Projects – medienwerk.nrw

University of Duisburg-Essen | Aylime Asli Demir: “AMBIGUITY & UNPREDICTABILITY”

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University of Duisburg-Essen | Aylime Asli Demir: “AMBIGUITY & UNPREDICTABILITY”

FELLOW: Aylime Asli Demir

Media Art FellowsResearch

Duration: ongoing

The Institute for Art and Art Sciences at the University of Duisburg-Essen and the atelier automatique invited you to a workshop discussion with media art fellow Aylime Aslı Demir (curator, activist) as well as guests Eva Busch (curator) and Begüm Karagöz (student assistant at the queerfeminist Archiv LIESELLE).

The conversation discussed forms of resistance and the archiving of queer narratives, with a focus on the exchange of experiences and artistic, curatorial practices in the context of archives and (in)visibilities. The talks were moderated by Julia Nitschke and took place at atelier automatique in Bochum.

From December 9 to 12, 2023 and from January 27 to February 3, 2024, the Turkish author, curator, activist and media art fellow Aylime Aslı Demir was a guest at the institute as part of the project Ambiguity and Unpredictability: On Forms of Resistance and the Archiving of Queer Narratives.

Her stay is integrated into the art studies sub-project of the DFG research group Ambiguity and Distinction. Historical-Cultural Dynamics under the direction of Prof. Dr. Gabriele Genge and with the collaboration of Eva Liedtjens, which is focusing on queer perspectives and ambiguous concepts of temporality in contemporary art in Turkey in the current funding phase. Aylime Aslı Demir used the time of her stay in December 2023 and January 2024 for curatorial research on queer practices of archiving and resistance. In addition to the exchange with the research group Ambiguity and Distinction, Aylime Aslı Demir established contact with local initiatives and institutionalized archives to develop new forms of networking with actors of queer (media) artistic and curatorial projects between the Ruhr area and Ankara.

Aylime Aslı Demir is a writer, curator, and activist. Demir studied Public Administration, Political Science and Women’s Studies. Since 2010, she has been working on editorial and curatorial projects dealing with the politics and aesthetics of bringing together diverse knowledge and practices in
exhibitions and publications. From 2013, she is the Academic and Cultural Studies Programme coordinator and the editor-in-chief of Kaos GL the main Gay and Lesbian Cultural Research and Solidarity Association in Turkey. She lectured at Ankara University on Gender and Women’s studies and has been the coordinator of Feminist Forum which gathers together prominent feminists and
LGBTI+ activists around the world in Ankara. Additionally, Demir is a jury member of Women to Women Story Contest organized since 2006 in order to encourage women writers to write about their lesbian–bisexual stories.

Apart from her editor career, Aylime Aslı Demir has been active in the framework of exhibitions, conferences, and community work. Some of her recent activities include curating the group show Betwixt and Between in 2023 at Sanatorium in Istanbul. In 2022 she was a participant at Slavs and Tatars residency that was supported by SAHA. Aylime Aslı Demir curated Unpredictable Times: Queering Politics in Turkey at, MUCEM in Marseille in 2019. She attended the Young Curators Academy at Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin in 2019. Furthermore At least three fingers; still life lessons from a queer feminist activist, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe 2019, Dislocations in Queer Art, Kara Art Studio, Kocaeli, 2019; Read My World Literature Festival, Amsterdam, 2018; Vanishing Mediator, Evliyagil Museum, Ankara, 2018; Colony, Queering the Posthuman, Schwules Museum, Berlin, 2018; Colony, Queering the Posthuman, Abud Efendi Mansion, Istanbul.

Aylime Aslı Demir established international Ankara Queer Art Residency in Ankara in 2019. The program hosts visual artists from Turkey and abroad and provides artists with 8 weeks of both living and working space while supporting and promoting production and research processes. During this time, artists have the opportunity to work with artists, activists, researchers, and curators from Turkey.

EVENTS FOR THE PROJECT
AMBIGUITY & UNPREDICTABILITY

OFFENHALTEN – EIN GESPRÄCH ÜBER KÜNSTLERISCHE RESIDENZFORMATE
30 January 2024, 19.00
WerkStadt, Viktoriastraße 5, 45327 Essen

The Institute for Art and Art Sciences at the University of Duisburg-Essen and PACT Zollverein invited you to an exchange on artistic residency formats. Together with media art fellow and director of the Ankara Queer Art Program Aylime Aslı Demir (Ankara, TR), Thomas Lehmen from Kunsthaus Mitte (Oberhausen, DE) and Hanitra Wagner (Akademie der Künste der Welt Köln, residency programs) they talked about the possibilities and limits of (international) residency programs, their particularities and histories.

Interested people were invited to the WerkStadt to get into conversation.

The event was held in English.

The publication VORSTELLUNG DER GEFÖRDERTEN PROJEKTE 2021-2023 on the Media Art Fund & Media Art Fellows can be downloaded here.

Credits: Photo © Institut für Kunst und Kunstwissenschaften der Universität Duisburg-Essen

STIFTUNG IMAI | VIDEONALE E.V.: „VIDEO DIGEST”

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STIFTUNG IMAI | VIDEONALE E.V.: „VIDEO DIGEST”

Videonale E.v. Bonn | IMAI Inter Media Art Institutes

Media Art FundResearch

Duration: spring until December 2023

Video Digest
An Online Video Art Magazine by Videonale and IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute.

With Video Digest, the Videonale Bonn and the IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute Düsseldorf presented an online video art magazine and an associated research and exhibition project at the Moltkerei Werkstatt, Cologne, complemented by the concurrent program series VIDEONALE.scope.

The Video Digest project began with an interest in Video Congress’ video magazine Schauinsland which is located in the archives of the IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute. Video Congress was founded in Kassel in 1982 as a loose association of video artists in the wake of documenta 7. Wishing to work on related themes in a collaborative manner, to establish infrastructures for the young medium of video, and to simultaneously initiate a self-determined system of distribution for their works, the artists in this group worked with VHS tapes, each comprising several video contributions, which could be independently circulated, presented, and shared. The initiators were inspired by the first video art magazine entitled Infermental, which developed just a few years earlier by Gábor and Vera Bódy. Between 1980 and 1991, ten issues of Infermental, featuring international, contemporary video art, were published by changing editors and with different thematic focuses. While Schauinsland was more linked to youth culture and punk and new wave aesthetics and the contributions of the various collectives were at times intertwined, Infermental strengthened the idea of an encyclopedia[1] seeking to portray current video experiments in all their diversity. The third video magazine included in the project is the Amsterdam-based Zapp Magazine with “branches” in New York, Paris, London, and Copenhagen. It operated a decade later than the other two and succeeded in once again redefining the format of the video magazine as an independent space of art, critique, and documentation.

The issues published from 1993 to 1999 did not only present video art, but also featured recordings of openings, lectures, and performances, which in their relaxed DIY aesthetics conveyed a polyphonic picture of the international art scene.

BOOKLET

VIDEOMAGAZINE

Despite structural and formal differences, these three video magazines share a particular political awareness showing itself both in the themes and the way they self-organized and distributed their work. Video Congress, for example, captioned their first issue with the motto: “Für eine aktive Art Video” (“For an active art video” and the editors of Infermental also adopted a decidedly political tone by addressing the simmering East-West conflict.

Video Digest, initiated by the Videonale and the IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute, took up these impulses and from a present perspective examined the resistive potential of moving images through a series of dialogically presented contemporary works. The newly commissioned videos, performances, and zines by Ji Su Kang-Gatto, Ayesha Hameed, Becket MWN, Rangwane, and Leyla Yenirce (in collaboration with Mazlum Nergiz) make use of diverse languages and strategies of protest and mobilization—but also of resignation—and reflect on a current video landscape shaped by video on demand, smart TVs, YouTube/Youku, TikTok, and Instagram.

Alongside new productions, the Video Digest exhibition presented the fourth issue of Infermental edited by FRIGO (Gérard Couty, Mike Hentz, Christian Vanderborght) with 102 contributions; issue one of Schauinsland entitled Erotik with contributions by Gruppe A & A, Fun & Art and Norbert Meissner; and issue six of Zapp Magazine, produced and curated by Corinne Groot, Jack Jaeger, Arnold Mosselman, and Rob van de Ven. They were set in an exhibition architecture by Lennart Wolff and were joined by a program of screenings and performances.

Curators: Miriam Hausner, Nele Kaczmarek, Tasja Langenbach
Concept:Tasja Langenbach, Linnea Semmerling

All works were on display together with issues of the historical video magazines Infermental, Video Congress and Zapp Magazine in an exhibition at the Moltkerei Cologne from November 25 – December 10, 2023.

The IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute is dedicated to exhibiting, archiving, and distributing time-based media art. Founded in Düsseldorf in 2006, the institute has had its own video art channel, IMAI Play, since 2021. This focuses on a participatory presentation of videos from the IMAI archive and invites users to put together their own video programs, share them and comment on others.

Videonale e. V. is a non-profit association based in Bonn, which was founded in 1984 to offer a first platform in Germany for the then still young international video art – making Videonale Bonn one of the earliest festivals for video art worldwide. Since then, the association has dedicated itself to presenting contemporary video art in all its facets, addressing a regional, national and international audience. Every two years, the association organizes VIDEONALE – Festival for Video and Time-based Arts with an exhibition presentation and an extensive festival program. Since 2010, the VIDEONALE has had an online video archive with over 200 entries.

The publication VORSTELLUNG DER GEFÖRDERTEN PROJEKTE 2021-2023 on the Media Art Fund & Media Art Fellows can be downloaded here.

Credits: Installation View, VIDEO DIGEST, 2023, Moltkerei Werkstatt, Cologne, Foto: Palazzo Photography

Studio Trafique | WEHR51: “FULLDEMO.CRACY”

FULLDEMO.cracy_Bild Tobias Weikamp

Studio Trafique | WEHR51: “FULLDEMO.CRACY”

STUDIO TRAFIQUE (SIR GABRIEL DELLMANN E.V.) | WEHR51 E.V.

Media Art FundResearch

Duration: October 2022 to December 2023

FULLDEMO.cracy is a realistic live theater game with escape room character.

The multiplayer live setting allows the audience to become actors in the story and experience the achievements and challenges of democratic processes at first hand. The action centers around the fundamental questions: What form of democracy do we want to live in and how can we actively shape it?

STORY

2023: A previously unknown group has occupied several of the parliament buildings of the city. To date, it is not fully clear what their intentions are.
Who are these self-proclaimed “democrats”? Until it has been verified whether the perpetrators are armed and what their goals are, special task forces and counter-terrorism units are on standby. For now, there will be no intervention to prevent an escalation.
Is this an attack on the status quo or a necessary revolution in politics and society? And who are the minds behind this supposedly decentralised movement?

“Welcome, player. We need your help. Consider all your decisions: The future of humanity could depend on you. The clock is ticking from now on.”

BACKGROUND Crude conspiracy theories and a global shift to the political right are holding each other’s feet to the fire. “Volksstürme” on parliaments of democratically organized constitutional states are a frightening “fad” not only in Brazil, the USA and Germany. Trafique react to these threatening scenarios with an artistic echo room that is designed on an interdisciplinary basis: The production FULLDEMO.cracy is being created by a team of artists, media designers and programmers in order to extend the performative design space with the latest digital and narrative methods.

FORM The players are divided into two teams that play with and against each other in separate locations. They are accompanied by two actors who contribute storytelling elements on the one hand and can control the course of the game as game masters on the other.
A local server gives the players access to the web interface created especially for the play, which becomes a central location for the live game theater. Light / sound and various interactive elements in the room (e.g. buttons and motors) react directly to the gameplay and thus to the actions of the players.

The premiere took place on December 6, 2023.

EVENTS FOR FULLDEMO.cracy

March 6, 7, 8 and 9, 2024 | 8 p.m.
LOCATION: Studio Trafique, Merheimer Straße 2

Studio Trafique – Institute for the design of theatrical visions of the future is a theater founded in Cologne in 2021 that focuses on contemporary aesthetics. The focus is on developing new forms of theater by combining familiar theatrical aesthetics with film and digital technologies. Studio Trafique is run by Ensemble Trafique with the artistic management team consisting of Anna Marienfeld and Björn Gabriel.
Studio Trafique was awarded the Kölner Kulturpreis für Junge Initiativen in 2022 for its initiative in the digitalisation of the performing arts. Over the past ten years, they have created a diverse program of various productions and have continuously developed further – always in search of appropriate manifestations for their contemporary content. In doing so, they overcome superficial genre boundaries.

Using digital and filmic elements, they extend the conventional representation and impact spaces of performing arts. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Trafique has developed the pioneering format of hybrid live-film theater, in which live character is always the main element: with live direction, live video editing and live sound engineering, every medium always refers to the theatrical situation and creates new experiences for the audience.

WEHR51 (under the artistic direction of Andrea Bleikamp and Rosi Ulrich) focuses on the realization of its own concepts and theater texts, which are dedicated to current and socio-politically relevant topics. This is linked to the search for new dramaturgical approaches that lead to unusual performance venues and include immersive art forms. In the artistic debate, the content determines the form. The initial idea and theme define the dramaturgical approach, in which the tools of acting, dance, music, video and others are equally combined and expanded. The result is a diverse program of ‘hybrid’ productions.
WEHR51 sees the audience as part of the production. The aim is not to force the audience to participate or to lecture them, but rather to sensually warm people up, to question the themes and to rethink them.

The project is also funded by the Cultural Office of the City of Cologne, the NRW Kultursekretariat Wuppertal and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW.

The publication VORSTELLUNG DER GEFÖRDERTEN PROJEKTE 2021-2023 on the Media Art Fund & Media Art Fellows can be downloaded here.

Image: ©Tobias Weikamp

PACT ZOLLVEREIN ESSEN | MARCO DONNARUMMA: “I AM YOUR BODY”

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PACT ZOLLVEREIN ESSEN | MARCO DONNARUMMA: “I AM YOUR BODY”

FELLOW: Marco Donnarumma

Media Art FellowsFunding, Research

Duration: July 2022 to October 2023

What do sounds mean to those who do not hear them? How can something be heard that cannot be heard? What sensory gaps are created by assistive technologies such as prosthetics and artificial intelligence (AI)? The project I AM YOUR BODY by Marco Donnarumma at PACT Zollverein offers a synaesthetic experience into a radically alternative sensorium. By repurposing and reappropriating AI algorithms and prosthetics developed for normative hearing, the performance interweaves sound, movement and light.

Electromechanical transmitters lie on the table, muscle sensors that make the physical – movements, palpitations, the blood flowing through the veins – audible and tangible. Marco Donnarumma develops musical instruments that make body sounds perceptible. To do this, he worked with AI robotics and new interfaces for musical expression. The five-member research group was able to experiment with these instruments as part of the I AM YOUR BODY project. They were people who have been deaf or hard of hearing since birth or who live with a cochlear implant, ranging from 15-year-old teenagers to 57-year-old electromechanics. With this very heterogeneous group, Marco Donnarumma explored the question of what sound means and how sound is perceived by deaf and hard of hearing bodies. The project aimed to expand the understanding of sound beyond the boundaries of normative hearing and to celebrate the interdependence of physical experiences.

Donnarumma himself is hard of hearing; in 2014 he was diagnosed with genetic, bilateral degenerative hearing loss. The participants shared their experiences at digital meetings and in workshops. Here we saw “how important it is for deaf and hard of hearing people to have a physical and mental space to exchange thoughts, concerns and questions about our physical experiences without being disturbed,” notes Marco Donnarumma. They talked about what sound can be – including vibration and light. Light filters were used to visualise – based on the individual hearing curve – what each participant can and cannot hear. The research is the inspiration for Donnarumma’s solo performance, which was premiered at PACT Zollverein in September 2023. An additional program with an exhibition, video installation, lectures and group discussions will complement the performance and make the creative work process understandable. Building on feminist theory and critical disability studies, this project seeks to promote a dialog between movement research, interactive music and human-computer interaction.

Marco Donnarumma (DE / IT) is an artist, performer, stage director and theorist weaving together contemporary performance, new media art and interactive computer music since the early 2000s. He manipulates bodies, creates choreographies, engineers machines and composes sounds, thus combining disciplines, media and technology into an oneiric, sensual, uncompromising aesthetics. He is internationally acknowledged for solo performances, stage productions and installations that defy genres, and where the body becomes a morphing language to speak critically of ritual, power and technology.
More info about Marco Donnarumma

Founded in 2002, PACT Zollverein in Essen is a production house with a special focus on performing arts in relation to science, contemporary theory and social topics. The house initiates and promotes experimental, artistic and transdisciplinary forms of knowledge production. Within an international stage programme, PACT presents co-productions, premieres and guest performances and realizes discursive formats such as symposia and festivals in the platform area. As a residency venue, PACT is a central place of work and activity for international and local artists. Together with six other central institutions in Germany, PACT is a member of the Alliance of International Production Houses.
More info about PACT Zollverein

The publication VORSTELLUNG DER GEFÖRDERTEN PROJEKTE 2021-2023 on the Media Art Fund & Media Art Fellows can be downloaded here.

Photos: © Dirk Rose

Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum | Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM): “Leaky Archive”

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Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum | Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM): “Leaky Archive”

Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum | Academy of Media Arts Cologne

Media Art FundResearch

Duration: spring until november 2023

The Leaky Archive project investigates how colonial archives and collections can be further developed in post-colonial times. Based on the free / libre open source philosophy, the teams of the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum (RJM) and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM), in collaboration with local and international institutions, colleagues and the public, are creating a new kind of archive – lively, multi-perspective and polyphonic. As part of this archive project, digital fellowships will be launched that focus on the fundamental perspectives of online collaboration, knowledge exchange and decentralised infrastructure. The project does not aim to transfer analogue ideas into the digital space, but to digitally rethink the RJM’s collections, the consequences of their digitization, the possibilities of their mediation and their radical democratisation through the creation of guides. The fellowships are aimed at artists, activists, makers, experts or collectives from the Global South. In each round, four fellows spend three months researching their own idea. They provide insights into the results of their research in digital public tours and lecture performances.

