Projects – medienwerk.nrw

Reading Artists’ Books: Problems for Computer

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Reading Artists’ Books: Problems for Computer

Office medienwerk.nrwVeranstaltung

TIME AND LOCATION:
Thursday, December 11, 2025, 13:30 – 17:00
Witten/Herdecke University
New building, room E.022 a/b
Alfred-Herrhausen-Str. 48
58455 Witten

and online via Zoom. Registration here. The event language is English.

The fourth edition of the series “Reading Artists’ Books” presents publications from the 1960s to the present that have critically reflected on computational thinking—that is, ways of thinking shaped by computer-based and algorithmic processes—or that have relied on computer technologies in their making. Already in the 1960s and 70s, artists and theorists were asking whether computers could expand or even replace human creativity, how algorithmic tools might reconfigure artistic roles, and who would have access to these emerging technologies. These questions, first raised over half a century ago, are resurfacingtoday with renewed urgency in the context of current debates on artificial intelligence. Publications such as Alison Knowles’s “A House of Dust” (1969), Stanley Brouwn’s “100 this-way-brouwn-problems for computer IBM 360 model 95” (1970), and Manfred Mohr’s “Artificiata I” (1969) demonstrated how concepts of chance, computational iteration, and algorithmic logic were translated into the analogue medium of the artist’s book—often coupled with a critical reflection on the promises and limits of digital technologies.
The event is dedicated to Alison Knowles, who passed away in October 2025 at the age of 92 in New York. It takes place within the framework of the Studium Fundamentale at Witten/Herdecke University and connects to ongoing discussions within the Centre for Advanced Study “Access to Cultural Goods in Digital Change” at the University of Münster. Shinji Toya’s (London) contribution exploring digital obsolescence highlights the fragility of network-based artworks and digital infrastructures. “Computers at Work. About Women in Computing” (2019) by Sophie Rentien Lando addresses the role of women in computing history, recalling that, in the early days, “computers” referred to predominantly female workers who performed complex calculations by hand. Gloria Hasnay (Düsseldorf) will discuss her publication “Key Operators. Weaving and Coding as Languages of Feminist Historiography” (2024), accompanying an exhibition of the same title at KunstvereinMünchen. Finally, Jonathan Harth (Berlin/Witten) explores the famous notes of British mathematician Ada Lovelace, widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer.
The program brings together artists, theorists, publishers, and curators who will introduce selected publications in relatively short presentations (10–15 minutes each), among them art historians Hannah Higgins (Chicago), Margit Rosen (Karlsruhe), Ursula Frohne (Münster) and Constanze Fritzsch (Florence); literary scholar Frank Fischer (Berlin); designer and programmer Jürg Lehni (Zurich); and artists Antye Guenther (Rotterdam), Andreas Bülhoff (Hamm/Berlin), and Rodrigo Araya Yáñez (Santiago de Chile).
The event will be held in English.

Reading Order:
13:30 | REGINE EHLEITER (on-site): Introduction to the event, followed by a reading of Stanley Brouwn,” 100 this-way-brouwn-problems for computer IBM 360 model 95” (1969)

13:45 | FRANK FISCHER (online) reading Nanni Balestrini, “Tape Mark I” (1961)

14:00 | CONSTANZE FRITZSCH (online) reading A.R. Penck, “Ich-Standart-Literatur“(1971)

14:15 | ANDREAS BÜLHOFF (on-site) reading “Reading Writing Interfaces – Word, InDesign, TextEdit” (2022)

14:30 | JÜRG LEHNI (online) reading “Things to Say” (2009), “Empty Words” (2011), “News” (2011), and “Research Notes” (2011)

14:45 | ANTYE GUENTHER (online) reading “The Beheading of the Fruit Fly? (How will I know if you are truly a sentient being?)” (2022)

15:00–15:30 | Coffee break

15:30 | URSULA FROHNE (on-site) reading Lucy R. Lippard’s contribution to “Information”(MoMA, 1970)

15:45 | HANNAH HIGGINS (online) reading Alison Knowles, “A House of Dust” (1969)

16:00 | RODRIGO ARAYA YÁÑEZ (online) reading “Entreactos. Ordenadores y sirvientes”(2014–19)

16:15 | GLORIA HASNAY (on-site) reading “Key Operators. Weaving and coding as languages of feminist historiography” (2024)

16:30 | JONATHAN HARTH (on-site) reading Ada Lovelace, Notes to her translation of Luigi Menabrea’s “Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage” (1842)

