Archive for April, 2007
Britt in Amsterdam/Rotterdam
I meet Sebastian in Amsterdam to conduct a number of interviews with new media artists in both Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Warm spring has arrived and the sun is turning everything into holiday atmosphere - we nevertheless have a tight schedule: first stop is DEAF07 - Interact or Die! dutch electronic art festival in Rotterdam. Even Queen Beatrix pays a visit on april the 18th - not sure if this tells us anything ..
Bycicle parking decks next to Centraal Station Amsterdam.
Zhana finds me a bycicle! Feeling immediately at home, zooming past elegant ladies, oldish men and incredibly stylish flats along the canals, I manage to visit every location on the list: De Apple Art Gallery, (Netherlands Media Art Institute - not in Uruguay), Waag society (located in one of the oldest buildings in Amsterdam) and STEIM. My favourite remains the ex-post office headquarters surrounded by building sites and water (where we later meet very nice ‘new media couple’ Karen and Hermen). Its charm is probably the combination of fairly smart but relaxed bar 11 (www.ilove11.nl ..!) on the top floor (fantastic views across Amsterdam), rather informal and slightly abandoned looking (but important online presence) mediamatic on ground floor and the official Stedelijk Museum for Contemporary Art (which is normally situated in its ancient premisses in the heart of Amsterdam).
Bar 11 has an ‘interactive’ menu in form of a book which invites customers to scribble on its white pages (here ‘nina’ - by chance..)
Goetz points out the seemingly permanent installation of video screens covering the walls - smart platform for new media art?
Rotterdam presents itself as a rough contrast to Amsterdam - which is precisely its charm. After a visit to Daan Roosegaarde in Gouda, next stop is V_2 - organizers and supporters of new media art/interactive design work since 1981. Like all other institutions/organizations we visit here, this too has none of the slick, smart, media overwhelming feel to it - bare staircases, warehouse spaces as research labs, books, computers, cables and people all mingled together. Third stop is Manix de Nijs who kindly drives us to his studio which he shares with sound artist Edwin van der Heide.
We extend the interview with Marnix to further conversations over dinner until Sebastian and I catch the evening train back to Amsterdam..
Add comment April 30th, 2007
Mini Dissertation Proposal, draft 1
Say what you will about our fast food and fast justice…we do our PhDs slow here in the U.S. Which is why, three years in, I’ve just now written my very first attempt to semi-formally describe my dissertation. It’s the product of a morning’s blurt, and has all sorts of boundary issues; you’ll see. I wrote it for my dissertation proposal writing seminar. Now THERE’S a measure of how slow we are: it’s an entire quarter-long course NOT for helping us write our dissertations, BUT for helping us write the proposals for our dissertations. You can’t see tectonic plates shifting…but you can feel them. Anyway, here it is, fully and polymorphously provisional:
Kris Cohen
Dissertation Proposal Draft
4.6.07
If images provoke conviction, disgust, outrage, melancholy, or, oppositely, numbness and apathy, then we can say that they are spaces of belonging: imagined, virtual, and actual spaces to which we feel that we belong or are excluded from belonging. Belonging, here, names the affect of being drawn in or being repulsed by what we find in the image. It is a kind of encounter, even if it’s a missed encounter. For instance, we encounter other viewers through the image; viewer becomes viewers becomes audience, and possibly, over the time of dispersed and unpredictable meetings, we can say that a political or intimate or counter public has been constituted: a relation among strangers. Recent aesthetic and vernacular practices seem to literalize these potentials, as evidenced by new critical work on “relational aesthetics” (N. Bourriaud), “the media public sphere” (D. Joselit), “participation” (C. Bishop), “conversation pieces” (G. Kester), “new genre public art” (S. Lacy), “the logic of the lure” (J.P. Ricco), or “un-sited community” (M. Kwon). These formulations, like much that seems new, also resonate with older art historical and art critical concepts like absorption (M. Fried), the third meaning (R. Barthes), the broken calligram (M. Foucault), perspective as symbolic form (Panofsky), and kunstwollen (A. Riegl). I signal this continuity—the way that it is possible to imagine a continuous, if polymorphous, history of images as spaces of belonging—through the figure of the caption, where a caption is understood as a slender space of potential opened up next to an image. In this sense, captions can be understood conventionally (that which explains or is explained by the image), but also figuratively, more like what Benjamin registered when he said that in the 20th century “[f]or the first time, captions have become obligatory.” Benjamin meant that all images in the age of technological reproducibility require instructions for use, but to say so does not restrict who can write captions, what they might be made to say, or what might happen in the wake of their inscription. Working through cases which connect the late 19th c. to the early 21st (from The Voiceless Speech, a 19th c. Suffragist contrivance, to www.flickr.com and networked art) this dissertation aims to write a short history of the politics of belonging to images, where the caption is the concept given to a space of potential which can be opened up next to images, and where the horizon of analysis is the affective and political life of images in the present.
Add comment April 7th, 2007
Goetz and Britt in Helsinki
.. just joined Goetz in sunny but freezing Helsinki to explore the new media art and interactive design scene in Helsinki. Meetings with several artists and designers are ligned up for the next 10days and Goetz had the pleasure of being introduced to many already at the Pixelache Festival which has just come to a close. http://www.pixelache.ac/2007/pikseliahky07-english/
Gliding over a lot of little islands - and impressed by the finnair design - I landed safely at Helsinki-Vantaa airport and was kindly welcomed by Pixelache graphic designer Wojtek, with whom I’ll be staying with these days. I have already given up trying to understand any of the signs - but am enjoying the sounds and extremely charming combinations of letters to form words - a lot of double ii, double uu, double aa, double ooooo
a pattern that reminds of the air view which you might have onto the fields below
.. bought a pair of home knitted gloves of a very old finish lady sitting outside Puistola train station. While listening to her husky voice talking to me (in finish) I respond by showing her my white frozen fingers and she smiles.. apart from this, almost everyone does speak english!
‘Headquarters of finish design export’ comments - Andrew Paterson
- active in media and socially engaged art as both artist, initiator and curator here in Helsinki as well as abroad - as we walk past, on our way from interview to finish dinner (Hering).
This has not been the topic of our interviews though - at least not only. During first two interviews (Andrew and Juha Huuskonen - initiator and organizer of Pixelache) we stumble upon different descriptions and understandings of media art here in Helsinki, its evolution over the last 15 years, its meaning and function within finish (and international) cultural/social networks - a complex set of questions, issues and opinions that are keeping us thinking..
Add comment April 4th, 2007