How can colonial archives and collections be critically explored and reflected on using digital technologies? This question is addressed by a digital scholarship programme, which focuses, for example, on the question of how digitised collections can be communicated in a new way.

Click here for the digital Leaky Archive

The exhibition opening took place on September 6, 2023 at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne.

In this podcast episode, Sophie Emilie Beha talks to curator Agustina Andreoletti about the project.

Founded in 1901 in the southern part of Cologne, the museum was reopened in 2010 as the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum – Kulturen der Welt in a new building in the city center. Around 70,000 items from daily life and rituals and around 100,000 historical photographs from Oceania, Asia, Africa and the Americas are kept there. Based on this primarily historical collection, various perspectives on the shared cultural heritage are opened up, with diverse past, present and future levels of meaning.

The Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM) was founded in 1989 and opened in Cologne in 1990. Today, the KHM is a major part of the German art and film school landscape. It represents a project-oriented approach and specifically promotes the interdisciplinary examination of various artistic fields (including photography, fiction, documentary and experimental film, video and light art, camera and image design, experimental computer science, theory, aesthetics and the history of machines, the arts and media).

The publication VORSTELLUNG DER GEFÖRDERTEN PROJEKTE 2021-2023 on the Media Art Fund & Media Art Fellows can be downloaded here.

Credits: Photos Depot: © Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum | Photos Edit-a-thon: @ Dörthe Boxberg

MIREVI (Hochschule Düsseldorf) | Die Ruhrgebieterinnen: “You better don’t know”

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MIREVI (Hochschule Düsseldorf) | Die Ruhrgebieterinnen: “You better don’t know”

MIREVI (Hochschule Düsseldorf) | Die Ruhrgebieterinnen

Media Art FundResearch

Duration: June 2023 to June 2024

Post-digital culture meets science fiction: the art project You better don’t know questions and stages the relationship between the environment, humans and the sense of reality and develops speculative narratives for paranormal and extraterrestrial experiences.

You better don’t know creates a fascinating surreal encounter with extraterrestrial life. The artists take up the UFO myth to invite us to play and experiment with orders of reality. The participants stand in the center of the action: In a hypnotic state between dreaming and being awake, they leave their familiar everyday surroundings to enter a post-apocalyptic world full of challenges. In exchange with beings from entirely alien worlds, they become active co-creators of a possible future.

Since my first paranormal, extraterrestrial experience at the age of eight in the form of a light phenomenon in the sky that cannot be clearly defined, I have always wondered whether this encounter was real or merely an illusion of light that appeared due to excessive consumption of sci-fi films.
I WANT TO BELIEVE My faith in humanity is based on our post-digital society finding a solution for dealing with intolerance and rejection of the foreign / alien. (Vesela Stanoeva))

The artistic project You better don’t know promotes the collaboration of various institutions and artists from a wide range of artistic disciplines (including media art, creative coding, sound design, dance, lighting design, scenography, costume design, 3D design) in order to jointly address the topic of the post-digital society against the backdrop of social and political change. The results of the cooperation project were presented at the NEW NOW Festival for Digital Arts in Essen in 2023. At least two further performances are also planned at Dortmund’s Theater im Depot.

Die Ruhrgebieterinnen is a collective of female artists founded in 2021 by Vesela Stanoeva and Elisabeth Drache and specialises in digital performance. They explore new forms of encounters and differences as well as the potential of diversity in various performative and installative projects.

MIREVI is the “Mixed Reality and Visualization” working group at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. In an external laboratory near Düsseldorf’s main railway station, a team of scientists, technicians and designers work together with artists on innovative human-technology interfaces that appeal to the whole body.

The publication VORSTELLUNG DER GEFÖRDERTEN PROJEKTE 2021-2023 on the Media Art Fund & Media Art Fellows can be downloaded here.

Credits: @ Die Ruhrgebieterinnen

Geert Lovink in conversation with Annekathrin Kohout „Stuck on the Platform – Reclaiming the Internet“

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Geert Lovink in conversation with Annekathrin Kohout „Stuck on the Platform – Reclaiming the Internet“

FFT Düsseldorf – Forum Freies Theater
FR, DECEMBER 16, 2022, 18:30 H

Office medienwerk.nrwPanel Discussion

Watch Live Stream (opens 16.12. – 18.30h)

The media theorist and net critic Geert Lovink has been observing developments in the digital world with growing concern for years. He warned early on about platform capitalism and urged us to delete our Facebook profiles. His analyses show how interaction in social media can produce a special kind of sadness. Nevertheless, he has not yet lost faith in a better web. His new book Stuck on the Platform. Reclaiming the Internet (transcript, 2022) has just been published in German. In it, he calls on us to develop “our own versions of the technosocial”. In conversation with media scientist Annekathrin Kohout (“Nerds. Eine Popkulturgeschichte”, “Netzfeminismus. Digitale Bildkulturen”), Geert Lovink presents the German translation of the book for the first time.

After the talk at the FFT Düsseldorf, all interested parties are invited to join a public viewing session: Together we will watch the livestream of internil’s performance Blackout in the foyer and interact via chat bot with the stage of Theaterdiscounter Berlin.

Our guests

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of, among others, Dark Fiber (2002), Zero Comments (2007), Under the Spell of Platforms (2017) and Digital Nihilism. Theses on the Dark Side of Platforms (2019) among others. Lovink is the founding director of the media-theoretical Institute of Network Cultures (INC) based at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, which has been dedicated to culture in virtual networks as a social phenomenon since 2004. Since 2021, Lovink has also been Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the University of Amsterdam.

networkcultures.org
Geert Lovink in the Collective Chronicle of Thoughts and Observations, 2017

Annekathrin Kohout is a media scholar and co-editor of the book series “Digital Image Cultures” and the journal “POP. Kultur und Kritik” and a member of the editorial board of the international “Journal of Global Pop Cultures”. Her book “Nerds. Eine Popkulturgeschichte” was published by C.H. Beck in 2022. She is currently a guest lecturer at the Institute for Media, Theatre and Popular Culture at the University of Hildesheim.

KAINKOLLEKTIV | SPUTNIC | MIREVI (HOCHSCHULE DÜSSELDORF) U. A.: “KASSIA & the Convent(ion) A Performative Archive”

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KAINKOLLEKTIV | SPUTNIC | MIREVI (HOCHSCHULE DÜSSELDORF) U. A.: “KASSIA & the Convent(ion) A Performative Archive”

KAINKOLLEKTIV | SPUTNIC | MIREVI (HOCHSCHULE DÜSSELDORF) U. A.

Media Art FundResearch

The composer, poet & Byzantine abbess KASSIA is considered the first European composer whose works have survived and still play an important role in European (music) history. Kassia was born in Constantinople in 810. KASSIA is not only an enigmatic personality as a musician. She is also a writer of astonishing radicalism, composing not only sacred poetry but also secular texts, of which more than 250 have survived in the form of epigrams. Last but not least, she appears as a political figure who rhetorically opposes the emperor Theophilos in his search for a bride.

Kassia is a kind of early feminist and cosmopolitan role model. Her work was taken by kainkollektiv and various artists, scholars and institutions from Germany, Poland and Turkey as the starting point for a multi-dimensional and multidimensional project consisting of the KASSIA opera performance and the (digital) KASSIA conference. Finally, the KASSIA online exhibition/archive is now being created, which will make these project parts visible in a bundled form and link them interactively.

The online exhibition/archive KASSIA will make the Kassia cosmos accessible, with all media developed in the previous parts of the project – music, texts, performance, lectures, images, portraits etc. – becoming part of this digital space. – will become components of this digital space

In cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation. Supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in the Media Art Fund and by the City of Bochum.

Take a look at kassia-archive.org and find out here more about the idea in the podcast episode with Mirjam and Olga.

The international artist team kainkollektiv has been working in various collaborations on theatrical scores between theater, installation and performance since 2009. These collaborations, from Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia to Poland, Croatia and Cameroon, are dedicated to a cooperative theater of time. Working in international
(co-)productions – the music-theatrical, docu-fictional GLOBE OPERAS, a performance format invented by kainkollektiv and based on extensive research – is a central component of the working method.

The collective sputnic develops new scenographic productions and installations using specially designed media and stage spaces. They experiment with crossover projects that combine analog, digital and media resources to create narratives and visual worlds on stage. In 2015, the collective created a new genre in theater and film with the production “The Possibility of an Island”: Live Animation Cinema. The production “IOTA.KI” was awarded “Best Production 2019” at the HART AM WIND Festival in Kiel and included in the official program of the Ruhrfestspiele 2020.

MIREVI (Mixed Reality and Visualization) at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences in the Department of Media is a team of digital media experts, computer scientists, designers and artists – all with a common interest in developing and implementing the best possible user experience for a wide variety of contexts. We work hard to create innovative interfaces between people and technology that are novel, useful and sustainable.

The publication VORSTELLUNG DER GEFÖRDERTEN PROJEKTE 2021-2023
on the Media Art Fund & Media Art Fellows can be downloaded here.

Illustrations: © Malte Jehmlich & Verena Herbst

TALK “WHAT THE VALLEY CALLS THINKING – AND HOW IT IS TALKED ABOUT”

Bild – VA Was das Valley denken nennt

TALK “WHAT THE VALLEY CALLS THINKING – AND HOW IT IS TALKED ABOUT”

HMKV im Dortmunder U | CINEMA, GROUND FLOOR And online
MI, 15th JunE 2022, 19 – 21 p.m.

Office medienwerk.nrwPanel Discussion

Live-Stream | June 15, 2022, 7pm

With Dr. Inke Arns, Prof. Dr. Adrian Daub und Jonas Lüscher
Moderated by: Dr. Iuditha Balint und Fabian Saavedra-Lara

Together with the cooperation partners, the Fritz-Hüser-Institut für Literatur und Kultur der Arbeitswelt and the HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, the Office medienwerk.nrw cordially invites you to the discussion “What the Valley calls thinking – and how it is talked about” with the literary scholar and publicist Prof. Dr. Adrian Daub, the writer Jonas Lüscher and the curator and director of the HMKV Dr. Inke Arns on June 15, 2022 at 7pm. The venue is the cinema in the Dortmunder U.

On the occasion of the current HMKV exhibition House of Mirrors: Artificial Intelligence as Phantasm, the discussion event at Dortmunder U will bring some thoughts from Adrian Daub’s and Jonas Lüscher’s texts into dialogue with the ideas and selected works from the exhibition. What all three participants have in common is the concern to take a critical and differentiated look at the history of ideas in Silicon Valley and the narratives about digital technologies produced by the companies residing there. In the discussion, some of these myths, which currently revolve around the buzzword “artificial intelligence”, for example, will be named and deconstructed. The event will be moderated by Dr. Iuditha Balint (Fritz Hüser Institute) and Fabian Saavedra-Lara (Büro medienwerk.nrw).

About the guests:
The Cologne-born Germanist and literary scholar Prof. Dr. Adrian Daub is professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, where he is the director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
He writes on topics such as early feminism, memory culture and 19th century German popular and musical culture. His book “What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley” (Suhrkamp, 2020) tells the story of Silicon Valley – a region that has risen to become the most powerful IT and high-tech location in the world over the last 70 years. In his book, Daub, who established his professional focus at Stanford in close proximity to the Valley, questions its self-staging by examining the rhetoric of entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel or Mark Zuckerberg and historically contextualising the ideology of the industry.

Jonas Lüscher is a Swiss-German writer and essayist. After studying philosophy, he did intensive research on the significance of narratives for the description of social complexity and in this context he had a scholarship from the Swiss National Science Foundation for a research stay at Stanford. His novella “Frühling der Barbaren” (2013) is about the importance of narratives in social contexts – in this book, Richard Rorty’s theories come to bear narratively. His novel “Kraft” (2017) tells about the mentality and rhetoric of Silicon Valley. As a socially and politically engaged essayist, Jonas Lüscher publishes on various topics such as economics and populism.

Dr. Inke Arns is the director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, Germany. She has worked internationally as an independent curator and theorist specializing in media art, net cultures, and Eastern Europe since 1993. After living in Paris (1982-1986) she studied Russian literature, Eastern European studies, political science, and art history in Berlin and Amsterdam (1988–1996 M.A.) and in 2004 received her PhD from the Humboldt University in Berlin. She has curated many exhibitions – at the bauhaus dessau, MG+MSUM Ljubljana, Gallery EXIT Pejë, KW Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, CCA Glasgow, CCA Ujazdowski Castle Warsaw, HMKV Dortmund, HKW Berlin, Muzeum Sztuki Lodz, La Gaîté Lyrique Paris, MMOMA Moscow, BOZAR Brussels, NCCA Yekaterinburg, exportdrvo Rijeka, a.o. She is the author of many articles on contemporary art, media art and net culture, and has edited numerous exhibition catalogues and books. In 2021-2022 Visiting Professor at the Münster Art Academy. 2022 Curator of the Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo (artist: Jakup Ferri), 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.

The Talk will be held in German.
Admission is free, no registration required.

The programme is funded by NEUSTART KULTUR and Stiftung Kunstfonds.

Portraits: Adrian Daub: © Cynthia Newberry | Jonas Lüscher: © Ulrike Arnold/Jonas Lüscher | Inke Arns: © Frank Vinken

Temporary Gallery – centre for contemporary art | Kris Dittel: “UNRULY KINSHIPS”

Gabris, Robert, 100x70cm, pencil on cardboard, Vienna 2022

Juurak, Krõõt_ Bailey, Alex_ FNW_7225 xx www m

Exhibition view_ Pauline Curnier Jardin + The Feel Good Cooperative (The Death of the Pope)

Exhibition view_ Nicole Baginski, Jay Tan, Clementine Edwards

Selman, Selma_ gold

Edwards, Clementine_ Rice Huisje Rice, gold leaf, silver leaf, copper leaf glue, 2022

Aiwen, Yin_ Relationship Consulate station_ Liquid Dependencies at Framer Framed_ photographed by Samuel White Evans

Aiwen, Yin_ Relationship Consulate station_ Liquid Dependencies at Framer Framed_ photographed by Samuel White Evans_

Temporary Gallery – centre for contemporary art | Kris Dittel: “UNRULY KINSHIPS”

FELLOW: Kris Dittel

Media Art FellowsResearch

Duration: march until dezember 2022

Kris Dittel is a current Medienkunstfellow NRW at the Temporary Gallery – centre for contemporary art in Cologne. During her fellowship she is involved in a research trajectory Unruly Kinships speculating about utopian forms of kinship beyond property relations and the social reproduction of norms. It is about the critique of the nuclear family with an aim to expand the questioning spirit into practices of collective learning, sharing and contemplating other ways of organising life and social reproduction. Topics of interest include family abolitionism, queer kinship, reproductive justice, the role of technology in forming relations, as well as a reflection on raising children. The project aims to collectively contemplate the question of how to build communities that expand beyond the normative family unit, in a world that is set up to regulate social relations via the private socio-economic organisation of the nuclear family. Instead of presenting new models or universalist ideals, the project aims to diverge from the idea of blueprints and hopes to collectively contemplate the question of how to build communities that expand beyond the normative family unit, in a world that is set up to regulate social relations via the private socio-economic organisation of the nuclear family.

The project involves a collaborative research between the fellow, Kris Dittel and the director of the CCA Temporary Gallery, Aneta Rostkowska. Additionally, a study group Unruly Kinships takes place. This series of gatherings aims to think collectively about the way we form relations in and with the world, outside of the nuclear family structure. The online meetings take place monthly. Each session is led by an invited guest, including artists, thinkers, poets, activists and others.

Kris Dittel is a Rotterdam-based curator, editor and occasional writer. Informed by her background in economics and social sciences, her curatorial practice pays attention to the social, political and economic context of her work. Her long-term research projects materialise in a multitude of ways, as exhibitions, performances, publications, talks, public events, and other. Most recent research interests include Unruly Kinships(Temporary Gallery, Cologne 2022); The Voice as Material (Post-Opera at TENT, V2_, Operadagen Rotterdam, 2019); and The Question of Value (The Trouble with Value at Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow and Onomatopee, Eindhoven, 2016–19). With Eloise Sweetman Kris co-hosts I Hope This Message Finds You Well, a podcast about curating.

Her latest publication, co-edited with Clementine Edwards, The Material Kinship Reader considers material beyond extraction and kinship beyond the nuclear family (Onomatopee, 2022). Previous edited volumes include The Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation (Onomatopee, 2020), Marjolijn Dijkman: Radiant Matter (Onomatopee, 2018), The Economy is Spinning (Onomatopee, 2017), and Antonis Pittas: Road to Victory (co-edited with Clare Butcher, Mousse Publishing and Hordaland Kunstsenter, 2017).
More info about Kris Dittel

In this podcast episode Olga Felker talks with Kris Dittel about the project

EVENTS FOR THE PROJECT
UNRULY KINSHIPS

FORMS OF KINSHIP – LIQUID DEPENDENCIES
19 February 2022

Organized by documenta Institut in collaboration with Temporary Gallery. Centre for Contemporary Art.
With Aneta Rostkowska (CCA Temporary Gallery, Cologne), Kris Dittel (independent curator), Aiwen Yin (ReUnion Network / Liquid Dependencies)
Moderation: Mi You
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – LIQUID DEPENDENCIE

FORMS OF KINSHIP – ON FAMILY ABOLITION
A talk by Sophie Lewis
16 March 2022

Family abolition is a charged phrase which often prompts the impulsive answer “But I love my Family!” With Sophie Lewis we will discuss what is meant by family abolitionism, what it has to do with love and collective care, why we should abolish the family, and its utopian vision. Sophie Lewis will also reflect on what does family abolition mean in political contexts where the Indigenous, minoritarian and racialised family is always already pre-abolished.
Documentation FORMS OF KINSHIP – ON FAMILY ABOLITION

FORMS OF KINSHIP – THE MATERIAL KINSHIP READER
Conversation with Kris Dittel, Clementine Edwards and a talk by Joannie Baumgärtner
29 April 2022

What does it mean to acknowledge one’s closeness to, enmeshment in or even kinship with the material world? And what does it mean to question family structures – the way they organise, coerce and make deviant certain lifeforms – and dwell in other possibilities of kin-making? Not just a jolly rethinking of objects or a polyamorous romp through relationships, The Material Kinship Reader reckons with the extractivist histories of materials and the social relations that frame much of contemporary life.