16:45 | SHINJI TOYA (online) reading “3 Years and 6 Months of Digital Decay” (2016)

16:45 | Drinks Reception

Prerecorded videos available online through the project’s Vimeo archive:
– MARGIT ROSEN reading Manfred Mohr, “Artificiata I” (1969)
– STUDENTS reading Sophie Rentien Lando, “Computers at Work. About Women in Computing” (2019)

The event was organized by Regine Ehleiter, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Chair for Digital Arts and Cultural Communication at the WittenLab. Future Laboratory Studium Fundamentale at the University of Witten/Herdecke and Senior Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study Access to Cultural Goods in Digital Change, in cooperation with the Office & Network for Media Art and Digital Culture medienwerk.nrw and the Centre for Advanced Study Access to Cultural Goods in Digital Change at the University of Münster. The Centre is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

The Reading Artists’ Books series was initiated by Regine Ehleiter and Tabea Nixdorff (Arnhem) in memory of Chicago-based curator and librarian Doro Boehme (1957–2020). It offers a public platform for artistic publishing practices through collective reading and lecture formats. Previous editions have focused on publications as a medium for presenting artistic writing practices (HGB Leipzig, 2022) and on “asemic writing,” inspired by the works of Argentine conceptual artist Mirtha Dermisache (Freie Universität Berlin, 2024). Recordings of previous events are available on the series’ Vimeo channel.

WEBSITES:
https://www.uni-wh.de/en/reading-artists-books-problems-for-computer
https://www.uni-muenster.de/KFG-Zugang/en/veranstaltungen/2025rab.html

The work of medienwerk.nrw is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, on whose behalf it undertakes coordination, professionalization, and advisory tasks in the field of media art. The medienwerk.nrw office is based at HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund.

Film program MedienKunstTage NRW 2025

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Film program MedienKunstTage NRW 2025

If the eye were not sunlike, the sun‘s light it would not see

Office medienwerk.nrwScreening

Film program More Future! MedienKunstTage NRW 2025

If the eye were not sunlike, the sun‘s light it would not see //
Wär nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, die Sonne könnt es nie erblicken
– Curated by Vanina Saracino

Film program on October 24, 2025

The first part of the film program takes a focused look at how technology shapes and forms our present and our future. The artworks operate at the intersection of logic and mysticism, global network infrastructures and local collective struggles, as well as speculative economies and imagined futures. They reflect on how we hope, fear, and cope with uncertainties at the edge of rapidly expanding technological possibilities.

1. Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Keeping Count, Annotated, 9’38’’, 2021–23

Keeping Count (2021–23) displays a musical score by Th&o alongside her animation and excerpts from educational films to explore the desire for certainty, legibility, and a “correct answer.” This video mixes spiritual elements with mathematical and scientific aspects, using digital artifacts, noise, pixelation, and stuttering animations to remind us of instability—the instability of meaning and epistemological hierarchies. Measurements, approximations, and their signs and symbols are related to questions of Black liberation. Through the recombination of phrases and leaps between lines, this video expresses that complex lives cannot be reduced to fixed formulas. The artist engages with questions of solving x as an exercise not in precision, but in deliberate approximation and miscalculation.

2. Elisabeth Brun, Big tech Blues, 20’, 2025

Big Tech Blues is a poetic film essay that reflects on the life and resilience of rural communities in the age of Big Tech. The abandoned school from the filmmaker’s childhood in the small village of Strengelvåg in northern Norway was one day bought up by Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink program—an event that prompted reflections on what is at stake when rapidly developing digital technology permeates all aspects of human life. 
The film links personal narratives about SpaceX’s intrusion into the filmmaker’s hometown with existential reflections on connectedness, freedom, nostalgia, and progress. It reflects on dilemmas related to place, digital technology, and physical experience. At the heart of this exploration is the experience of sound: the hum of digital technology, the laughter of children, and the sounds of weather and nature. The film asks: What does a living place sound like?
By blending personal anecdotes with broader reflections, the film offers an insider’s view of the subtle encroachment of the digital industry into rural areas in northern Norway and beyond. It meditates on the complex relationships people have with their surroundings, highlighting the dual constraints of digital technology and the importance of embodied experiences for memory and connection.

