suprisingly the day program is challenging, acts like khan of finland, planningtorock, fm3 featuring blixa bargeld (video) and even the buddha machine startled us. their unusual performances were presenting more than performing only music but going into various levels of performance art.
in the following articels we will present some single artworks to give you an overview of what the festival had to present.

friedrich kittler – endlichkeit der algorithmen

hq-video vom vortrag (danke an rainer kohlberger)

friedrich kittler, professor für ästhetik und geschichte der medien auf der humboldt universität in berlin, spricht über die endlichkeit der algorithmen, ja sogar der logik. diese – mit wortwitz und charme gespickte keynote, behandelt den werdegang des algorithmus’, von den abakusrechnern der antike bis hin zu den clusterrechnern der heutigen zeit.

vor allem die endlichkeit von unendlichen prozessen wie der endlosschleife, die aufgrund von äusserlichen einflüssen plötzlich stoppt, verdient seine besondere aufmerksamkeit.

der charmante und lebendige vortrag dieses bedeutenden deutschen philosophen wirft, vor allem für die medienkunst, fragen auf die nicht nur an der oberfläche kratzen sondern bis tief zu den wurzeln vordringen. medienkunst in der heutigen zeit braucht die ‘computerei’ wie die maler den pinsel, der algorithmus als seele des rechners ist als grundbedingung dieser kunstform anzusehen…

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