The Material Kinship Reader proposes to think kin beyond bloodlines and material beyond extraction. The event will include an introduction by the editors, Kris Dittel and Clementine Edwards, followed by a talk by Joannie Baumgärtner. The talk, based on their text Family Value: Towards a Kinship Beyond the Forms of Capital will outline some ideas on the way the nuclear family structure produces kinship through the capital form.
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – THE MATERIAL KINSHIP READER

FORMS OF KINSHIP — RADICAL DREAMING
Workshop with Georgy Mamedov
15 May 2022

For many people sleep is an escape strategy in stressful situations. We want to fall asleep in the hope that after awakening the stressful condition is gone. Sleeping is a transitory state, a refuge from the pressing and devastating reality. In dreams complex, otherwise unexperienced worlds and feelings never experienced before appear. Dreams have a power to frighten and distress but also to heal and liberate. Dreaming is an utterly personal, even intimate experience, very often too embarrassing to share with others.

Yet, this is what I want to do – to invite friends and strangers into my dream; to let everyone explore and settle in the dreamworld I’ve once visited myself. It is a world in which people have a chance to live eternally, but if and when they decide to die, they turn into human-made objects. What object would you want to become after death? What does death mean anyway? What happens to kinship, love and belonging in a world where the ontological difference between the human and non-human becomes arbitrary? We will collectively dive into these questions and try to come up with some answers, which potentially bring some light and hope to our present gloomy and scary world.
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – RADICAL DREAMING

FORMS OF KINSHIP — THE POWER OF DREAMS
A reading and conversation with Georgy Mamedov
16 May 2022

In dreams mundanity, fantasy, individual fears and collective desires are often tied up in the strangest ways. Can we potentially use the power of these odd juxtapositions for radical (re)imagination of the world we live in? Audre Lorde starts her Notes from a Trip to Russia (1976) with a recollection of an erotic dream during her visit to Moscow. Georgy Mamedov will read this short fragment as an invitation to a conversation about the power of dreams as vehicles of radical imagination. Let’s share dreams and see where it gets us!
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – THE POWER OF DREAMS

FORMS OF KINSHIP – POLYSEXUAL ECONOMY
Reading group with Bini Adamczak
24 August 2022

The love market is premised on competition between lovers, like any other market solely on the construction of scarcity. There are enough lovers for everyone, but not everyone gets one – or ten. The theory of polysexual economy apprehends sexuality as value-form, from the side of the exchange process. It allows a glimpse of the possibility of a sexual economy that, for the first time in history, would not be structured in a corporative-feudal, racist-segregationist way: a universal (world) market, in which all bodies appear as commodities and are exchangeable (what a delay – see 1789). Deregulating the economy though means abolishing its limitations, and not abolishing the economy itself – which is what’s at stake here. What is sought is a mode of socialisation that is neither the (under-consumptive) crisis mode of the single-market, nor that of the twosome, the marriage contract, or the trade agreement for (a stage of) life. Neither a proto-capitalist economy of general competition, nor a socialist controlled economy that administers poverty – one and just one commodity of attractive power for each – for eternity.

Bini Adamczak (Berlin) works as a philosopher and artist who writes on political theory, queer politics, and the past future of revolutions. She invented the term “circlusion” and is the author of Communism for Kids (MIT) and Yesterday’s Tomorrow. On the Loneliness of Communist Specters and the Reconstruction of the Future (MIT). Together with Konstanze Schmitt she created the theatre play Everybody Needs Only You. Love in Times of Capitalism (Berlin 2019).
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – POLYSEXUAL ECONOMY

FORMS OF KINSHIP — ANCESTRAL SPIRITS
Talk with Khanyisile Mbongwa and Li’Tsoanelo Zwane
7 September 2022

During the event curator Khanyisile Mbongwa and researcher/ healer Li’Tsoanelo Zwane will engage in a conversation about ancestral spirits and how they establish various levels of kinship. They will discuss the way they relate to each other as Sangoma‘s (shaman/ indigenous spiritual healer), the way we can shape relations with idlozi – singular and plural ancestral spirits, with whom, one shares their corporeal body (Zwane, 2021) and brotherhood with ubuNgoma (which can be defined as the overarching theoretical and pragmatic frameworks informing the work of Sangomas) (Zwane, 2021). The discussion will also revolve around kinship from the perspective of feminine and masculine energies that are not static roles, but fluid and always changing. Mbongwa will elaborate on how this form of kinship informs her curatorial practice of care and cure.
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – ANCESTRAL SPIRITS

FORMS OF KINSHIP – DADDY RESIDENCY
Talk with Nahee Kim and Jiyoung Kim
31 October 2022

The event will be a conversation between artist Nahee Kim and researcher Jiyoung Kim with a special focus on the artist’s project Daddy Residency. Daddy Residency is a project about Nahee Kim’s family planning with their unborn baby and multiple biologically unrelated daddies. The project is Kim’s attempt to contemplate how much our norms and desires about family are programmed as ‘natural’ and how Kim, as an individual in the hetero-patriarchal society, can override those. In 2019, in the project’s initial phase, Kim publicised their plan to have a baby via IVF and raise the baby with multiple temporary daddies, chosen through an open-call. The applicants’ gender does not matter, they would be compensated for their child-rearing labour.
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – DADDY RESIDENCY

FORMS OF KINSHIP – NEUROQUEER INTIMACIES
Event with Francisco Trento
8 December 2022

During the event, Francisco Trento will present two work-in-progress projects on the topic of non-neurotypical intimate relationships, ones that deviate from the standpoint of neurotypical privilege. Francisco will introduce their research on the stigmatisation of neurodiversity within online dating platforms and share excerpts from an article soon to be published in Culture Unbound journal. During the second part of the event, they will present a zine prototype, T*nder-bender (developed at the UrbanApa Home Residency). The zine discusses experiences of stigmatisation in the online dating scene as a neurodivergent person. While this is a project strongly connected to complaining, it emphasises neuroqueer JOY. This is why the prototype also includes fictional playful dating app profiles showing a joyful approach to more-than-human and neuroqueer approaches to intimacy; profiles that value neurodivergent traits such as stimming, stuttering, being hypersensitive and overwhelmed by textures, sounds and crowded environments. The zine features counter-ableist dating app profiles from the perspective of non-human subjects, such as rocks, trees and toys looking for intimate connection. The zine’s conceptual allies are, among many, Remi Yergeau’s book Authoring Autism: On Neurological Queerness and Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family.
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – NEUROQUEER INTIMACIES

FORMS OF KINSHIP – ON THE (FEMINIST) CONTRADICTIONS OF PARENTING
Event with Karina Kottová and Barbora Ciprová
13 December 2022

Hold on to – Let go
Parenting in times of today’s multiple global crises raises many question marks. What can we look up to and which models can we follow or establish in order to raise children with a future, capable of co-creating more sustainable and caring conditions for life, education, relationships, work and fulfilment?

The online talk and screening will offer a glimpse into texts and research materials on diverse modalities of parenting and relations with children that were used in preparation of an international exhibition project titled Beyond Nuclear Family, presented by Jindřich Chalupecký Society curatorial collective in Prague, Berlin and New York. During the talk and the following discussion, two curators will explore some of the often contradictory stands and propositions on parenting and parent-children’s perspectives stemming from feminist theory and fiction, psychological and anthropological literature. They will discuss topics such as (in)secure attachment, (de)privatisation of care or “tribalization” of parenting styles. The talk will include excerpts of moving image works that were part of the Beyond Nuclear Family exhibition.

Karina Kottová is a curator and theoretician of contemporary art based in Prague, Czech Republic. She is currently director of the Jindřich Chalupecký Society. Among projects she established and co-established are INI Project, an independent process-oriented project space, the Věra Jirousová Award for art critics, or UMA Audioguide. She is interested in the psychological and emotional impact of current socio-political challenges as well as in feminist theory and the subversive potential of the so-called “feminine” qualities, such as empathy, irrationality or intuition. Since 2010 she has curated over 60 exhibitions, projects and festivals, both in the Czech Republic and internationally – in independent art centers and museums in New York, Washington D.C., Berlin, Helsinki, Diepenheim (NL) or Gdansk (PL). She has worked on large-scale projects and new artwork commissions with prominent artists from diverse backgrounds. In 2019 Display published her monograph Institution and the Viewer.

Barbora Ciprová is a curator and musician based in Prague. She graduated from the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University in Prague and the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno in the studio of Environment. Apart from her independent curatorial projects mainly in regional galleries, she has been working at the Jindřich Chalupecký Society, first as a production manager, then as part of the curatorial collective and as deputy director. In her practice she focuses on the influence of the physical or cultural environment on the inner “space” of a person, whether in the context of art, anthropology or psychology.

Beyond Nuclear Family represents the third chapter in the Jindřich Chalupecký Society’s long-term project Islands: Possibilities of Togetherness. It is also part of the international platform Islands of Kinship: A Collective Manual for Sustainable and Inclusive Art Institutions, co-funded by the European Union.

The Temporary Gallery – centre for contemporary art is a non-profit institution for contemporary art in Cologne. Founded in 2009 as an art association, it was directed by art historian and curator Regina Barunke from 2012-2018. In January 2019, Aneta Rostkowska took over as director of the gallery. In solo and group exhibitions, the Temporary Gallery presents young or rediscovered, often international positions. Since 2014, the Temporary Gallery has been institutionally supported by the City of Cologne as a centre for contemporary art.
More info about Temporary Gallery – centre for contemporary art

Images: @ Konrad Klapheck. The Superman (Der Supermann), 1962. Ludwig Museum I © Christopher Leaman. Sophie Lewis, 2019 I ©Pan Yannan I Image: Bini Adamczak © Chris Grodotzki

Fringe ensemble | Fehime Seven: “SHARING SPACE”

MAP TO UTOPIA

Fringe ensemble | Fehime Seven: “SHARING SPACE”

FELLOW: Fehime Seven

Media Art FellowsPerformance

Duration: ongoing

How can we expand the space of a theatre performance? Which techniques expand the theatre space and which elements help to consolidate the live experience and the theatrical space despite the expansion? What possibilities of interaction do digital solutions offer us?

The project wants to rethink the framework of a performance, expand it and combine it with original formats. The aim is to create a situation in which a hybrid audience experiences itself as a community. SHARING SPACE wants to explore how the new understanding of encounter and proximity affects the theatre space.

The research will follow on from the collaboration between Fehime Seven and the fringe ensemble in the Map to Utopia project. The project, a German-Turkish collaboration, developed an interactive performance design from 2019 to 2020, which Corona conditionally developed first as a hybrid then as a purely digital format. The situation of working towards a production gave them the chance to experience the framework conditions and content-related technical possibilities in detail and to collect feedback from the audience.

The fellowship allows on the one hand to step back and review subjective experiences, to open the eyes for new formats, and on the other hand to continue a successful collaboration.

Fehime Seven is a computer scientist and playwright from Istanbul, Turkey. She has shot documentaries and short movies in different locations in Europe. She has graduated from the master’s program at the IT University of Copenhagen in the Game Technology department. Alongside her study, she worked at Makropol as an XR developer. Also, she was the teaching assistant for the “Programming for Designers” course for one semester. She has been working on her new gamified award-winning theatre project “Map To Utopia” in collaboration with fringe-ensemble and Platform Theatre since 2019. She continues to work as a freelance developer on multiple game and transmedia projects.

Olga Felker met Fehime Seven and the team of the fringe ensemble to learn more about their research on interactive performance design

Please note: After the intro, the language of the Podcast switches to English!

EVENTS FOR THE PROJECT MAP TO UTOPIA

PERFORMANCE DATES
The performances took place in a hybrid form, at the Theater im Ballsaal in Bonn as well as digitally.

in german language
Fri, 30 September 2022
Sat, 01 October 2022

Performance in English
Fri, 07 October 2022
Sat, 08 October 2022
Tickets and further information

Sat, 08. October, 10 – 18 p.m.
one-day conference in English
at the Theater im Ballsaal and online
Tickets and further information

The fringe ensemble in Bonn was founded by Frank Heuel in 1999. Under his direction, over 80 productions, projects and project series have been created to date. The fringe ensemble works with a free and open ensemble of freelance, professional actors and actresses – supplemented by musicians, video artists and authors selected depending on the production.
More info about the fringe ensemble

Image: © fringe ensemble | © Fehime Seven | © Tanja Evers

Stiftung Zollverein | Julia Kaganskiy & Juliette Bibasse: “A Model World”

gerzweiller9j

Stiftung Zollverein | Julia Kaganskiy & Juliette Bibasse: “A Model World”

FELLOWS: Julia Kaganskiy & Juliette Bibasse

Media Art FellowsResearch

Duration: Spring 2021 and ongoing

A Model World is a research project investigating emerging techniques for climate modification, commonly known as geoengineering, explored through the lens of visual culture. It was initiated by curators Julia Kaganskiy and Juliette Bibasse in the Spring of 2021 and is currently ongoing.

As art historian T.J. Demos points out, the notion that we are living in the age of the Anthropocene “appears to imply the necessity of geoengineering.” It is therefore worth considering how this came to be, and how specific forms of representation, knowledge production, power, and desire have made the concept of engineering climate not only thinkable, but something that seems within reach (for a privileged few).

Some would say that humans have been modifying the climate unintentionally all along, so we may as well take control of the wheel. Those who subscribe to this position tend to regard the Earth’s climate systems as somehow easier to regulate than the human activities that disrupted them. Yet many scientists warn that we simply don’t understand environmental systems well enough to confidently introduce techno-fixes, noting that the potential risks may be too great to responsibly attempt something like geoengineering. Others worry that geoengineering poses a “moral hazard” by reducing the political and social imperative to curb fossil fuel emissions today. Despite these concerns, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been factoring climate interventions like large-scale Carbon Dioxide Removal into its modeling projections since 2018, noting that keeping planetary warming below 1.5°C can no longer be achieved by lowering emissions alone. Even Solar Geoengineering, the more radical and risky approach, is being touted by some as “inevitable.”

Our research interest in the topic was inspired, in part, by several recent popular science books like Holly Jean Buck’s After Geoengineering, Oliver Morton’s The Planet Remade, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky, as well as the observation that artists are slowly beginning to venture into this space, exploring the history of human-designed climate interventions, problematizing techno-solutionist approaches to environmental management, investigating the implied material reconstitution of the atmosphere, and raising ethical questions about who these interventions ultimately benefit.

Thanks to our research fellowship from medienwerk.nrw, we embarked on a month-long residency at Zeche Zollverein in Essen, hosted as part of the NEW NOW festival’s inaugural artist residency program. North-Rhine Westphalia, both because of its mining past and its focus on industrial innovation, seemed like rich terrain in which to situate this research into present-day technological solutions to climate change. The fellowship and residency period gave us an opportunity to delve deeper into the science of geoengineering and the critical discourses surrounding it, as well as to conduct interviews with scientists, researchers, artists, and curators whose work intersects with this subject area.

Today, geoengineering is still mostly hypothetical, but as environmental sociologist Holly Jean Buck notes, “it’s a topic that’s unlikely to disappear until either mitigation is pursued in earnest or the concept of geoengineering is replaced by something better; as long as climate change worsens, the specter is always there.”

The outcomes of our residency and our research to date can be found on the project website: www.a-model-world.net/

The non-profit Zollverein Foundation was established in 1998 by the City of Essen and the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, with the Rhineland Regional Association as a co-founder. In addition to promoting culture and the preservation of historical monuments, the foundation’s main task is to preserve and safeguard the existing buildings and facilities of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Zollverein Coal Mine and Coking Plant and to develop them for future use.
More info about the Zollverein Foundation

More information about the project A Model World?
Listen to Olga Felker’s conversation with Julia
Kaganskiy and Juliette Bibasse in the podcast
behind the scenes – behind the screnes.

Zum Podcast

Image: www.a-model-world.net

Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl | Kollektiv 42 | cityscaper | Folkwang Universität der Künste: “Augmented Art Advertising”

Augmented Art Advertising

Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl | Kollektiv 42 | cityscaper | Folkwang Universität der Künste: “Augmented Art Advertising”

Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl | cityscaper | Folkwang Universität der Künste

Media Art FundProject

Duration: July and August 2022

adARt – Augmented Art Advertising is an interdisciplinary media art project and a design experiment to communicate cultural content using contemporary technologies. The Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl, the Essen-based media art duo Kollektiv 42, the Aachen-based cityscaper GmbH and the Folkwang University of the Arts are planning an innovative augmented reality project to virtually extend the museum space to the exhibition architecture of advertising in public spaces. The interest here is not only in the critical examination of the structural omnipresence of product marketing. Equally decisive is the intensive, cross-sector discourse on the technical possibilities and medial difficulties of mixed reality systems.

With a freely available app, interested people all over NRW will be able to experience the advertising posters in their neighbourhood as exhibition spaces of an augmented reality, create collections of their favourite artworks and learn more about the artists. In August 2022, the Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl will then invite visitors to a special highlight: the virtualised collection and the temporary adARt exhibition with artworks specially developed for the AR space. Visitors can explore the exhibition on their own with the app or take part in curated guided tours in the city centre equipped with tablets.