3. Gala Hernández López, for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world, 19’06’’, 2024

for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world is an experimental dual-screen film that explores the connections between crypto culture and cryotechnology as two speculative technologies for which the future becomes an economic resource to be exploited. Using a collage of YouTube videos, archival images, and 3D animations, for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world explores the connections between financial speculation, speculative science fiction, and the prediction and control of the future. The narrative explores the fantasies conveyed by cryptocurrencies and is carried by the enveloping text of an invisible narrator who describes her intimate dreams and fears. She accompanies us on a dreamlike, poetic, historical, and futuristic audiovisual journey, conjuring up the figure of American extropian and cypherpunk Hal Finney, a key figure in the history of Bitcoin, who has also been a cryonics patient since 2014. In the narrator’s dreams, Finney integrates a section of society that has entered into a state of suspended animation or subsidized biostasis in order to accelerate economic recovery following a future global economic crisis. The narrator has an imaginary conversation with Finney about belief or fear of the future and how an optimistic bet on the future could actually jeopardize its potential through a political departure from the struggles of the present.

The film also explores the feeling of temporary suspension: through the character of “Scheintod” (apparent death), it recalls a historical era characterized by a high degree of unpredictability and uncertainty due to the acceleration and disruption of new technologies and the manifold consequences of the Anthropocene. The idea of temporary suspension is questioned by the dichotomy “suspension – free fall”: Is humanity floating in uncertainty, or are we rather in free fall? Given the limits of human perception and knowledge, how can we distinguish between the two? “For here am I sitting in a tin can far above the world” works with the nonlinear temporality of dreams and memories, the fractured temporality of time travel narratives, such as the one in which Hal Finney enters his cryogenic capsule.

4. Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung, Literally No Place, 18’36’’, 2023

Hello, everyone, this is the final boss of Vocal Fry. Daniel Felstead’s glamorous Julia Fox avatar is back. Last time, she took on Zuckerberg’s metaverse. Now she takes us on a journey into the cyberwar between AI utopians and AI pessimists, examining the risks, fears, and hopes of all sides. Will AI bring about the post-scarcity society envisioned by Marx, where we can all live in labor-free luxury, or will it literally wipe out humanity?

We all know that Julia Fox is not a Manichean, binary woman. As she navigates the dichotomy of AI apocalypse and AI utopia, she presents us with an uncanny array of possible future scenarios, delving deeply into the predictions of both AI simps and manic tech overlords such as Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. Watch this video before you decide which side you’re on.

The screening of the films will be followed by an artist talk with Elisabeth Brun & Vanina Saracino (curator of the film program).

Film program on October 25, 2025:

Goethe wrote: “Were not the eye sunlike, it could never behold the sun” – a metaphor for the relationality of perception, with the sun at its center. The works in the second part of the film program explore solar energy as a generative, relational, and informational force, reflecting on how life, memory, ecosystems, technologies, and bodies are intertwined through solar rhythms and shaped by exposure, transformation, and decay.

The following films will be shown:

1. Shuang Li, ÆTHER (Poor Objects), 18’28’’, 2021

ÆTHER combines the imagery of ring lighting, a lighting device often used by vloggers, cam models, and a growing group of people who now work from home and live on screens, with that of a ring-shaped solar eclipse, continuing the artist’s reflection on personal subjectivity and its intertwining with an increasingly immersive and ubiquitous online culture.

The concept of “leakage” reflects the inverse relationship between the body and its representation on screen and runs as a fundamental theme through the artist’s visual works and screenplay, as an exploration of the imperfect transmission between virtual pixelated objects and backgrounds into physical life.

The sphere of ring light and solar eclipse becomes an opening that the camera penetrates, while overlapping languages of evolution and pregnancy contemplate the spatio-temporal detachment of our social and technological conditions. Through the portrayal of a cam model and a mukbang vlogger, the work aims to promote a reversal of the dematerialization and digitization of physical bodies under our current mediatized circumstances.

2. Ani Schulze, Flint House Lizard, 15:49 min.,2019

The body and physicality are at the heart of Flint House Lizard, which moves between fable, fiction, reality, and speculation. Through hypnotic sequences of shifting textures, moods, characters, landscapes, and distinctive soundscapes, the film unfolds nonlinear fragments of a bizarre and unsettling story. The result is a mood or state of mind that hovers between sleep and wakefulness.

Flint House Lizard navigates through four different cycles that are oriented toward the sun. The film begins in darkness and starts with a single body or figure. Although its protagonists seem to refine and harness the potential energy of the sun, the assumption arises that the sun has its own intentions.
The film draws on the ideas of Soviet biophysicist Alexander Chizhevsky (1897–1964). His approach linked sunspots, solar flares, and the eleven-year solar cycle to political and social developments such as populist mass movements. Inspired by his writings, the film shows how contemporary social patterns of mass images, information structures, and current forms of populism simulate and determine the individual body and influence the movements of groups.