With a symposium in the SANAA building at the Zollverein World Heritage Site, Kollektiv 42 and Folkwang University of the Arts will offer a platform for cross-sector discourse on mixed reality systems on 11 November 2022 in Essen. Project results will be presented publicly and reflected in various contexts through exhibition elements, guest lectures and a panel discussion.

EVENTS FOR THE PROJECT AUGMENTED ART ADVERTISING

Expanded Worlds – urban media art in marl
Opening on Friday, August 12th at 6 pm

More Information about ERWEITERTE WELTEN

The Expanded Worlds, a free translation of the English technical term Augmented Reality, describe a reality that is expanded with the help of a technical device, a smartphone or a tablet. The Expanded Worlds are an interdisciplinary media art project and a creative experiment in conveying museum content through the use of contemporary technologies. In this project, the large advertising posters placed at central locations throughout cities are recognized by a specially developed app and replaced with new content on the display: All you have to do this, you hold a smartphone in the direction of the poster and a work of art appears on the screen instead of the advertisement.

The Expanded Worlds consist of two parts, with the first part being location-based and only available to experience in Marl starting August 12th. This urban media art exhibition follows a route in Marl-Hüls, which starts at the new location of the museum at the Martin Luther King School. Students from the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen and other young artists from North Rhine-Westphalia have created ten new media art works for this project – videos, animations or acoustic-visual experiments – which are assigned to specific advertising posters and take part in a walk of about an hour. This format is similar to a classic outdoor exhibition, where the works of art are communicated using small technical devices that have become indispensable in our everyday lives: this art is virtual, it does not need picture frames or concrete bases.

In the second part, those interested from all over North Rhine-Westphalia can experience the advertising posters in their neighborhood as exhibition areas of an augmented reality. The Skulpturenmuseum Marl owns around 700 works on canvas as well as drawings and graphics on paper, which have not been on view for a long time because the museum focuses mainly on sculpture, video and sound art. A selection of around 200 works of art is now being made accessible in this technically advanced form. They are landscape paintings, still lifes or depictions of people that were bought by the city of Marl in the late 1960s as decoration for representative locations in the then new town hall, long before the museum existed.
The Extended Worlds are a joint project by Anastasija Delidova and Philip Popien of the Essen media art duo Kollektiv 42, Robin Römer and the programmers from cityscaper GmbH from Aachen and the Skulpturenmuseum Marl.

Expanded worlds – urban media art in Marl opens on Friday, August 12, 2022 at 6 p.m. at Georg-Herwegh-Straße 67. Museum director Georg Elben and the head of the cultural department of the city of Marl, Claudia Schwidrik-Grebe, will speak.

During the exhibition period of the exhibition Erweiterte Welten – urbane Medienkunst in Marl from 12 August to 28 August 2022, the Sculpture Museum offers two additional special guided tours of the outdoor exhibition every week in addition to the usual neighbourhood tours (always Sundays 11h30, start at Creiler Platz, with registration // 15h30, start at the museum, without registration). Together with an art mediator, the tour explores the district of Marl-Hüls and discovers a total of 10 media artworks, some of which were created site-specifically for the exhibition in Marl.
For the tour, visitors can bring their own mobile device with a stable internet connection on which the app adARt is installed. This is available free of charge from the Google Play Store and the AppStore. Alternatively, a device can be borrowed for the tour of the museum. The tour is free of charge and will be offered every Wednesday at 5 pm for the next two weeks. The tour starts at the Sculpture Museum and ends there again. It lasts about 90 minutes and is free of charge.

Participating artists:
Lotta Bauer, Thiemo Frömberg, Hamidreza Ghasemi, Huong Huynh, Elena Kruglova, Donja Nasseri, Jana Kerima Stolzer & Lex Rütten, Julia Unkel
The texts for the media art works were written by students at the Ruhr University Bochum within the seminar “Artistic Interventions in the Smart City” by Professor Dr. Annette Urban.

Image.: © Stephan Wolters

Rottstr5-Kunsthallen | Women In New Media Art (WINMA): “WOMEN IN MEDIA ART LAB BEEP”

Women in New Media

Rottstr5-Kunsthallen | Women In New Media Art (WINMA): “WOMEN IN MEDIA ART LAB BEEP”

Women In New Media Art (WINMA) | Rottstr5-Kunsthallen

Media Art FundWorkshop

Duration: October 2022
Women in New Media Art and Rottstr5-Kunsthallen are organising a one-week media art lab by women artists for women artists in NRW for the first time. Six female media artists will have the opportunity to exchange their working methods, get to know each other and work artistically and technically together. Female media artists can apply for an open call.

When selecting the artists, the diversity of the applicants’ artistic genres will be taken into account in order to stimulate an interdisciplinary creative process on the one hand and to be able to investigate different conceptual and technical approaches within media art on the other. Applications from artists from the fields of video and sound art, virtual reality, robotics, artificial intelligence and coding as well as colleagues who conceive hybrid or purely digital performance formats are welcome.

The aim of the project is to bring together women media artists in a free environment to create collaborative works. In terms of content, the lab focuses on examining one’s own identity as a media artist. What particular challenges must be overcome? How can specific media skills be acquired? What presentation spaces and discourses exist and where do women media artists find their position?

The lab will be accompanied by a series of interviews with other media artists. The aim of this is to find out the needs and potentials and will be documented on film. The results will be published on a project website. In addition, the artists will be introduced.

These results are a first step towards establishing a platform for women media artists. In the long term, it is planned to establish an interactive network for women in media art.

The Media Artists’ Lab will take place from 10-15 October 2022. The lab participants will be provided with infrastructure to develop one or more joint interdisciplinary media art projects. On 15 October 2022, the lab’s work will be presented at the Rottstr5 Kunsthallen. This presentation will be accompanied by a discussion event.

The jury consists of the organisers Christine Bödeker, Anastasija Delidova and Roberta de Lacerda Medina (Women in New Media Art) and Seta Guetsoyan (Rottstr5 Kunsthallen).

Women In New Media Art (WINMA) was founded in 2020 by female media artists from the North Rhine-Westphalia area to develop and promote contemporary art with new media by female artists. The intention is to build a network for women in media art.
More information about Women in New Media Art (WINMA)

The Rottstr5 Kunsthallen are a presentation venue for transdisciplinary art and cultural-political discourse. In addition to presenting professionals, the Rottstr5-Kunsthallen promote young artists.
More information about Rottstr5 Kunsthallen

Abb.: © Anastasija Delidova | © Dr. Martin Bluma

Burg Hülshoff – Center for Literature | Andreas Bülhoff: “TAB TALKS”

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Burg Hülshoff – Center for Literature | Andreas Bülhoff: “TAB TALKS”

FELLOW: Andreas Bülhoff

Media Art FellowsResearch, Workshop

Duration: December 2021 until June 2022

From December 2021 to June 2022, Andreas Bülhoff, author, scholar and media artist from Berlin, will work as a media art fellow at Burg Hülshoff – Center for Literature (CfL). Bülhoff’s academic and artistic research focuses on the influence of digitalisation on practices of text production and reception such as writing, publishing and reading. During the fellowship, Andreas Bülhoff will develop Tab Talk, a digital event format between studio visit and workshop talk. Working hypothesis: Today, literary work essentially takes place on the computer. The Tab Talk makes the invisible visible via the “share screen” function and grants unique access to the digital writing environments of authors: Never before has it been possible to see processes of creative work so closely and immersively on one’s own screen and to talk about them with the respective invited authors. The Tab Talks series will start in May 2022.

Andreas Bülhoff is an author and literary scholar living in Berlin.
He completed his PhD on interface concepts of digital and post-digital text art at the Kolleg für Gegenwartsliteraturforschung Schreibszene Frankfurt. In 2018 and 2019, he published a weekly zine on these topics. It deals with text and text technologies and their specific materialities and practices in the post-digital. Possible outputs are zines, bookworks, sound poetry or literary texts. Possible means are artistic research, interface or techno-logy criticism and publishing as artistic practice.
Find out more about Andreas Bülhoff

In this podcast Olga Felker talks with Andres Bülhoff about the project

EVENTS FOR THE PROJECT TAB TALKS

In the Tab Talks series, authors guide us through their digital writing environments in a mixture of studio visit and workshop discussion.

Tab Talks #1 with Kathrin Passing
For Tab Talks #1, author and programmer Kathrin Passig shares her screen. In the stream, she talks about the influence of digital tools on her writing.

PDF PRINT

Tab Talks #2 with Mara Genschel
For Tab Talks #2, author and performer Mara Genschel shares her screen. She is known for her permanent subversion of literary conventions and her site-specific text realizations. But even the most unconventional poetry has to go through the text editor at some point. What this means for her production of her “applied conceptualisms” she reveals in conversation with Andreas Bülhoff.

PDF PRINT

Tab Talks #3 with Clemens Setz
For Tab Talks #3, author Clemens Setz shares his screen. Setz channels digital cultures like hardly anyone else and shapes them into literature in books. In conversation with our in-house artist Andreas Bülhoff, he shows exactly how this happens.

PDF PRINT

Tab Talks #4 with Elisa Aseva
For Tab Talks #4, author Elisa Aseva shares her screen. Aseva writes primarily on smartphones and is one of the most virtuosic literary voices on social media. She talks about Facebook as a writing environment, limitations and motivations of writing apps, and smartphone thumbs with house artist Andreas Bülhoff.

Tab Talks #5 with Heike Geißler
Tab Talks #5 will be broadcast live from the Leipziger Buchmesse on 27 April 23 at 17:00 and will take place for the first time as an online-offline hybrid. For this, author Heike Geißler shares her screen. In her texts, Geißler reflects both analytically and poetically on writerly working conditions and designs literary texts as vehicles for socio-political utopias. With house artist Andreas Bülhoff she talks about how this relates to the default settings of the word processing programs on her computer and what needs to change from a poetic point of view. For participation on site you need a ticket for the Leipziger Buchmesse. For participation via Zoom you can book a ticket for free. The livestream on the Digital Castle is free of charge.

Collaborative Writing Workflows #1 with Allison Parrish
How do writerly work processes take place on the computer and what influence do computer programmes have on the writing process? In a workshop by author and programmer Allison Parrish, we will write and program the possibilities of collective text production with and despite computer programs. The results can be presented in a zine.

Collaborative Writing Workflows #2 with Brendan Howell
In a workshop by programmer and media artist Brendan Howell, we will discipline our text production. We will log into his typewriter The Maggot. We follow the writing tasks and -times, which are determined by the machine and from which she edits in an autonomous way the collectively written text. The results can be presented in a zine.

Since 2018, the Center for Literature has been developing projects between event, exhibition and dialogue as a place of artistic-practical research. The CfL transfers aesthetics and production methods of other arts (such as film or performing arts) to the field of text creation and mediation.
More info about the CfL

Images: Leon Kirchlechner

IMAI Foundation | Wouter de Romph: “The Cassette Underground – Archiving Cultures of Alternative Distribution in North Rhine-Westphalia”

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IMAI Foundation | Wouter de Romph: “The Cassette Underground – Archiving Cultures of Alternative Distribution in North Rhine-Westphalia”

FELLOW: Wouter de Romph

Media Art FellowsResearch

Duration: 15.12.2021 – 30.06.2022

From the 1970s to the 1990s, the music cassette made a significant contribution to the lasting democratization of the music industry and the proliferation of marginal genres and styles on informal markets. The Cassette Underground approaches the cassette cultures of North Rhine-Westphalia through archival practices: the punk, new wave, and industrial cassettes of the distributor 235 at the Düsseldorf IMAI, the cassette collections of Turkish guest workers at DOMiD in Cologne, the zines, flyers, and stickers at Afas in Duisburg, and the critical tape-digging program of the Interkultur Ruhr initiative in Essen. With their different collection strategies, indexing methods, and research interests, these institutions do not only facilitate research into the mechanisms of production and distribution, but also allow for a reflection on archiving and presentation strategies for marginal and fragile audiovisual media.

The Inter Media Art Institute is dedicated to exhibiting, archiving, and distributing time-based media art.
More info about Foundation IMAI

Wouter de Romph is a musicologist who approaches the field from both a theoretical and practical point of view. After having studied Arts & Culture Studies and Philosophy (BA) in Rotterdam, he completed his studies in Applied Musicology (MA) in Utrecht, with a thesis on the D.I.Y. cassette networks of the 1980’s. Since, he has been involved in the music industry through his work for recordlabel, store and distributor Clone Records as well as through his role as DJ and radiomaker.

For this Podcast episode Olga Felker met Wouter de Romph and Linnea Semmerling to learn more about the project The Cassette Underground

EVENTS FOR THE PROJECT
THE CASSETTE UNDERGROUND

03 July 2022, 20:00 – 04 July 2022, 02:30
SDV Goes Osdorp
A Cassette Night at the Salon des Amateurs
More info about the event

Image.: Detail from 235 catalogue, 1983, Archive Stiftung IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute, © Ulrich Leistner, Axel Wirths, 2022

LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur | Westfälischer Kunstverein with Nina Fischer & Maroan el sani: “Cloud Alchemy – Art, Activism and splitting Communities”

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LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur | Westfälischer Kunstverein with Nina Fischer & Maroan el sani: “Cloud Alchemy – Art, Activism and splitting Communities”

ARTISTS: Nina Fischer, Maroan el sani

Media Art FundExhibition

A 6-channel-video-installation exhibited in LWL-Museum of Art and Culture within the scope of the cooperation exhibition „Nimmersatt? Thinking society without growth“ (November 27^th 2021-February 27^th 2022)

Nina Fischer (*1965, Emden) & Maroan el Sani (*1966, Duisburg) frequently develop their video projects in workshops and employing performative scenes with actresses and actors. For the “Cloud Alchemy” project, the artists have staged a simulation game in the rainwater collection basin at Berlin’s abandoned Tempelhof Airport. Like the venue itself, the protagonists find themselves in a transitional situation. Using texts by Japanese writer Toshiki Okada, a glowing cloud hovering over a village becomes the catalyst for an ominous social divide. This cloud forces people to decide whether they want to try radically new ways of living and types of housing and drastically curtail their consumption, or whether everything should remain as it is. The natural phenomenon is illustrative of a global problem, and represents differences and tensions. Fischer & el Sani pose key questions about the non-historical occurrence of division that paralyses and undermines societies around the world: Do we feel called to immediate action? Or do we want to limit our perception to one of a mere natural phenomenon and not draw any consequences?

Co-produced by the LWL-Museum of Art and Culture.
Supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW.

About the cooperative exhibition “Nimmersatt? Thinking society without growth” (November 27^th 2021-February 27^th 2022) of the Kunsthalle Münster, the LWL-Museum of Art and Culture and the Westfälischer Kunstverein:
At three venues in Münster a total of 25 international artists will present works in different media and raise the question of what might take the place of the existing economic and social models in the future. In three rounds of talks on the opening day (26.11.), experts and artists will speak about themes such as responsibility, abundance or capital. The almost 30 works of art on show make reference to current crises, social inequality, climate change, illness, war, refugee movements, xenophobia and the attendant developments. The works ask which other options exist apart from growth.
The exhibition will include video installations, drawings, photographs and sculptures, along with works in the public domain. In addition to a series of works on loan, the venues will feature several new productions that emerged in dialogue with the curators and are being shown here for the first time.
More information about the exhibition here.

Photography: Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani
Die Alchemie der Wolken -Art, ActivismandSplitting Communities, 6-Kanal-Videoinstallation, Trichterförmige-Holzkonstruktion, 2021 Production Still, 2021 © Fischer & elSani und VG Bild Kunst, Bonn 2021
Koproduziert durch das LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur.Gefördert durch das Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes NRW.

Symposium „Digital Culture“ | NEXT LEVEL 2021

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Symposium „Digital Culture“ | NEXT LEVEL 2021

Hall 2, UNESCO-Welterbe zollverein, essen
saT-sUN, 27.-28. November 2021

Office medienwerk.nrwSymposium

The two-day symposium “Digital Culture” takes place within the scope of the NEXT LEVEL-Festival, on the UNESCO-Welterbe Zollverein in Essen and will offer various thematic forums, panels and presentations. Digital formats and concepts for performance and concerts will be presented and discussed, as well as live-act platforms and corresponding exploitation issues. The focus will be on projects and initiatives from NRW.

Listen to the recorded symposium here: Digital Arts in NRW

FORUM: Perspectives for the Digital Arts in NRW
Sunday, November 28^th, 2021, 3-4:30 pm
What are the perspectives for the digital arts in NRW? What about the qualification of artists and what technical support is needed? Are the actors in the scene and their needs sufficiently involved? How should things continue now that deficits in the field of digitalisation have become obvious during Corona? How can the numerous digital experiments and virtual artistic formats that emerged during the Corona pandemic be further developed in the long term? These are the questions posed by a forum and panel organised as a cooperation between Office medienwerk.nrw, NRW KULTURsekretariat and Regionalverband Ruhr as part of the “Next Level – Festival for Games 2021”.

Open talk moderated by Klaas Werner (Office medienwerk.nrw)

PANEL: Digital Arts in NRW. What has happened – where do we go from here?
Sunday, November 28^th, 2021, 5-6 pm
A discussion panel with the artist duo Jana Kerima Stolzer & Lex Rütten, Jasmin Vogel (Kulturforum Witten), Brigitta Muntendorf (artist and composer), Fabian Saavedra-Lara (Office medienwerk.nrw), Dr Christian Esch (NRW KULTURsekretariat). In cooperation between Office medienwerk.nrw, NRW KULTURsekretariat and Regionalverband Ruhr, in collaboration with WDR 3. The panel will be recorded by WDR 3 for the programme “Forum” and broadcast at a later date.

Panel moderator: Fatma Idris (journalist)

About NEXT LEVEL – FESTIVAL FOR GAMES
For more than ten years, the “Next Level – Festival for Games” has been exploring interactive and participatory models of digital games culture and shedding light on their potential and perspectives. Like no other event in the field of tension between digital art forms and analogue experience formats, Next Level sheds light on exemplary media art in the games context and, in an exciting mix of performances and exhibitions, impulses and discussions, workshops and laboratories and workshops together with many partners, addresses different target groups who have one thing in common: an interest in games and in gaming at a high level. After three years in Cologne from 2010 to 2012 and three more in the Dortmunder U from 2013 to 2015, Next Level moved on to the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf from 2016 to 2018 and developed from a conference into a festival lasting several days. Since then, in addition to informational and discursive components, the focus has been on digital experience formats such as interactive installations or dance, theatre and music performances, but also artistically sophisticated and curated games courses. In 2019, the multi-day event took place for the first time at the UNESCO World Heritage Zollverein in Essen, where it successfully celebrated its tenth anniversary.

Further information at www.next-level.org

WORKSHOP | Copyright in digital event formats

THU, 28. october 2021, 4-6 pm
ONLINE-event

Office medienwerk.nrwWorkshop

Especially in digital event formats via internet-based channels, with a potentially unlimited public, organisers and seminar leaders are often unsure where their own liability for shown content begins and ends. What needs to be pointed out in advance? Which declaration of consent should be obtained in advance? Which content can be shown in which context without hesitation?

Within the two-hour online workshop, the speaker Dr. iur. Till Kreutzer will cover the following topics:

1 Basics of copyright: what is copyright, how does it come into being and how does it end?

2 Free uses in the context of culture and education: Quotations, satire, accessories, uses for teaching purposes (training, conferences).

3 Use of online content on platforms, social media and websites: Linking, embedding, sharing

4 Legally compliant use of open content: Creative Commons and the re-use of free images, texts, videos

After each part there is an open question and answer session.

We ask for your understanding that AN INDIVIDUAL LEGAL ADVICE CANNOT AND – for legal reasons – MUST NOT BE GIVEN WITHIN THE WORKSHOP. Such advice is only permissible within the framework of a lawyer’s mandate. Of course, the speaker will be happy to answer individual questions. However, questions related to specific individual cases (such as: “I have the following project, contracts are to be concluded there, how do I have to … formulate?“) cannot be answered during the workshop.

The workshop will be held in German.

Registration until 24. October 2021:
Interested (online) organisers and (online) seminar leaders can register until Sunday, 24. October 2021, by sending an email to info@medienwerk-nrw.de, please mentioning your first and last name as well as your professional context. If you already have specific questions, you are welcome to include them in the registration email. Registration is free of charge but binding. The number of participants is limited.

Dr. iur Till Kreutzer is a lawyer, legal scholar and publicist. He is co-founder and managing partner of the law firm iRights.Law as well as co-founder and editor of iRights.info, the internet portal for consumers and creatives on copyright in the digital world, which has won several awards (including the Grimme Online Award 2006). He is a frequent invited expert for governments and parliaments on copyright reforms in the information society, both at national and EU level. He teaches at a variety of institutions on IT, copyright and personal rights.

The Office medienwerk.nrw is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW. The Office medienwerk.nrw is located at Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.

WORKSHOP | Technical realisation of digital event-formats

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WORKSHOP | Technical realisation of digital event-formats

tue, 13.04. / 20.04. / 27.04 2021, 5pm – 8pm
ONLINE-event

Office medienwerk.nrwWorkshop

Online workshop series in cooperation with the Landesbüro für Bildende Kunst NRW (LaB NRW): “Technical realisation of digital event-formats”, led by Jonathan Kastl & Mario Frank, for artists, event- or project managers and production staff

In this three-part online-workshop, the two video artists Jonathan Kastl and Mario Frank introduced into the technical and organisational basics of digital event-formats. They showed alternative scenarios for different artistic practices and answered questions from the participants.

The 1st workshop-block “Technical basics” took place on April 13th 2021 and offered artists, event managers, project managers and production staff an introduction into the technical realisation of live streams and online conferences. Using practical examples, the speakers demonstrated the functions, interaction-possibilities and limitations of streaming-software, platforms and tools for videoconferences. In addition, the participants were given an overview of the necessary components of audio- and video-technology.

On April 20th 2021 the 2nd workshop-block “Alternative virtual space scenarios” took place and presented various possibilities of how technical set-ups and platforms can be used non-intentionally and alternatively, for example to generate attention in social media or to achieve an interesting effect during an online-event. Extended and creative uses of software were discussed as well specialised apps for social gathering and games. Other topics were multi-channel playouts (livestream + video conference) and hybrid events.

In the 3rd workshop-block “Successful realisation of online-events” on April 27th 2021, the speakers focused on project- and resource-management. The question “How do I successfully implement an online event?” accompanied the participants through this last block of the three-part workshop series. Design concerns such as speech intelligibility, image detail, lighting, lecture structure and interactive design were discussed as well as concrete organisational questions about technical requirements, staff scheduling, resource planning and technical support.

MARIO FRANK is an integrated designer, photographer, videoartist, audioengineer and cultural activist. Music production and performance as “M.Funk”. Co-founder of the art and design collective „KOLLEKTIV33“ and artistic director of the musiclabel of the same name. Co-founder and chairman of the board of the non-profit cultural association “dreidrei e.V.”. Co-founder and board member of the literary initiative „Land in Sicht e.V.“. Co-initiator of the studio community “INSEL”. Lectureships at the Köln International School of Design, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln and Bergische Universität Wuppertal. Further information at www.mariofrank.com.

JONATHAN KASTL is a visual and sound engineer, videoartist and musician. His artistic work includes media art, video and sound for theatre productions as well as various music projects. As a cameraman and image director, he creates recordings and live-streams for various clients. He also supports artists and institutions in the planning and realisation of hybrid and online-events. Further information at www.jonathankastl.com. Jonathan Kastl and Mario Frank have been working together under the name frankaflux since 2021.

The office medienwerk.nrw, the LaB K and the workshop were supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW. The office medienwerk.nrw is located at Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.

Artist Talk with Holly Herndon | #TdM2020

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Artist Talk with Holly Herndon | #TdM2020

online
MOn, 28.09.2020

Office medienwerk.nrwArtist Talk

For the first time the office medienwerk.nrw took part in the event “Tag der Medienkompetenz”. As a video contribution for the digital exhibition of the TdM2020, an artist talk between Fabian Saavedra-Lara (head of the office medienwerk.nrw) and the US-American media artist Holly Herndon was shown.

Under the motto “A Better Tomorrow! – Visions for a digitalised society“, the eighth Tag der Medienkompetenz took place on September 28th 2020 in the NRW-stateparliament. Together with citizens, players in media literacy education and representatives of NRW state politics, discussions were held on how the digital transformation can be shaped politically and what contribution each individual can make to a humane society. Due to the corona pandemic, the TdM2020 took place virtually and digitally. In the livestream, discussions and thematic forums encouraged participants to delve deeper into individual aspects of digital competence. At the “Town Hall Meeting”, the state’s politicians answered questions from the digital public live. And the central exhibition was also moved from the state parliament to the internet. Here, institutions from NRW showed their own visions for a digital future.

THE SOUND OF DATA: Artist talk & concert with Holly Herndon

Under the title “Every Step You Take – Art and Society in the Data Age“, the second medienwerk.nrw conference took place on 12-15 November 2015, dealing with the debates surrounding Big Data, surveillance and data protection. In the locations of the Dortmunder U and the Schauspiel Dortmund, international positions from media art & digital culture met to question utopias and dystopias of our digital, networked media reality. In addition to an exhibition, numerous lectures, panel discussions, artist talks and film screenings, the programme also included a concert by US artist Holly Herndon.

In the Artist Talk with Fabian Saavedra-Lara, head of the office medienwerk.nrw, the avantgarde musician talks about the love affair with her laptop and about “THE SOUND OF DATA”. Her music includes electronic sound collages with samples from everyday digital life as well as glitches, disturbances, errors in the system and expressions of media hyperactivity. The concert was accompanied by vocals by Colin Self and visuals by Mat Dryhurst.

Holly Herndon works between media art and electronic music. Her album “Platform” was released in 2015 and received international critical acclaim. It deals with the emotional relationship between man and machine. Alternative ideals of progress become palpable here: How could future technologies be used if they were open, accessible and free of economic or political interests? In the process Herndon always reflects on the constitution of those media she uses for her music production – in her songs software and laptops are portrayed as fragile actors that can transform from familiar devices of everyday use, creativity and social communication into apparatuses of surveillance and control at any time.

LOUIS BETONG & BALZ ISLER: COVIDITY INTERVENTIONS

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LOUIS BETONG & BALZ ISLER: COVIDITY INTERVENTIONS

online www.medienwerk.nrw
MON, 08.06. – SUN, 31.08.2020

In form of a web residency, the performance- and media artists Louis Betong & Balz Isler worked on the website of the network for media art and digital culture

The original agreement between the artists and the office medienwerk.nrw was to conceive several contributions for the Meta Marathon 2020 festival of the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf under the annual motto “Cyborgs” and to realise them on site in a time span of 42 hours. But – as everyone knows – everything turned out quite differently. The situation surrounding the outbreak of the coronavirus also had serious consequences for the cultural sector, resulting in the cancellation of all events in the physical space until at least summer 2020. For artists and many institutions of all disciplines, questions arose about securing their livelihoods as well as new forms of artistic production, presentation and exchange with the public in times of “social distancing” – beyond the purely documentary. The situation at that time was also a time of experimentation with the possibilities and limits of the digital as well as fundamental political debates – among other things about the world after the crisis, “system relevance”, solidarity and the importance of art and culture for an open society.

Louis Betong & Balz Isler’s interventions, which took place episodically in the digital space of the website www.medienwerk.nrw, were attempts at artistic reflection on the new realities, ways of speaking and thinking, everyday and media worlds, adaptations and restrictions brought about by the coronacrisis, which brought people together worldwide in a state of waiting, hope, speculation and uncertainty. Isler & Betong call this state “covidity”. As self-proclaimed “covidity residents”, the two nested on the website www.medienwerk.nrw and played with the artistic possibilities of the medium. Reflections on the location, individual experiences of presences and absences in now closed places as well as questions from previous medienwerk.nrw events on the thematic field of “Body and Technology” served as source material.

The works could be experienced in the period 08.06.-31.08.2020 on the website of medienwerk.nrw

About Louis Betong & Balz Isler:
The two are performers, artists and public thinkers in old and new space. They studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg and work with time-related media. They live together in Europe. Isler & Betong move in the compositions of sound and space and in installations and performances. Within this they deal with communication, presentation methodology and today’s clip- and documentary culture. They collect, superimpose, rearrange and try to make new connections by means of different media and spatial levels, translating them into “real time” (Paul Virilio) in order to infer new movements if necessary.

The office medienwerk.nrw nd the web residency were funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. The office is located in: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.

Afro-Tech Fest – exhibition, talks, performances, workshops, films and music

Ausstellungsansicht „Afro-Tech

DREXCIYA – Detroit Techno, Aquanauten und die Politik des Dancefloors

Ausstellungsansicht „Afro-Tech

DREXCIYA – Detroit Techno, Aquanauten und die Politik des Dancefloors

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Panel Afro Fest

Workshop „Afro-Tech

Afro-Tech Fest – exhibition, talks, performances, workshops, films and music

DORTMUNDER U
Fr, 20.10. – Sa, 28.10.2017

Office medienwerk.nrwFestival

The Afro-Tech Fest was organized by HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein) & Büro medienwerk.nrw in cooperation with Interkultur Ruhr – a project of the Regionalverband Ruhr (RVR) and Africa Positive e.V.

The AFRO-TECH FEST presented a festival week from 20 – 28 October 2017 with talks, lectures, film screenings, performances, DJ sets, concerts and workshops at various locations in Dortmund. The programme started at the same time as the exhibition Afro-Tech and the Future of Re-Invention of the HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein) at the Dortmunder U – Zentrum für Kunst und Kreativität and created very different occasions to discuss and deepen the themes and motifs of the exhibition together and to experience them directly in many events. During the Afro-Tech Festival, works from media art, visual art, film and photography as well as contributions from pop culture and applications from digital culture were shown and discussed.

THEME
In an international group exhibition and festival week, AFRO-TECH deals with speculative visions of the future and current developments in the field of digital technologies by artists and inventors from various African countries, the African diaspora and many other voices in the USA and Europe. The focus is on science fiction narratives and ideas of technology that function according to their own rules and do not follow the dominant narratives of the West. An essential inspiration for the artistic works is Afrofuturism, which emerged in the middle of the 20th century against the background of the historical experience of racism and discrimination of the Afro-American community in the USA and tells of a future that opens a space for one’s own history, for emancipation, self-empowerment and individual freedom. The concepts, ideas and aesthetics of Afrofuturism are not limited to the USA, but circulate around the world, influencing numerous other artists and encountering their own experiences – also in German-speaking countries.

GOALS
The project is based on a special cooperation of different partners from the artistic, cultural and socio-cultural field on a local, regional and international level. Artistic positions and projects from the field of digital culture that have never before been shown in NRW will be presented. At the same time, the Afro-Tech Fest networks with Dortmund’s diverse city society via numerous event formats and creates spaces to get into conversation, think, experience art and dance. The common goal of the participating partners is to present Africa as a continent of technological innovation and to take a differentiated look at current developments in media art in Africa and the diaspora. Afro-Tech would like to be an occasion to ask: What other strategies, practices, aesthetics, narrative traditions and technological ideas, apart from the hegemonic Western perspective, are there to think about the future – and what do these futures look like? What do they also tell us about the different experiences of the present and history?

All of the Afro-Tech Fest talks are available on Vimeo. The opening lecture was given by Ingrid LaFleuer from Detroit:

Host Office medienwerk.nrw: HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein)
Interculture Ruhr: Regionalverband Ruhr (RVR) / Sponsor of the Interculture Ruhr
The exhibition was supported by: the TURN Fund of the Federal Cultural Foundation and the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia.
The festival week was supported: by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia, the NRW KULTURsekretariat International and the Kulturbüro Stadt Dortmund.
Main funder HMKV: Dortmunder U – Centre for Art and Creativity
Partners: Goethe-Institut, Afrikamera – Current Cinema from Africa (Berlin), NRW KULTURsekretariat, Kino im U e.V. (Dortmund)

STAGING COMPLEXITY – A laboratory for art and theatre in the digital age

Staging Complexities

STAGING COMPLEXITY – A laboratory for art and theatre in the digital age

thu, 19. MÄRZ 2020, 11am – 5pm
ONLINE

Office medienwerk.nrwConference

The symposium was organized by Cheers for Fears in co-production with the Academy for Theatre and Digitality, the Dortmund Theatre and the Office medienwerk.nrw.

Due to the decisions of the City of Dortmund on the handling of COVID-19, the originally planned presence laboratory of several days was not possible. Therefore the potentials and limits of digitality were tested in a concentrated online symposium on March 19th.

Digital technologies have been changing the way we think, work, love, communicate and live together for a long time. Algorithms regulate the flow of traffic, social networks create new forms of relationships and management systems optimize workflows. Digitality thus also shapes artistic content, transforms established modes of representation and produces new art forms. How do theatre and art reflect and explore these profound changes?

The digital and networked present was analyzed in the context of a public online symposium. The potential, but also the limits of the digital in society, culture and art were questioned: How does digital change affect our everyday social practices? How it does influence artistic modes of narration and design? What does this mean for directors, video artists, actors or musicians? What for their audience? How do we experience art and cultural practices that do not only make use of individual technical aids, but are at home in computer-generated environments?

Online Symposium
Diana McCarty opened the online-symposium with the question of techno-feminist modes of action and organization, Anja Breljak dealt with the fact that computer technologies have become an integral part of our intimate sphere, Christian Sievers and Régine Debatty asked how artists react to dispositives of insecurity, control and precarization, and Philipp Jonathan Ehmann discussed how social networks and computer games change narratives in the performing and visual arts. Last but not least, the symposium created space for discussion and exchange about visions and fears in digital times.

To the technical program: On the day of the symposium, a link to participate in the symposium was posted at 10 a.m. Active participation via the browser and via the telecommunications provider Zoom was guaranteed. For active participation in the discussions, a computer with microphone and possibly webcam was required. Questions regarding content could be directed to labor@cheersforfears.de. Furthermore, a telephone number was published on the day itself, which could be used for technical questions.

Programme on Thursday, March 19th, 2020

10:30 a.m. Online symposium open for test runs

11:00 a.m. Welcome
Michael Eickhoff (Academy for Theater and Digitality, Theater Dortmund)
Sina-Marie Schneller, Jascha Sommer (Cheers for Fears)
Klaas Werner (Office medienwerk.nrw)

11:30 a.m. Intervention I
Diana McCarty: Be(coming) media – Techno feminist Pasts, Presents & Potentials, (ENG)
12:00 a.m. Discussion on Intervention I

12:30 p.m. Intervention II
Anja Breljak: Staging Affect? Digitization as a socio-affective process
(DE)
1:00 p.m. Discussion on Intervention II

1:30 p.m. Break

2:30 p.m. Tele-Panel: Artistic approach to (post)digital challenges
Christian Sievers: Trackedness. The dream of control, dealing with
Insecurity – and what art makes of it (DE)

Régine Debatty: Where are the click-luddites? (ENG)

Philipp Jonathan Ehmann: Multimedia theatre – completely without media, completely without Theatre (DE)

4:00 p.m. Break

4:15 p.m. Discussion about the Tele-Panel

5:00 p.m. End

Further informations are available at: www.cheersforfears.de

The online-symposium Staging Complexity was organized by Cheers for Fears in co-production with the Academy for Theatre and Digitality, the Dortmund Theatre and the office medienwerk.nrw (office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein). Supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW and the Kunststiftung NRW.