The densely layered narrative of Flint House Lizard reveals patterns of storytelling influenced by speculation and belief formation. Seductive, haptic close-ups develop into a disturbing, dark sequence of images and a brief choreography of computer-generated images. This animation, created in part with mass simulation software, reflects the striking ease with which crowd movements can be simulated using algorithms.

3. Jana Kerima Stolzer and Lex Rütten, Ponor, 23’29’’, 2025

What does it mean to view a river as an organism consisting of many individual parts? With this question, Lex Rütten and Jana Kerima Stolzer take up the so-called “Gaia hypothesis,” which is based on the scientific concept that the Earth can be viewed as a self-regulating system in which living beings and their physical environment interact to create life-sustaining conditions.

Hypothesis,” which is based on the scientific concept that the Earth can be viewed as a self-regulating system in which living beings and their physical environment interact to create conditions conducive to life.
In the video work “Ponor,” they explore the underground paths of a river from the highlands to its sources. 

Like a sinkhole in karst rock, the video work allows viewers to follow the water through complex cave systems and encounter tiny organisms such as cave beetles. Given a voice, our non-human neighbors from the world of flora and fauna take center stage and tell the story of their lives, their survival, and their adaptation.
In a unique way and in a mixture of fact and fiction, the artists tell the story of a river that has its origins in the karst landscape before it emerges from hundreds of springs. The different narratives of the protagonists illustrate the connection and feedback system between all (living) beings on earth and at the same time reveal the different temporalities in which they encounter each other. 

The screening of the films will be followed by an artist talk with Ani Schulze, Jana Kerima Stolzer, Lex Rütten & Vanina Saracino (curator of the film program).

Biographies of filmmakers and artists

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner. Her middle name, Janan, comes from the Arabic root (J-N-N / جنان) and stands for the unbound, the veiled, and the unsanctioned. Accordingly, Rasheed explores the relationship between language, mysticism, and disobedience. She examines the materiality of wayward language—acrobatic (Clarice Lispector) sentences with trapdoors (Fred Moten), runaway syllables scattered across the margins of a page, words that break free from the orbit of their parent clause, footnotes that devour their references, and utterances that dissolve before they can be recorded. She also explores the materiality of reading, focusing on spiritual practices in which reading takes place through touch and digestion rather than just viewing. As a “language person” (Paul Soulellis), she “gives language a body” (Chang Yuchen) through her large-scale installations, multi-channel video works, publications, software, performances, public archives, and learning platforms.

Her work in the fields of art, education, and new technologies has been recognized with numerous awards. In 2024, she was a finalist for Artes Mundi 11 and received a fellowship from High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree. She has received additional grants and awards from Working Artist (2023), the Schering Foundation (2022 Award for Artistic Research), the Creative Capital Award (2022), an Artists + Machine Intelligence Grant – Experiments with Google (2022), and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts (2021). Her work has been presented worldwide, including in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Her recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include the Henry Art Gallery (2025), REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). She has participated in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum, Bronx Museum, New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, MASSMoCA, The Kitchen, and ICA Philadelphia.

Elisabeth Brun is a visual artist, filmmaker, and theorist who explores questions of form, mediation, knowledge, and the relationship between humans and the environment. Her work takes various forms, including films, installations, 3D works, and texts, and engages in a dialogue between philosophy, environmental science, and visual art.  Brun is particularly interested in how media technology influences the perception of place, space, and time, often drawing on her subarctic/northern Norwegian origins.
Brun’s work has been shown internationally at festivals and venues such as the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (DE), the Seattle Art Museum (US), the Festival du Nouveaux Cinéma in Montreal (CA), and the Lofoten International Art Festival LIAF (NO). Her recent awards and honors include the 2020 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment from Kings College, a special mention at the Mimesis Doc Fest Emerging Artist Award, and a Poetry by Video Artist Award at the Cadence Video Poetry Festival.  Elisabeth Brun holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Oslo, has 14 years of experience as a documentary filmmaker/journalist (NRK), and a Post-Master in Public Art from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. 