KULTURKONFERENZ RUHR 2019 – Cultural potentials of technology

Meta Marathon 2019

KULTURKONFERENZ RUHR 2019 – Cultural potentials of technology

DORTMUNDER U
FRi, 13.09.2019

Office medienwerk.nrwConference

The Kulturkonferenz Ruhr 2019 was organised by the Regionalverband Ruhr and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, in cooperation with medienwerk.nrw.

The digital transformation not only poses new challenges for communication and production processes. Cultural institutions and cultural practitioners must also develop strategies, responses and positions on digitalisation. The 8th Kulturkonferenz Ruhr in the Dortmunder U, which was fully booked with 400 participants, offered a top-class forum on the topic on September 13th 2019.

The programme of the Kulturkonferenz Ruhr 2019 was conceived by:

Dr. Inke Arns, director Hartware MedienKunstVerein e.V. (HMKV)
Alain Bieber, director NRW-Forum Düsseldorf
Stefan Hilterhaus, director PACT Zollverein
Stefanie Reichart, Head of Department Kultur Regionalverband Ruhr
Fabian Saavedra-Lara, director Office medienwerk.nrw.

Man and machine: in a mature industrial region like the Ruhr, this relationship has always been a special one and rarely a simple one.

The digital transformation is now taking this relationship to a completely new, unprecedented level. In many cases, fiction has long since become fact; nothing seems impossible, every idea technically realisable.

Digital technologies are changing our society and our urban structures to an almost incalculable extent – and are thus also influencing the role and self-image of art and culture in socio-political development.

On the other hand: technical overload, an oversupply of information, the dominance of a few commercial actors and new global (and often hidden) relations of exploitation.

How does an artist become and remain relevant here? What about ethical values, one’s own rights, responsibility, data sovereignty and existing power relations? Who benefits and who doesn’t? What educational models are needed? What archives? How does digital actually work? And is the longing for the analogue still legitimate? In short: What about the modern relationship between man and machine? And what does the machine have to say about it?

Cultural institutions and cultural practitioners are called upon to develop their own strategies and positioning in a process of change that dissolves temporal and spatial boundaries, that thinks in updates and global dimensions. Digitisation expands our world to include virtual realities, opens up markets, enables new artistic freedom and aesthetics. It makes art and culture ubiquitous, available at any time and generally accessible.

The 8th Kulturkonferenz Ruhr 2019 invited people working in the arts and culture to actively shape the debate on the digital transformation. It wanted to set impulses, make potential visible and strengthen it, explore and promote new alliances between art, culture, science and business.

The aim was to initiate a discourse on what role art and culture can play now and in the future in the discussion about technology and society, and what preconditions and cultural policy framework conditions should be created for this.

Festival: Blue Skies – Bodies in Trouble

Blue Skies 1

Blue Skies 2

Reservate_07

Festival: Blue Skies – Bodies in Trouble

PACT ZOLLVEREIN
WED, 10.07.2019 – SUN, 14.07.2019

Office medienwerk.nrwFestival

FIRST EDITION OF THE BLUE SKIES FESTIVAL SERIES FESTIVAL WITH LECTURES / TALKS / EXHIBITION / PERFORMANCES / WORKSHOPS / MUSIC

With the growing impact of technology on life, our bodies, our communities and our environment are changing – what to do? How can we understand and shape this change together?

The unstoppable pace of technological change and the revolutionary developments in biochemical research are increasingly intervening in life itself: hybrids of machine and organism are emerging, technical interventions and substances are becoming one with the body. The latest developments in genetic engineering, however, promise to make humans modifiable even before birth. The foundations of our existence and of our social and public interaction are changing profoundly. In the promises of technological corporations, the power over completely modyfying our bodies, social dynamics and our environment sounds like a universal solution. Others fear a hopeless social scenario in which the individual’s power to act falls victim to extensive technological reductions, mathematical operations and filtered knowledge. But what might the critical overtones of these polarizing positions sound like?

The festival is the fifth conference of the office medienwerk.nrw and at the same time the start of a new series of events by PACT Zollverein. In the coming years it will be dedicated to active and interdisciplinary work on urgent current issues in the field of tension between technology and society, new narratives, speculative visions of the future and alternative, empowering practices.

Festival Opening:
WEDNESDAY, JULY 10TH, 2019
6.30 p.m.
Welcome, introduction & opening of the exhibition
9 p.m.
Munich Kammerspiele, Rimini Protokoll (Stefan Kaegi) and Thomas Melle: “Uncanny Valley“

With contributions from:

Exhibition, Performances & Workshops
acting in concert, The Agency, Aliens in Green, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, FAM_, knowbotiq, labsa, Xavier Le Roy, Mary Maggic, Špela Petrič, Paula Pin, Johannes Paul Raether, Rimini Protokoll (Stefan Kaegi) & Thomas Melle, Silke Schönfeld, Nguyễn + Transitory and others

Discourse
Marie-Luise Angerer, Madeleine Böckers, Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Gabriele Gramelsberger, Jens Hauser, Oliver Kuchenbuch, Justus Pötzsch, Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Tabita Rezaire, Emilia Sanabria, Paula-Irene Villa and others

Music
Asita Shirali, COOL FOR YOU, Odete, tryniti, N!zza

You can find the complete programme on the PACT Zollverein website: www.pact-zollverein.de

Notes:
Admission to the talks, lectures and workshops only with registration. Free admission to the concerts, the exhibition and the party.

Tickets in advance for the performances “Medusa Bionic Rise” by The Agency and “Uncanny Valley” by Rimini Protokoll (Stefan Kaegi) can be ordered on the PACT Zollverein website.

Conference programme in english language.

Concept: Stefan Hilterhaus, Fabian Saavedra-Lara, Team Office medienwerk.nrw: Kirsten Möller, Nada Schroer, Mary Shnayien, Klaas Werner, Sonja Wunderlich
In cooperation with: PACT Customs Union

Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of the alliance of international production houses.

The office of medienwerk.nrw and the festival ‘Bodies in Trouble – Körper in Aufruhr’ were supported by the Ministry for Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund). Supported by the “International Visitors Program” of the NRW KULTURsekretariat.

Further information

ON/LIVE – The theatre of the digital natives

ON/LIVE

ON/LIVE – The theatre of the digital natives

FFT DÜSSELDORF
Fri, 10.05.2019, 7pm – Sun, 12.05.2019, 9:30pm

Office medienwerk.nrwSymposium

A cooperation between FFT Düsseldorf, Institute for Art and Art Theory, University of Cologne, City Libraries of the City of Düsseldorf, Office medienwerk.nrw

In the near future there will be only one theatre: The theatre of the digital natives. It belongs to those who can no longer imagine a world without digital networking, smart devices and social networks. The symposium ON/LIVE brings together digital natives from art, science, schools and politics and asks how we will meet in the future – in theatre and in everyday life. Which narratives and modes of perception determine our present and how do we shape the future together? In lightningtalks, discussions, performances and workshops the FFT negotiates media practices in everyday life and the arts. Among other things, the FFT is dedicated to the net as a sphere of new gender configurations and to the game as a performative practice of the future.

Klaas Werner (Office medienwerk.nrw/Anna Kpok) moderated the discussion.

“Gaming & Escaping – The New Delight in Games“
Saturday, May 11th, 2019, 12 am., FFT Juta. As part of ON/LIVE 2019 with: Dr. Stefanie Husel, Dennis Palmen, machina eX

As part of the alliance of international production houses, supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media.

META MARATHON 2019 – ROBOTICS

Meta Marathon 2019

META MARATHON 2019 – ROBOTICS

NRW-FORUM DÜSSELDORF
Fri, 15.03. – Sun, 17.03.2019, 42 hours

Office medienwerk.nrwPanel Discussion

The META MARATHON 2019 was organised by the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf in cooperation with the tanzhaus nrw and the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf. The Office medienwerk.nrw contributed the programme item “Robotic Swarm”.

42 hours non-stop living, loving, celebrating and working with robots: The META MARATHON 2019 is dedicated to the topic of robotics on March 15th – 17th, 2019. Visitors can not only take part in workshops, talks and performances, but also share their living space with robots, including the opportunity to stay overnight at the NRW-Forum and meet the probably currently most famous robot in the world, Sophia.

What happens when robots leave the industrial context and become part of our everyday life? What does society have to be prepared for when automated processes are carried out by machines and decisions are made without human intervention? How do robots change our actions and feelings? Are machines becoming more human-like or human emotions more machine-like? Can robots help us to relax and decelerate and what does a culture of intelligent robotics look like?

Programme item of the Office medienwerk.nrw:

ROBOTIC SWARM
Presentation & Talk with Katrin Hochschuh, Adam Donovan, So Kanno.
Moderation: Klaas Werner
Sunday, 17.03., 11:00 am

The artist duo Katrin Hochschuh and Adam Donovan have invented, developed and programmed non-humanoid swarm robots. In this event, presented by the office medienwerk.nrw, the artists show how they work, both in the technical process and on a conceptual level, focusing primarily on their current work “Empathy Swarm”.

These were developed as antithesis or extension to humanoid robots like the famous “Sophia”. They want to show that non-humanoid robots can also learn and create a feeling of empathy and compassion. So Kanno, whose work “Lasermice” also deals with swarm behavior, joins the discussion.

The Office medienwerk.nrw was funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.

Screening and talk: BALLADE – Céline Berger

Meta Marathon 2019

Screening and talk: BALLADE – Céline Berger

Temporary Gallery
thu, 7.06.2018, 7pm

Office medienwerk.nrwScreening

Short film: BALLADE, 23 min, Céline Berger, 2017

A project manager, a personnel manager and a managing director wander through a barren landscape and talk about the constraints and fears of everyday working life and their longings for a different, better life. The screenplay for Céline Berger’s short film “Ballad” is based on recordings of coaching sessions at german business schools and deals with the handling of corporate strategies, management rhetoric and the potential use of labour as a human resource.

Céline Berger, born 1973 in Saint Martin d’Heres, France, is an artist and lives in Cologne and Rotterdam. Her work is concerned with the linguistic and visual world of today’s work and corporate structures. Before studying art at the KHM Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, she studied physics and materials science and worked as an engineer for semiconductor manufacturers. Berger is the winner of the NRW Scholarship for female media artists (2015).

Emmanuel Mir, born 1972 in Toulon, France, studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, art history at the University of Düsseldorf and received his doctorate on the function of art in private companies. Since 2017 he has been project manager of the LaB K State Office for Visual Arts NRW.

Further information is available at: www.temporarygallery.org

The office medienwerk.nrw was funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. The office is supported by the Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.

META MARATHON – Artificial Intelligence

Meta Marathon 2018

42 hours of non-stop talks, performances, films, concerts, exhibition and workshops on the subject of artificial intelligence: the META Marathon is a new type of technology festival that took place May 25th – 27th, 2018, at the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf. The participants create the festival themselves, change roles from experts to laymen and experiment with the new format – including overnight accommodation on site.

Invitated by the office medienwerk.nrw, curator Michelle Kasprzak spoke on the topic: “Algorithms, trust, and politics: how everything old is new again“.

Further information is available at: www.metamarathon.net

The office medienwerk.nrw was supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW. Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund

Das Büro medienwerk.nrw und die Veranstaltung wurden gefördert vom Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes NRW. Träger des Büros: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund

Short film programme “Working Life”

The Working Life – Still

Short film programme “Working Life”

CINEMA IN DORTMUNDER U
SAT, 24.03.2018, 8PM

Office medienwerk.nrwScreening

A professional hypnotist shows us the labyrinth of our working life. During long coaching sessions three hikers move through a barren landscape. Former workers of the Moscow paper factory “October” reflect on the lost work and their current situation. Three very different situations, three artistic short films.

Along these stations, the office medienwerk.nrw and the artist Céline Berger invited us on a complex and unusual journey into our working life. The event presented “Ballade”, a movie which emerged from the the NRW grant for female media artists (supervised by office medienwerk.nrw).

The Working Life, 9:50 min, Superflex, 2013
Ballad, 23:00 min, Céline Berger, 2017 (Premiere)
Recitando, 33:00 min, Romana Schmalisch & Robert Schlicht, 2010

Detailed information on the movies and artists:

FILM 1: The Working Life, SUPERFLEX

“The Working Life”, HD, 9:50 min, 2013, English

The Working Life is a 9:50-minute film that deals with working life from a therapeutic perspective. How should one behave as a “good citizen” when the central demand of an economy in crisis seems to be the individual willingness to work and at the same time the structural necessity of a certain percentage of unemployment to keep wages low? A hypnotist guides us through the labyrinth of working life – looking for relief or maybe even a way out, if there is one.

SUPERFLEX was founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen and Rasmus Nielsen. Using a versatile and complex approach, SUPERFLEX questions the role of the artist in today’s society and explores the nature of globalisation and power structures. Their artworks, full of wit and subversive humour, are dedicated to serious social and cultural concerns. SUPERFLEX describe their works as instruments for pointing out numerous possible areas of application for their art.

FILM 2: Ballad, Céline Berger

“Ballad,” 2K, 23 min, 2017, sync. english

Based on real coaching conversations, Ballade examines the rhetoric and narrative strategies of business coaching.

A barren landscape. The wind is blowing. Three people, immersed in successive coaching sessions, are describing specific events from their working lives as project managers, personnel managers, managing directors. Banal words of regret, fears, dreams of an easier future resonate strangely in the minimal landscape.

Since 2009, Céline Berger has been developing artistic works that examine our working life, its language, routines and rituals. After studying physics and materials science, she worked as a project engineer in various large companies until 2008. Berger’s work is an attempt to artistically continue the dialogue which developed with her former colleagues – in search of new ways to question our daily professional life, beyond simplification, irony or fatalism.

FILM 3: Recitando, Romana Schmalisch & Robert Schlicht

“Recitando”, HD, 33 min, 2010, Russian with English subtitles

Recitando documents the encounter between workers in a moscow factory and two filmmakers from abroad. The cinematic production process is only made possible by the standstill of the machines. What at first looks like everyday work soon turns out to be theatre, simulation. The “October” (formerly “Red October”) factory, built in 1924, was one of the largest paper factories in Moscow. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, parts of the complex were converted into an art space.

Romana Schmalisch (Berlin) and Robert Schlicht (Berlin) have been working together since 2004 on projects at the interface between film and theory. Their main focus in recent years has been on the theme of work, for example in the performance series The Choreography of Labour (2013-15), the play All the best from Labour Power Plant (2017), the short film Top/Down (2017) and the feature film Labour Power Plant (in post-production).

All films are in english language

Afterwards: artist talk with Romana Schmalisch, Robert Schlicht and Céline Berger.
Organized by the office medienwerk.nrw & Kino im U e.V.

The office medienwerk.nrw and the event were supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW. Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund

ENJOY COMPLEXITY – Conference on digitality and theatre

Enjoy Complexity

ENJOY COMPLEXITY – Conference on digitality and theatre

VARIOUS LOCATIONS IN DORTMUND
FRi, 23.02.- Sun, 25.02.2018

Office medienwerk.nrwConference

A cooperation between Office medienwerk.nrw, Schauspiel Dortmund, Academy for Digitality and Theatre, Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV)

We were very pleased to accompany the initiative of our network partner, the Schauspiel Dortmund, regarding the foundation of an “Academy for Digitality and Theatre“.

At the start of these activities, a “Conference on Digitality and Theatre” was held on February 23rd – 25th, 2018 under the title “ENJOY COMPLEXITY“.

On three days there were performances, exhibitions and workshops at the location of the newly founded academy in Dortmund.

Schedule:

Opening evening | Friday, February 23rd, 2018

5:00 pm: Exhibition and Lounge open

7:00 pm.: Official opening of the conference by the Minister of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia, Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen

Afterwards: Keynote by Marc Grandmontagne, Managing Director of the German Stage Association.

Afterwards: interactive dance performance CORPUS (PYGMALIO) by Chris Ziegler

Workshop day | Saturday, February 24th, 2018

Morning: Self presentation of ten selected (international) projects and institutions working in the field between theatre and digitality.

Afternoon: Workshops and lectures, including on the following topics: Virtual Reality and Bertolt Brecht’s radio theory, Art and Theatre on the Net, Between Machine Learning, Nanotechnology and Body Enhancement, Montage techniques and complex narration between film and theatre, Digital movement architecture on stage through the use of generic technologies, Coding and movement, Augmented Reality and theatre, The media department of the future at theatre, Virtual Space, Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things

4:30 pm. – 6:00 pm. Panel discussion: The theatre of the future

With: Hubert Eckart and Wesko Rohde (Deutsche Theatertechnische Gesellschaft, DTHG), Kay Voges (director of the Schauspiel Dortmund) + N.N.(media artists). Moderation: Anne Schulz

The panel discussion was a cooperation with the office medienwerk.nrw.

Evening: 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane (Director: Kay Voges)

At night: concert by Moritz Simon Geist / Sonic Robots.

Final day | Sunday, February 25th, 2018

10:30 am: Workshops

Followed by: large, concluding panel discussion.

The panel discussion was a cooperation with the office medienwerk.nrw.

2:30 pm.: Guided tour through the exhibition “Afro-Tech and the Future of Re-Invention” at the Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) in Dortmund U with Inke Arns (artistic director of HMKV) and Fabian Saavedra-Lara (director of office medienwerk.nrw).

6:30 am.: Flammende Köpfe (Director: Arne Vogelgesang) in the studio of the Schauspielhaus Dortmund.

Location: former primary school at Kleyer Weg 90, Dortmund

The office of medienwerk.nrw is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW. Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund

Workshop & presentation: Foolish Hackathon – Let’s create not-so-smart Homes

Meta Marathon 2019

Workshop & presentation: Foolish Hackathon – Let’s create not-so-smart Homes

SPeicher 100, Dortmunder Hafen
thu, 01.09.2018, 10am-4pm

Office medienwerk.nrwWorkshop

Are you looking for another hackathon where you can develop your next million dollar app and start your next start-up by the way? Then you are in the wrong place!

In our Foolish Hackathon we want to question things, identify the elementary functions of products – and remove it! We take a look at the components and try to make new combinations. In the end it should be senseless, useless and just crazy.

On September 1st, 2018, we started at 10:00 a.m. with an intensive four-hour workshop. First we looked at the typical components of a future smart life. An automated cocktail machine served as the basis for this: we removed or replaced parts, reprogrammed the entire machine, but also arbitrarily and wildly added new functions.

Those one without any skills in programming, got the opportnity for a practice-oriented crash course in programming. So all participants were able to implement their own ideas on the cocktail machine or with their own prototype. Sufficient microcontrollers, sensors and actuators were provided for this purpose. In addition, there was plasticine and a 3D printer, for a quick implementation of large and small components. Afterwards from 2:00 p.m. the gadgets for a future not-so-smart Home were presented during a walk through the harbour.

Invited were artists, activists and all interested people – with and without previous knowledge.

Process Festival 2018 – Pre-Event
The Foolish Hackathon was organized by office medienwerk.nrw in cooperation with the Process Festival and FabLab DEZENTRALE Dortmund, joint laboratory for future questions, a project of Fraunhofer UMSICHT. The event took place under the Process Festival motto “Man <> Machine” and was held with a small group of about 10 people who did not necessarily have to program.

Schedule: 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.: Workshop | 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.: Public presentation of the gadgets.

Further information: dotprocess.org

The office of medienwerk.nrw and the event were supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW. Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund

Workshop: Contemporary tactics for net-activism

Netzaktivismus

Workshop: Contemporary tactics for net-activism

PACT Zollverein
thu, 05.07.2018, 10am-5pm

Office medienwerk.nrwWorkshop

#BlackLivesMatter and #Metoo are two examples of how digital public spheres can be used to highlight socio-political problems of discrimination and inequality. Often, physical and digital spaces are intertwined: protesting groups accure in urban space and images of these actions circulate in social networks around the world, generating attention for the shared concern.

At the same time, new, anarchic-libertarian and aggressive subcultures are also forming “on the other side” of the political spectrum on the Net, such as Alt Right in the USA and Identitäre in Europe, which are based on self-organization on the one hand and the contempt of all statehood on the other. They also produce strong images with the intention to have a social echo. The focus here is often on campaigns against individuals or public institutions, in which the appeal to lower emotions has replaced the rational exchange of arguments in favour of any construction of reality. The actors of these populist campaigns adopt the tactics of “counter culture” and turn them against the idea of a pluralistic, open society.

The one-day workshop, organized by the Landesbüro Freie Darstellende Künste and the office medienwerk.nrw, aims to explore these contemporary dynamics of activism, in order to understand what role the strategy of border-crossing plays today, how the arts react to these developments, what the power of current movements on the net is – and where their limits might lie. Different forms of artistic action have tried to use similar strategies in recent years. After a short input at the beginning and the discussion of some current artistic projects, the participants looked for suitable ways of dealing with these phenomena themselves. The participants were also invited to bring their own concepts and material in order to refine existing approaches during the the workshop-day.

Since this year, Hans Bernhard and lizvlx have been the professor-team – called UBERMORGEN – for Networks at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. They are currently researching and working in the field of “Binary Primitivism” and are interested in the Alt-Right movement and related right-wing net cultures globally. They are investigating what transhumanism has to do with gamification in social media systems; what kind of role games – as a “cold” medium – plays for unloved people and what all that have to do with the Right and its revolutionary potential.

Workshop direction: UBERMORGEN | Input: Fabian Saavedra-Lara (Office medienwerk.nrw)

UBERMORGEN: lizvlx (AT, *1973) and Hans Bernhard (CH/USA, *1971) are two artists, working with installation, video, code and performance: “doing strange things with software & hardware”. Their early works have been called ‘Media Hacking‘ and ‘Online Performances’. In 2000, the strategy behind the voting platform Vote-Auction was described by Libération as “un plan machiavélique”. In 2005, the NZZ described the “Google Will Eat Itself”-project as “factual and perverse” conceptual art.

The event took place within the framework of weiterkommen! – the qualification program of the NRW Landesbüro Freie Darstellende Künste. weiterkommen! was supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the state of NRW within the framework of the IKF (Individeuelle KünstlerInnenförderung).

The office medienwerk.nrw and the event were supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW. Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund

Virtual Art – Forum Europe Ruhr

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Virtual Art – Forum Europe Ruhr

ESSEN
SA, 07.09.2017

Office medienwerk.nrwConference

Immersive technologies of augmented and virtual reality open up many new possibilities for actors in the cultural field. Especially artists and curators from media art and performance are currently questioning the opportunities and limits of the medium. To transcend the technology and to create new visual worlds and approaches is the claim and task of relevant contemporary art actors. Despite existing technical and financial hurdles, an impressive possibility of multisensory and multiperspectival art is now entering the field of the public. Artists are no longer alone, but surrounded by designers and programmers, or they become them.

In presentations and conversations, key European players talk about new modes of production, new modes of presentation, and changing modes of storytelling.

4x 15-minute presentations of the developed projects followed by a discussion.

Moderated by Klaas Werner (medienwerk.nrw)

Documentation on the forum

Block I – VR in the exhibition context

Tina Sauerländer (DE) – Curator of the exhibition “The Unframed World” at the House of Electronic Arts, Basel

Banz & Bowinkel (DE) – Media artists from NRW, working with VR technology

Block II – VR in interactive performances

Mona el Gammal (DE) – Theater maker and scenographer

Daniel Rammer, Lorenz Krautgartner (AT) – Collaborative VR-Videogame

Philosophical tour of Erwin Wurm – with Prof. Dr. Markus Gabriel

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Philosophical tour of Erwin Wurm – with Prof. Dr. Markus Gabriel

Lehmbruck Museum
SAT, 08.07.2017

Markus Gabriel (University of Bonn) is the youngest professor of philosophy in Germany and also an excellent expert on Erwin Wurm’s work. In a tour of the exhibition, he talks in an entertaining and knowledgeable way about the everyday life and the special features of Erwin Wurm’s work.

Markus Gabriel caused a sensation as the founder and main representative of “New Realism”, a philosophical movement whose circle also includes the Berlin Poor Avanessian and Quentin Meillassoux. Their aim is to leave Kant’s theses behind by realizing that the world exists independently of the image and idea we have of it. Thus, Markus Gabriel sometimes makes bizarre statements such as that unicorns exist. Erwin Wurm’s fat car or his absurd looking mountain formations therefore become the starting point of a question about the world and its reality in this philosophical tour.

The event was a cooperation between the office medienwerk.nrw and the Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg. It took place in the broader context of the topic “Speculative Technologies” of medienwerk.nrw.

The office medienwerk.nrw is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW. Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.

Afro-Tech – movies about technology and science-fiction

Ausstellungsansicht „Afro-Tech

DREXCIYA – Detroit Techno, Aquanauten und die Politik des Dancefloors

Ausstellungsansicht „Afro-Tech

DREXCIYA – Detroit Techno, Aquanauten und die Politik des Dancefloors

2018_AFRO_Fest_Tag_3_Uniongewerbehof_Foto_Anneke_Dunkhase_23_web

Panel Afro Fest

Workshop „Afro-Tech

Afro-Tech – movies about technology and science-fiction

DORTMUNDER U
FR, 23.07.2017, 8 pm

Office medienwerk.nrwScreening

A cooperation between Office medienwerk.nrw, Africa Positive e.V., Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Interkultur Ruhr, Regionalverband Ruhr (RVR)

A space program in Zambia, speculations about the future of Zanzibar, a little boy in 1980s Burkina Faso dreams of superheroes, and a trip to the utopian island of Drexciya.

On June 23rd, 2017, the media-art-project Afro-Tech Fest was a guest at the Afro-Ruhr Festival 2017 (organizer: Africa Positive e.V.) and invited visitors to an evening of cinema with four short films, which gave a first insight into the discussed topics during an international exhibition and festival week in Dortmund at the end of October (opening Afro-Tech Fest: 20.10.2017).

The film programme in June focused on stories about the future from a variety of african perspectives. What they all have in common is an independent view on technology and on various myths of popular culture, which challenges the ruling powers of interpretation. The film is understood as a medium in which one’s own utopias and dystopias can be created.

The filmmakers, whose works have been shown, use such diverse and creative design possibilities to create these imaginary spaces: In her film, director Frances Bodomo, for example, adds a third actor to the well-known story about the race to the moon in the 1960s – a village community in Zambia which is building its own rocket. Simon Rittmeier tells of a future in which the current “refugee crisis” has turned into its opposite: In his film, it is people from Europe who embark on the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to seek refuge in the countries of Africa – and sometimes end up on a legendary island whose inhabitants have access to unknown, advanced technologies.

Alternative historiography meets speculation. Science fiction stories from the “global North” meet much older myths and legends in different regions of Africa, always starting from the very real social and political situations of the present.

The evening, curated by Alex Moussa Sawadogo (Afrikamera/Berlin), provides an insight into current film production in various african countries and aims to arouse curiosity about the numerous events and the exhibition in the context of the Afro-Tech Festival, which were presented later in 2017 in Dortmund by the cooperation partners Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV), Interkultur Ruhr, Africa Positive e.V. and office medienwerk.nrw.

THE PROGRAM:

1
Afronauts

Afronauts tells an alternative story of the race to the moon, based on true events. It is the night of July 16th, 1969, when the United States prepares to launch Apollo 11. At the same time, in the now independent Zambia, an inventive group of villagers builds a rocket to enter the “race into space”. As the launch date approaches, their astronaut – 17-year-old Matha Mwambwa – has to decide whether she wants to give her life to keep up the myths of her family …

Ghana/USA 2014, 14 min. engl. OF
Director: Frances Bodomo

Ghanaian filmmaker Frances Bodomo studied film at Columbia University and at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Her first short film “Boneshaker” (with Oscar-nominee Quvenzhané Wallis) was screened at more than 20 festivals. “Afronauts” celebrated its world premiere at the Sundance Festival 2014.

2
Twaaga

Burkina Faso is a country in transition in 1985. Manu, who has a passion for comics, and his big brother Albert grow up in a time when the impossible seems to be possible. When Albert one day decides to undergo a magical ritual designed to make him invisible, Manu realizes that there are real powers, which can compete with those of his superheroes.

Burkina Faso/France 2013, 31 min / Original with English subtitles
Director: Cédric Ido

The Burkinabè Cédric Ido works as a scriptwriter, director, actor, musician and draftsman. In 2008 he appeared as an actor in Spike Lee’s film “Miracle at St. Anna“. As a director he is responsible for the television documentary “Un ‘Stains’ de musique” (2009) and the short film “Hasaki Ya Suda” (2011).

3
Jonah

Mbwana and his best friend Juma are two young men from Zanzibar with big dreams. These dreams seem to come true when they photograph a giant fish jumping out of the water and their small town becomes a tourist hotspot. But the sensational discovery not only puts the relationship of the two friends to the test, it also changes their formerly sleepy hometown.

Tanzania/Great Britain 2013, 17 min / English OF
Director: Kibwe Tavares

British Sundance winner Kibwe Tavares realised his award-winning film “Robots of Brixton” while he was studying architecture. Together with Jonathan Gales and Paul Nicholls he founded the production company Factory Fifteen, with which he also created the special effects for “Jonah“. He combines his knowledge in architecture with storytelling and animation to create futuristic animated 3D live-action movies.

4
Drexciya

Simon Rittmeier’s short film is inspired by the afro-futuristic myth of the place “Drexciya” – a “black Atlantis”. Europe has gone under long ago. A young man tries to bring european refugees – in the hope of a better life in Africa – in boats across the Mediterranean Sea. One day his boat sinks and he is the only survivor to be stranded on the African coast. Alone, he sets off for the next big city – Drexciya.

Germany/Burkina Faso 2012, 27 min. / English OF
Director: Simon Rittmeier

The filmmaker Simon Rittmeier studied fine arts and film at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg and at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. He often uses archive images to explore the power and political influence of the moving image. His films, both experimental and essayistic, question social conventions and classical narratives about history.

The films are subtitled in English or in English. Introduction by Alex Moussa Sawadogo in German. Handouts with short descriptions of the films in German will be available in the evening.

The entire film programme of the Afro-Ruhr Festival took place on 22 and June 23rd, 2017, at the cinema in the U (Dortmund). Concerts, parties, lectures and discussions of the Afro-Ruhr Festival could be experienced from June 30th – July 2nd, 2017, in the Dietrich-Keuning-Haus (Dortmund) (http://afroruhr.africa-positive.de).

Film programme Afro-Tech curated by: Alex Moussa Sawadogo

Organizer of the film program: Office medienwerk.nrw (Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein)
Partner Film Programme: Afrikamera – Current Cinema from Africa, Kino im U, Africa Positive e.V.

Cooperation partner Afro-Tech Fest: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Interkultur Ruhr, a project of the Regionalverband Ruhr (RVR), Africa Positive e.V., Office medienwerk.nrw

The exhibition was sponsored: in the TURN Fund of the Federal Cultural Foundation; by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW

The project week was supported: by the Federal Agency for Civic Education; by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW
from the cultural office of the city of Dortmund

Main conveyor HMKV: Dortmund U

Discourse programme of the Videonale. 16 (in cooperation with medienwerk.nrw)

Kurven_Lockemann

Discourse programme of the Videonale. 16 (in cooperation with medienwerk.nrw)

VIDEONALE c/o KUNSTMUSEUM BONN
FR, 17.02.- SA, 17.02.2017

Office medienwerk.nrwPanel Discussion

The office medienwerk.nrw cooperated with the long-standing network partner Videonale e.V.. Together, the two partners organised – as part of the discourse programme of the Videonale. 16 – two panels for the opening weekend (February 16th – 19th, 2017), during which there were also many other performances, lectures and guided tours:

Panel: The artist is (not) present – Live performances and their representation in media art
Impulse lecture by André Eiermann: Postspectacular performance, talk with: Doplgenger (artist duo, Belgrade), André Eiermann (dramaturge, theatre scientist, Cologne), Wermke/Leinkauf (artist duo, Berlin), Moderation: Katrin Mundt (freelance curator, author, Bochum). In english language.

The panel discussed the theoretical and aesthetic framework of performances – those one which are performed live and also the one which are preserved in video. The starting point was the thesis that performances do not depend on the joint physical presence of performers and audience, but rather involve a mediating third party.

The panel was a cooperation with the office medienwerk.nrw.

Panel: Performativity of digital media – on action and participation everywhere
Talk with: Dries Depoorter (media artist, Gent), Stefan Panhans (artist, Berlin), Julia Scher (artist, professor for multimedia/performance, Cologne), Moderation: Felix Hüttemann (PhD student, Bochum). In english language.

In the constant battle for attention, regarding to the flow of digital image overload, there are usually no winners or losers. Despite constantly optimised methods of self-presentation, it remains unclear who is performing for whom and who is seen by whom. The panel reflects on other (subversive) strategies to react to the ubiquitous retrievability of the unique.

The program of the Videonale and the opening weekend can be found at: v16.videonale.org

The office medienwerk.nrw was funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW. Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund

Dowse-Workshop with Jaromil – an artistic Design&Hack-Workshop

Dowse WS

Dowse WS 2

Dowse WS 3

Dowse-Workshop with Jaromil – an artistic Design&Hack-Workshop

REKORDER II, DORTMUND
wed, 27.09.2017

Office medienwerk.nrwWorkshop

“We should be able to manner your devices behaviour – but first you need to be aware of what they do!” (Jaromil)

In the context of its workshop series Speculative Technologies, the office medienwerk.nrw invited students, artists, hackers and makers to take part in a one-day workshop on concrete hardware- and software-solutions for alternative ideas of technology.

The series Speculative Technologies opened a space for the discussion of technoimaginations beyond commercialization and control. The focus was on strategies from digital culture and media art, which understand technology as principles of open systems, accessibility, changeability, versatility, emancipation and self-empowerment. The aim was not just to consume a perfectly designed product, but to convey a creative approach to technology and the knowledge of how it works. Speculative Technologies asked which “other” technologies are conceivable.

The workshop in September was aimed at artists and designers who, for example, want their installations to react to network traffic and allow things to communicate with each other in real time; and it was aimed at hackers who work with open source, cryptography and intelligent proxies, and many others who are interested in a critical, artistic and creative approach to technology. The workshop will be led by italian media artist and researcher Jaromil (https://jaromil.dyne.org/). With his independent software company Dyne.com, Jaromil has developed, among other things, a device which is able to track the activity in our networks, share resources with friends and neighbours – and finally to protect our own LAN: DOWSE is an invention based on open source and open hardware principles which can be set up on a low-cost board (like a Raspberry Pi or an OlinuXino). Jaromil helped workshop participants to create their own box and to work together on ideas for artistic applications. Further information: http://www.dowse.eu

The workshop took place in the workroom Rekorder II, Scharnhorststraße 68, in Dortmund.

The workshop was organized by the office medienwerk.nrw and is part of the workshop series “Speculative Technologies”. The workshop was funded within the framework of the Individual Artists’ Funding (IKF) of the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. The office medienwerk.nrw is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW. Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.

Virtual Desires

DREXCIYA – Detroit Techno, Aquanauten und die Politik des Dancefloors

Ausstellungsansicht „Afro-Tech

DREXCIYA – Detroit Techno, Aquanauten und die Politik des Dancefloors

Virtual Desires

Universität Witten/Herdecke
FR, 30.07. – SUN, 02.07.2017

Office medienwerk.nrwWorkshop

The office medienwerk.nrw and super_filme e.V. invited students, prospective (media-)artists and scientists to take part in a two-part workshop on technoimagination, exploring the subversive potential of the virtual and alternative formations of gender and desire. The workshop was led by Anneliese Ostertag, member of the warehouse project (http://warehouse.industries/). With Rahel Spöhrer and Samira Elago.