Gala Hernández López is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. Her work combines interdisciplinary research with the production of essay films, video installations, and performances on new forms of subjectification brought about specifically by computer-assisted digital capitalism. From a feminist and critical perspective, she examines the discourses and imaginary worlds that circulate in virtual communities as symptomatic fictions of the state of the world. Her work has been shown at the Berlinale, DOK Leipzig, Cinéma du Réel, IndieLisboa, Transmediale, and Salon de Montrouge, among others. Her film “The Mechanics of Fluids” won the César Award for Best Short Documentary and the Scam (France) Experimental Work Award 2023, receiving a total of a dozen awards. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Paris 8, where she is developing a research and creative project on screen recordings and has been teaching for three years. Thanks to a DAAD research fellowship, she has worked as an associate professor (ATER) at Gustave Eiffel University and as a visiting researcher at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf (Germany). From 2023 to 2024, she will be Artist in Residence at the French Academy in Spain – Casa de Velázquez. She is co-director of the research and creative collective After Social Networks (www.after-social-networks.com). She regularly gives workshops.

Daniel Felstead is a scientist and artist whose work focuses on the relationship between the body, technology, and culture. He is the course director of the Master’s program in Fashion Media & Communication at the London College of Fashion (UAL). Daniel has given lectures and organized exhibitions internationally, including at the Architectural Association, Berlin Critics Week, Angewandte, Fundació Foto Colectania, Global Art Forum, MAPS, ICA, PAF, RCA, RISD, Shedhalle, Transmediale, and the V&A Museum.
Most recently, Daniel and his collaborator Jenn Leung have produced a series of highly acclaimed short films exploring the myths, ideologies, and realities of the metaverse, AI, biotechnology, and neural media.

Jenn Leung is an educator and technical artist specializing in 3D, game engine simulations, and real-time streaming tools. She is a lecturer in Creative Technology and Design at London College of Fashion, UAL, and a researcher at Antikythera’s Synthetic Intelligence Studio in 2024. She is also a member of Off World Live, an engineering and research group for Unreal Engine developers, and was program director at Architectural Association VS Unit 5 Xalon.

Shuang Li (born 1990 in the Wuyi Mountains, CN) lives and works in Berlin, DE, and Geneva, CH. In 2014, she completed her master’s degree in media studies at New York University. Li’s work, which includes performance, interactive websites, sculptures, and moving image installations, deals with various media that shape the contemporary digital landscape. She takes globalized communication systems as her starting point and draws inspiration from different locations and uneven flows of information.
Her recent solo exhibitions include “I’m Not,” Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2024); “Distance of the Moon,” Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai (2024); “I’m Not,” Swiss Institute, New York (2024); Galeria Madragoa, Lisbon (2023); Cherish, Geneva (2021); and Callie’s, Berlin (2020). She has also participated in numerous institutional group exhibitions, including Fondazione Prada, Milan, curated by Nicholas Cullinan (2023); Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga, curated by Tīna Pētersone (2023); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2022); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, curated by Tobias Berger, Jill Chun, and Daniel Ho (2022); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva (2021); X Museum, Beijing, curated by Poppy Dongxue Wu (2020); Times Museum, Guangzhou, curated by Biljana Ciric (2019); and Mao Jihong Arts Foundation, Chengdu, in collaboration with Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018).
Her work has been shown at a number of biennials, including the most recent Whitney Biennial 2024 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024); the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2024, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Switzerland (2024); the Kunsthal Charlottenborg Biennale 2023 in Copenhagen; and the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia (2022). Li has also collaborated with Miuccia Prada on a special project for the Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2023 fashion show.

Ani Schulze (*1982 lives and works in Cologne and Porto) studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and the Glasgow School of Arts. Her works have been shown in group and solo exhibitions, including at the Mountains Gallery in Berlin, the Lehmann + Silva Gallery in Porto, and the Kunstverein Siegen, as well as in the Double Feature program at the Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt. She works with video, painting, and large-scale installations. Her most recent solo exhibitions include “At One Go” at Mountains (Berlin 2025); “The Convent of Pleasure- Prolog/ Ticking Time” at the Moltkerei Werkstatt (Cologne 2023/24); “Snake Charming” at Galerie Lehmann+Silva (Porto 2023); “Lovers & Hunters,” Kunstverein Siegen (2021); “Hang in there, baby,” A Certain Lack of Coherence, Porto (2021); “Flint House Lizard,” Basis (Frankfurt, 2019); “Flint House Lizard,” I: Project Space (Beijing, 2019) and “7 Follies,” Artothek (Cologne, 2019). Her work has been shown in a number of international group exhibitions and screenings, including at the Hamburger Kunsthalle; Galerie Clages, Cologne; Galeria Municipal Porto; Salzburger Kunstverein; Fundacion Botin, Santander; Kölnischer Kunstverein; Pavilhão Branco, Lisbon; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and Extra City Kunsthalle, Antwerp. She has received numerous scholarships and awards, including the Scholarship for Media Artists from the State of North Rhine-Westphalia; working scholarships from the Kunststif
Ani Schulze studierte an der Städelschule in Frankfurt, Kunstakademie Karlsruhe, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf und der Glasgow School of Arts. 2023 erschien ihre Monografie Hang in There, Baby bei Mousse Publishing. 