The first block (June 30th – July 2nd, 2017, in german language) dealt with new technologies, texts and artistic positions, which put the virtualization of desires and post-internet intimacy at the disposal of the audience. This block was accompanied by Rahel Spöhrer, co-founder of the performance collective THE AGENCY.

The second block (July 15th – 16th, 2017, in english language) focused on subversive media practices. Togehter with the finnish-egyptian artist Samira Elagoz (http://www.samiraelagoz.com/) the participants explored intimacy relationships and structures of desire in new media. Furthermore they tested some formats through which the virtual space can be (re)conquested for artistic production.

The workshop took place at the University of Witten/Herdecke (Bahnhofstraße 48, 58452 Witten). After the workshop, an online publication of the artistic and scientific results appeared.

The workshop was organized by super_filme e.V. and the office medienwerk.nrw and was part of the workshop series “Speculative Technologies” (office medienwerk.nrw) as well as the curatorial online/offline project “warehouse” (super_filme e.V.).

The workshop was funded within the framework of the Individual Artists’ Funding (IKF) of the Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. The office medienwerk.nrw was supported by the Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sport of the State of NRW. Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.

Cold bodies, warm machines – art and technology after human being

Cold Bodies

Cold bodies, warm machines – art and technology after human being

NRW-FORUM DÜSSELDORF
FR, 09.11. – SUN, 11.11.2016

Office medienwerk.nrwConference

Based on current concepts in digital technologies such as “affective computing”, utopias of the cybernation of the body as well as tendencies in artificial intelligence research, the conference “Cold bodies, warm machines – art and technology after human being” (organized by the office medienwerk.nrw) focused anwew on the relationship between human being and machine: What are the current boundaries which shift between the sphere of the living and the sphere of the artificial? Various of these phenomena were explored and discussed in lectures, talks, artistic contributions and a film programme. What would change if we developed machines with an increasingly sensitive sensorium which “understand” and classify us and our emotional movements – new actors who learn and act – while we increasingly see our own biological bodies as a resource which can be optimized and programmed?

The conference based on an interdisciplinary approach: it brought together scientists, artists and interested citizens in order to proactively accompany the far-reaching social changes – which has already started – and to conduct intensive futurology for three days using the means of art and exchange.

With: Ramon Amaro, Inke Arns, Alain Bieber, Andreas Broeckmann, Melanie Bühler, Ami Clarke, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Laura Hille, Erich Hörl, Felix Hüttemann, Cathrine Kramer, Tasja Langenbach, Kevin Liggieri, Robert M Ochshorn, Luciana Parisi, Sascha Pohflepp, RYBN.ORG, Alexander I. Stingl, Markus Tillmann, Michael Wheeler, Inigo Wilkins

KEYNOTES

ERICH HÖRL: »TECHNO-ECOLOGICAL CULTURE OF MEANING (FÉLIX GUATTARI)«
In the light of the general cybernetisation of existence modes and the development of environmentalism as a form of government implemented by media technology, the lecture presented Félix Guattari as a pioneer of the new, namely techno-ecological culture of meaning which emerges in the process. Special attention was paid to the critical range of Guattari’s concept of integrated world capitalism, which had to be reprioritized with regard to the environmentalist transformation.

ANDREAS BROECKMANN: »MACHINE LOVE AND SIBLING STRUGGLE. ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PEOPLE AND TECHNOLOGY«
Machines occur in many different ways and have been defined in many different ways. Throughout the last century, the term has been used to describe a polar, if not antagonistic, relationship between humans and technology. The lecture discussed various concepts of machines and proposed a diagram according to which “the machine” can be understood as the expression of a technological paradigm, that projects not so much posthuman as entirely human desires.

ROBERT M OCHSHORN: »PROTOTYPES«
A prototype is both, provisional and exemplary, and refers to a reality which has not yet been implemented. Just as people create tools and techniques and are in turn created by them, software prototypes must be understood as crude Frankenstein sketches of a new person. Does this person have certain abilities? A body? Is a “symbiosis” with the computer possible, and if so, could it provide insights into artificial and statistical intelligence? Considerations and evidence about and in the media/voice prototypes of the speaker.

PERFORMANCE

AMI CLARKE: ERROR-CORRECTION: »AN INTRODUCTION TO FUTURE DIAGRAMS MIT LOW ANIMAL SPIRITS«
Error-Correction: An Introduction to Future Diagrams (Take 7) is part of an ongoing series of research on diagrams, which take up and process thematically relevant texts, contemporary commentaries, news and anecdotal traces to culminate in a mutual convergence of many interwoven threads, whereby the voice, using language, is constituted “between another person’s thoughts and the paper”. Based on Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, and his book Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution, Take 7 is primarily interested in materiality, algorithms and an evolving subjectivity. Low Animal Spirits by Ami Clarke and Richard Cochrane is an algorithm for high frequency trading, fed in real time with news from around the world.

FILM PROGRAM

The film programme on “Cold bodies, warm machines” expanded the discourse space of the conference into the moving image and showed artistic film- and video-works that depicted various facets of the man-machine relationship and questioned them, usually critically. What in early science fiction films still seemed like distant utopias of possible android life forms is today a natural part of our reality. The progressive merging of human being, machine and technology in everyday life as well as the increasing control of our living environment through data flows and computer-controlled aids is reflected in the moving image then and now. In contrast to then, the artists today do not rely on utopias, but on the latest scientific findings and research as well as on personal everyday experiences. The film programme showed a selection of works from 2007-2015, which deal with the status quo of the human-machine-relationship through experimental documentary formats, found-footage collages and performative interventions.

Curated by Tasja Langenbach (Videonale, Bonn)

SCHEDULE OF THE CONFERENCE

FRIDAY, SEPT. 9TH, 2016
7:30 P.M.
OPENING OF THE CONFERENCE
(Ruth Schiffer, Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia; Alain Bieber, NRW-Forum Düsseldorf; Fabian Saavedra-Lara and Klaas Werner, medienwerk.nrw office)

8:00 P.M.
Keynote I: Erich Hörl
“Techno-ecological culture of meaning (after Félix Guattari)”

9:30 – 10:00 P.M.
Film programme – first part

SATURDAY, SEPT. 10TH, 2016

11:00 A.M.
Keynote II:
Andreas Broeckmann “Love of machines and sibling struggle. On the relationship between humans and technology“

12:15 P.M.
Artistic keynote: Robert M Ochshorn Prototypes

2:15 P.M.
Panel 1: Machines which think and want: Neural networks, behavioral modeling and computer models of cognition (in cooperation with Goldsmiths, University of London)

4:00 P.M.
Film programme – second part

5:30 P.M.
Panel 2: Neural networking – Communication with machines

7:00 P.M.
Performance by Ami Clarke

SUNDAY, SEPT. 11TH, 2016

11.30 A.M.
Panel 3: The posthumanist threshold or: On the possibility of thinking one’s own end (in cooperation with the Mercator Research Group “Spaces of Anthropological Knowledge, Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

2:00 P.M.
Film programme – third part

3:30 P.M.
Panel 4: Man as machine – phantasms of the optimization of mind and body

5:15 P.M.
Talk between Inke Arns (Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund) and Sascha Pohflepp (artist, Berlin/US)

6.00 P.M.
End of event

Organizer: Office medienwerk.nrw
Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV)
Project Team: Program Director Fabian Saavedra-Lara (medienwerk.nrw), Program and Organization Klaas Werner (medienwerk.nrw), Curator Film Program Tasja Langenbach (Videonale, Bonn)
cooperation partners: NRW-Forum Düsseldorf; Goldsmiths, University of London; Mercator Research Group “Spaces of Anthropological Knowledge”, located at the Ruhr-University Bochum

The conference and medienwerk.nrw were sponsored by the Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sports of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Further funding: British Council

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Every Step You Take – Art and Society in the Data Age

Unter falscher Flagge 1

Unter falscher Flagge 2

Every Step You Take – Art and Society in the Data Age

Dortmunder U / SCHAUSPIEL DORTMUND
FR, 12.11.- SA, 15.11.2015

Office medienwerk.nrwFestival

A project of medienwerk.nrw, organized by: Office medienwerk.nrw, Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Schauspiel Dortmund, Dortmunder U – Zentrum für Kunst und Kreativität, Kino im U e.V., Heimatdesign, Fraunhofer UMSICHT

The second international conference of medienwerk.nrw, titled “Every Step You Take – Art and Society in the Data Age”, dealt with the utopias and dystopias associated with new technologies of automated collection, storage and analysis of data. Numerous feuilletonist, scientific and artistic positions are currently articulating an uneasiness about latest developments in our digital and networked media reality. The public debates on “Big Data”, surveillance, transparency and data protection, but also individual user behaviour on social networks, are characterised by a profound ambivalence: the promises and temptations of technological progress – security, predictability, optimisation, comfort – are accompanied by social as well as private consequences, which often remain unmanageable and abstract in their complexity.

The conference Every Step You Take presented positions from media art, media theory and digital culture, which reacted to these technological and social developments. Following question was of particular interest: in which way are contemporary artistic strategies able to make invisible (immaterial) and highly complex processes visible, describe current technological change and make its consequences comprehensible? A second focus was on the social, economic and political ideas, which have inscribed themselves into the modes of operation of the new media: How do these ideas and logics reproduce themselves in everyday use? And what scope remains for critical debate and emancipation in the digital space?

Besides lectures, panels and artist talks, the program included a concert with the artists Holly Herndon (music) and Mat Dryhurst (visuals), a film programme curated by Florian Wüst, a screening of the live movie Minority Report (R: Klaus Gehre), a reading with the writer Leif Randt (novel Planet Magnon) and workshops in cooperation with Fraunhofer UMSICHT and the Dortmunder U. HMKV showed the group exhibition (Artificial Intelligence) Digital Dementia at Dortmunder U, curated by Thibaut de Ruyter.

With contributions from: Inke Arns, Kim Asendorf, Dirk Baecker, Alain Bieber, Mercedes Bunz, Niels van Doorn, Cécile B. Evans, Paul Feigelfeld, Matthew Fuller, Gemma Galdon Clavell, Louis Henderson, Holly Herndon, Felix Hüttemann, Alexander Kerlin, Ignas Krunglevičius, Constanze Kurz, Brigitta Kuster, Koen Leurs, Boaz Levin, Joanne McNeil, Jennifer Lyn Morone, Luciana Parisi, Peng! Collective, Maral Pourkazemi, Leif Randt, Hans Ulrich Reck, Manfred Schneider, Nishant Shah, Christian Sievers, Christoph Wachter & Mathias Jud, Jennifer Whitson, Pinar Yoldas and others

Film-programme with contributions from: Nadav Assor, Jürgen Brügger & Jörg Haaßengier, Bureau of Inverse Technology, Emma Charles, Hellmuth Costard & Jürgen Ebert, Norman Cowie, Stéphane Degoutin & Gwenola Wagon, Omer Fast, Harun Farocki, Walter Koch, Steffen Köhn, Jen Liu, Christian Niccoli, Ridley Scott

Film programme was curated by Florian Wüst

Concept & Programme Management: Fabian Saavedra-Lara
Concept & Program: Judith Funke
Projectmanagement: Annette Bohn

Sponsored by:
Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia
Federal Agency for Civic Education
Cultural Office City of Dortmund

Under false flag? Crossing genres and boundaries in contemporary art

Unter falscher Flagge 2

Unter falscher Flagge 1

Under false flag? Crossing genres and boundaries in contemporary art

PACT Zollverein
FR, 26.06. – SUN, 28.06.2015

Office medienwerk.nrwConference

From June 26th to 28th, 2015, the 1st conference of the office medienwerk.nrw took place at PACT Zollverein (Essen) on the topic “Crossing Branches and Borders in Contemporary Art“. Artists, curators and scientists from the fields of media-, performance- and visual art examined current artistic practices in lectures and panels. The focus was on positions, which leave their traditional representation in favour of other presentation-contexts; and those ones, who change the experience of spatial and temporal structures at their performance venues and blur the boundaries between the various artistic disciplines.

The focus of the discussion was the recurring convergence of traditional artistic disciplines such as film, visual arts, performative arts and media art, in which the classical boundaries between the genres seem to dissolve once again.

In four panels – two on Saturday and two on Sunday – various aspects of this development were discussed with experts and the interested public. The conference was opened with a keynote speech on Friday. This was followed by a lecture-performance by Swedish artist Erik Bünger (“The girl who never was“). In addition, some artistic positions could be seen at various locations of PACT Zollverein – by Cécile B. Evans, Balz Isler, Erik Bünger and Laura Brechmann, Dwayne Holiday, Tania Reinicke, Stephanie von Gelmini, Anne Weyler (EIN collective).

The current interest of visual-art-institutions in the ephemeral, in artistic strategies, which rely on situativity, fleetingness and experience, seems to be symptomatic of new alliances, shifts of responsibilities and changes of perspective in contemporary art based on over 40 years of avantgarde developments. In this context, the conference asked on which medial constitutions and social developments artists react today when they change their context and make disciplinary boundaries permeable.

At the beginning of the conference the following questions have been formulated: How will the transfer of forms between disciplines influence the practice and self-image of artists and institutions? How do artists and curators interact between disciplines today? How do recipients, visitors and spectators deal with the trend towards the dissolution of traditional disciplinary boundaries?

TALKS AND LECTURES with Inke Arns, Hans Bernhard, Nadja Elia-Borer, Melanie Bühler, Dieter Daniels, André Eiermann, Cécile B. Evans, Paul Feigelfeld, Judith Funke, Stefan Hilterhaus, Michelle Kasprzak, Daniel Kötter, Serge Laurent, Kirsten Maar, Jessica Nitsche, Manuel Pelmus, Laurence Rassel, Sabine Maria Schmidt, Jörn Schafaff, Bettina Steinbrügge, Vivian Ziherl

ARTISTICAL CONTRIBUTIONS by Erik Bünger, Cécile B. Evans, Balz Isler and Laura Brechmann, Dwayne Holiday, Tania Reinicke, Stephanie von Gelmini, Anne Weyler (EIN collectively)

SCHEDULE

Friday, June 26th, 2015

7:00 p.m., opening of the exhibition-rooms (Erik Bünger, Balz Isler, Cécile B. Evans, EIN collective)

7:30 p.m., welcome, big stage

8:00 p.m., Keynote: Vivian Ziherl (If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Brisbane/Amsterdam), big stage, in english language

9:15 p.m., Lecture-Performance: Erik Bünger (Berlin, “The girl who never was“) small stage, in english language with German subtitles

10:15 – 11:00 p.m., exhibition rooms opened

Saturday, June 27th, 2015

12:30 pm, opening of the exhibition-rooms

1:30 – 3:00 p.m., Panel 1: Historical perspectives of the border-crossing (with: Jessica Nitsche [moderation], Dieter Daniels, André Eiermann, Nadja Elia-Borer, Sabine Maria Schmidt)

3:45 – 5:15 p.m., Panel 2: Border-crossing and the question of temporalities (with: Judith Funke [moderation], Daniel Kötter, Kirsten Maar, Manuel Pelmus, Laurence Rassel), in English

5:30 – 6:30 p.m., conversation with Serge Laurent (Curator Centre Pompidou, Paris), in English

7:00 – 10:00 p.m., Get-together

Sunday, June 28th, 2015

12:30 p.m., opening of the exhibition-rooms

1:30 – 3:00 p.m., Panel 3: Digital (de-)limitation (with: Melanie Bühler [moderation], Hans Bernhard, Cécile B. Evans, Paul Feigelfeld, Michelle Kasprzak), in English

3:45 – 5:15 p.m., Panel 4: Cross-disciplinary curating (with: Jörn Schafaff [moderation], Inke Arns, Stefan Hilterhaus, Bettina Steinbrügge)

6:00 p.m., end of the conference

Projectmanagement and concept: Fabian Saavedra-Lara, Klaas Werner

The office medienwerk.nrw and the conference were supported by the Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sports of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.

DIGITAL FOLKLORE

Pauline

DIGITAL FOLKLORE

HMKV Hartware MedienKunstverein
FR, 16.10.2015, 6PM

Office medienwerk.nrwArtist Talk

In his creative work Bürger deals with participatory design-practices on the net. For example, he designed the publication Digital Folklore, on which the exhibition is based, and was also working on design for the media art festival transmediale (Berlin). The short presentation and discussion focused on the current interests in the field of digital culture and on the amateur cultures of the early 1990s internet: What has changed since then, what has been lost? Apparently, the web-services and -tools of the time offered more scope for individual design and thus enabled a wider range of aesthetics as well as a lively user-culture, which has disappeared in recent years in favor of uniform templates as the web has become increasingly commercialized. The discussion with Dr. Inke Arns (HMKV) and Fabian Saavedra-Lara (Büro medienwerk.nrw) deals with the old ideals of DIY-culture on the Net; and furthermore: what could we as today’s users learn from it in retrospect, and how the Net-aesthetics of that time, which from today’s perspective seem “retro”, influenced today’s design-practices as well as artistic practices (“post-internet”).

With: Manuel Bürger (Berlin), Moderation: Dr. Inke Arns (HMKV), Fabian Saavedra-Lara (Office medienwerk.nrw)

Manuel Bürger (Berlin) or “The Laboratory of Manuel Bürger” (Worldwide) deals with amateurish and virtuoso design forces, works between nonsense and cultural theory and looks after clients from various areas of the communication-landscape, such as the transmediale festival in Berlin. Bürger is part of several collectives like Mimetic Club, Bench Boys, Figure 8, teaches at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart and successfully runs the Naives & Visionaries publishing house. He is also in charge of the regularly published research magazine CVSN of the Critical Vision course at the University of Cincinnatti, USA, and the annual research publication of Aarhus University, Denmark. Recent publications and essays deal with the mimetic potential of design and house music: “Slippery Design – forever beta” and “Duck House Theory – Robert Venturi’s Darkroom Fantasies” respectively.

The office medienwerk.nrw was funded by the Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sports of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.