Jana Kerima Stolzer and Lex Rütten are an artist duo who have been working together since 2016. They create multimedia installations and performances that deal with the technological environment as a formative and transformative component of the world, influencing not only humans but also flora and fauna. The protagonists of their multimedia works are mostly beings that have no voice in reality: hybrid beings representing nature and technology, plants and animals that convey their own view of the world in musical environments. The duo collects stories from around the world, based on factual research, to develop narratives that enable new connections and relationships. They combine historical and scientific research with science fiction to design the (im)possible for the future.
Jana Kerima Stolzer studied at the Münster University of Fine Arts with Aernout Mik and Lex Rütten at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with Dominique Gonzalez Foerster. In 2020, both were fellows at the Academy for Theater and Digitality. In 2023, the duo opened their first institutional solo exhibition at Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund. This year, they had their first solo exhibition in Seoul, South Korea, at Loop Alt Space.

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Fake Futures! A minifesto making exercise

FakeFutures_KI-stablediffusionf7

Fake Futures! A minifesto making exercise

Workshop Medienkunsttage NRW 2025

Office medienwerk.nrwWorkshop

Fake Futures! A minifesto making exercise

The future has always been fake, because it cannot be verified as the future – only when it becomes our present or our past, can we verify its prediction and promises. And yet, fake futures seem to be steeped in crisis, annihilation, doomerism, more often than not in some way propelled by AI. Fake news, fake it till you make it, the fake is both threat to and condition of our contemporary moment and the next. But if futures have always been fake, then it is up to us to shift gears and enact our capacity to habituate different futures, precisely by practicing them in the now. If we do not like the path laid out, we need to identify what it is we dont like about it and change the scopes towards a different way.

FAKE FUTURES is an exercise to prompt, reflect, and manifest different futures in a collective forum. TO PROMPT means to engage with, interrogate, and potentially adapt our desire to know the future – why have we needed to know in the past, and what is suggesting this need to know can be best met by technology? TO REFLECT on these given futures as fake means to understand that its conditions are well set in the now, but also that they are alterable. What are the alternative futures floating around, and can their contradictions show us something about our own agency? TO MANIFEST means to take agency over what these futures could entail, and to collectively map out practices of repair. How can we help each other, and ourselves, to work towards our own versions of the fake and possibly even make them a reality?

The workshop will be divided into three parts broadly conceptualized around notions of prompting, reflection and manifesting.

Registration via info@medienwerk-nrw.de; in English; workshop leaders: Nishant Shah and Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss.

Visit the website of More Future! MedienKunstTage NRW 2025.

More Future! Media Art Days NRW 2025

Ausstellungsansicht „Afro-Tech

More Future! Media Art Days NRW 2025

Office medienwerk.nrwVeranstaltung

Program MediaArtDays

Friday, October 24, 2025 – 11:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Saturday, October 25, 2025 from 11:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.
In cooperation with: HMKV Hartwarte MedienKunstVerein, Academy for Theater and Digitality, UZWEI at the Dortmunder U
All events are free of charge.

In light of multiple crises, how can we still believe in the future today? The MedienKunstTage NRW 2025 explores this question with a program that brings together artistic imagination, technological criticism, and social visions. Under the title “More Future!”, the festival brings together positions that understand hope not as a naive attitude, but as a critical practice.

For over a century, technological progress has inspired utopias: networked societies, shared knowledge, free time, fairer opportunities. But the promises of automation, participation, and digital democracy seem to be increasingly evaporating. The belief that technology makes our lives better is being shaken—by political setbacks, ecological crises, and the concentration of power in the tech sector.

The MedienKunstTage 2025 counter this with an artistic and scientific search space: for new stories, rediscovered ideas, and other forms of coexistence. At the center is the thesis that we have lost the future—and that it is time to reclaim it. 

In screenings, readings, performances, talks, and workshops, we ask: 

More Visions. What dreams does art feed? 
More Critique. How do technologies and their providers threaten the future?
More Hope. Where can we find new optimism? 
More Endings. What must end so that something new can emerge? 
More Art. What is currently happening in media art in North Rhine-Westphalia? 
More Channels. How can we come together digitally in a different way? 
More Connections. What should the cultural networks of the future look like? 
More Sharing. How can we share knowledge sustainably?

More Future in the Sun! – We invite artists, scientists, and the public to join us in making the future (once again) conceivable.

With contributions from: Iuditha Balint, Sophie Emelie Beha, Jacob Birken, Elisabeth Brun, Nadja Buttendorf, Jamie-Lee Campbell, Dietmar Dath, Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung, Theresa Hannig, Isabella Hermann, Laura Hille, Felix Hüttemann, Claude Jansen, Shuang Li, Gala Hernández López, Anna-Verena Nosthoff, Felix Maschewski, Lisa Panitz, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Laurence Rassel, rendered realities (Agnetha Jaunich & Hendrik Lange), Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss, Vanina Saracino, Julia Scherzl, Ani Schulze, Nishant Shah, Jana Kerima Stolzer & Lex Rütten, Paula Maya Strunden, SOAP (Bettina Katja Lange & Uwe Brunner), Cornelia Sollfrank, Manuel Talarico, Maximilian Voigt, Nate Wessalowski, Ingo Wichmann

Program of MedienKunstTage 2025

Download Program as PDF here (German)

Friday, 24.10.2025	Location	Saturday, 25.10.2025	Location
11:15h Welcome and opening remarks	HMKV, Dortmunder U, Ebene 3	11.00 – 13.00h Workshop: Fake Futures – *a minifesto making exercise*	Akademie für Theater und Digitalität
11.30 – 13.00h Live-Podcast: Behind the Screens, Behind the Scenes	HMKV, Dortmunder U, Ebene 3	14.00 – 15.30h Filmprogram: If the eye were not sunlike, the sun‘s light it would not see	Kino im U, Dortmunder U, Ebene 0
14.00 – 15.30h Filmprogram: If the eye were not sunlike, the sun‘s light it would not see	Kino im U, Dortmunder U, Ebene 0	14.00 – 15.30h Guided tour Genossin Sonne	HMKV, Dortmunder U, Ebene 3
		16.00 – 19.00h Workshop: PlakaTopia: I’m so angry, I even made a sign.	uwzei, Dortmunder U, Ebene 2
16.15 – 18.00h Paneldiscussion: Unattainable presents, inevitable endings	HMKV, Dortmunder U, Ebene 3	16.00 – 17.00h Paneldiscussion: Commons of Today: Open source ideas for a livable future	HMKV, Dortmunder U, Ebene 3
19.00 – 20.00h Performance: POST CORPUS SHAPESHIFTER	uzwei, Dortmunder U, Ebene 2	18.00 – 19.00h Discussion panel: Commons of Tomorrow: open thinking, living, working together	HMKV, Dortmunder U, Ebene 3
20.30 – 22.00h Discussion panel: Future Fiction: Sci-Fi for a Better World	HMKV, Dortmunder U, Ebene 3	20.00 – 21.30h Reading and discussion: Skyrmions Or: A Fucking Army (with Dietmar Dath)	HMKV, Dortmunder U, Ebene 3

All events are free of charge.

The work of Büro medienwerk.nrw is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia, on whose behalf it organizes coordination, professionalization, and consulting in the field of media art. Büro medienwerk.nrw is based at HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.

MELT presents: A Data Set of Screams

melt slider

MELT presents: A Data Set of Screams

12th of December, 18 – 21h
at Glasmoog KHM Cologne
Heumarkt 14, 50667 Cologne

Office medienwerk.nrwPerformance

Together with medienwerk.nrw, the MELT collective invites you to COUNTING FEELINGS on December 12, 2024 in the GLASMOOG at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne:

“COUNTING FEELINGS is a research project that considers what data might mean for Trans* and autistic people. During the evening of December 12th, we invite you to join us in recording a data set that holds our voiced screams as resistance. Together we will scream into the data set – and stretch it into one that can hold our embodied and collective grief. We intend to do this as a trauma informed practice, and it is possible that feelings of grief, anger, and distrust emerge. Holding this space together, we aim to understand these expressed feelings as collective and powerful tools against structural oppressions. Let us tap into our collective scream-as-collective-power-against.” (MELT, 2024).

The event consists of an introduction by MELT, a vocal warm up to prepare our voices from Klara Hens, the recording itself with the support of Pink Noise Pollution, and a cool down and hang out after.

Disabled, Trans*, and neurodivergent folks and allies screaming about oppressions are warmly invited.
Please send a short message to mail@meltionary.com to sign up, please include any further access needs you may have.

Access Info will be here soon. This is a relaxed performance event, taking breaks and taking it slow are welcome.

MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Iz Paehr) study and experiment with shape-shifting processes as they meet technologies, sensory media and pedagogies in a warming world. Meltionary (derived from “dictionary”), is a growing collection of arts-design-research engagements that cooks up questions around material transformations alongside impulses from trans* feminism and disability justice. Melting as a kaleidoscope like phenomena touches upon multiple topics at once: climate change, the potential for political reformulations, change over time and material transformation. MELT shares work in the forms of videos, installations, websites, lectures, workshops and courses.
Find out more about MELT

Credits: Images © MELT

Science meets art | DATA POETICS / DATA POLITICS

DATA POETICS / DATA POLITICS

Science meets art | DATA POETICS / DATA POLITICS

Thursday, 28.11.2024, 11:00 to 19:30 hrs
UniversitY Witten/Herdecke – Holzbau (UG)

Office medienwerk.nrwConference

Data has long since become the raw material of social environments; this naturally includes our economic activities and simultaneously designates alternative economies (e.g. attention and platform economies). Based on everyday situations, we would like to shed light on what data does to us and how implication-rich the changes can be about the world and self-perception. Beyond the influential ‘Big Tech’, the (political) question of data sovereignty also arises.

Based on this, scientists and artists will engage in a dialog to explore the questions: What is data?
What does data do with me and among us?
What do (smart) technologies do with our data and what do we in turn do with these technologies?
How does data change our relationships and our self-relation?
What perspectives and solutions can media art and art-based research offer when dealing with data & AI?

With contributions by Prof. Dr. Paul Feigelfeld, !Mediengruppe BITNIK, Audrey Samson (Goldsmiths College, University of London, FRAUD collective), Prof. Sven Meister, Prof. Matthias Kettner, Prof. Kerrin Jacobs, Dr. Jonathan Harth, and more. We look forward to a keynote speech by internationally renowned AI policy advisor Dr. Gemma Galdón-Clavell.

PROGRAM

11:00: Welcome
Aude Florence Bertrand-Höttcke and Klaas Werner

11:30 – 12:30: Keynote by Prof. Dr. Paul Feigelfeld
If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes. Why intelligence is always artificial.
The lecture explores the history of an idea of thinking which determines our present and future. Particular interest lies in the stories less told, the media technological dead ends and cultural historical secret passages. Their charting and investigation are essential for a better understanding of the cultural, social, political and technological consequences that lie ahead.

12:30 – 13:00: Lecture by !Mediengruppe Bitnik
Unreal Data – Real Effects
With the shift to a data-driven society, automated data collection has become an intrinsic component of most technological systems and devices. Our interactions with technology generate data that in turn influences our world: our devices tell us how well we have slept, predict where our favourite restaurants will be and what products we will like. But data systems also shape the news we read, the borders we are allowed to cross, the jobs we can successfully apply for. Using examples, !Mediengruppe Bitnik explore how reality is shaped by data and how producing specific data can become a means to strategically intervene into data-driven systems. What possibilities for resistance remain, when opting out of data streams is no longer an option? How can data be used not to describe the world but instead to strategically intervene in it?

14:00 – 15:30: Workshops with Dr. Kerrin Jacobs, Prof. Dr. Sven Meister and !Mediengruppe Bitnik

Session 1: re:cognition and social pathology – Dr. Kerrin Jacobs
We all exist twice, as a physical person and as a digital agent or “data-set”. For many people, their own digital presence has long since become a “project” and thus also a mirror of the conditions of social recognition. In this session, we talk about the regimes of digital self-presentation in social media, and in doing so, work out the interpersonal and transpersonal dynamics of digital struggles for recognition. Some digital reproduction dynamics of what we evaluate as false or lack of recognition against the backdrop of what we see as adequate expression of social recognition will be outlined and put up for discussion in relation to “classical” socio-pathological phenomena (e.g. exclusion, alienation, loneliness). This session is primarily intended for people who may not yet have any specific (digitalization) philosophical knowledge and simply want to engage in an open discussion with their own “digital” experiences (e.g. as a content creator, or as social media user) about self-representation regimes, strategies of (in)visibilization and the digital reproduction dynamics of power relations. In doing so, we are attempting to bridge the gap between an interpersonal modeling of (pathodynamic) social recognition relationships and the transpersonal dynamics of digital self-representation, to outline also those processes that take place “behind the backs of the agents” as (digital) scripts that (pre)determine the struggles for social recognition.

Session 2 with Prof. Dr. Sven Meister

Session 3: Unreal Data – The 1 Review Tour ⭐!Mediengruppe Bitnik
For their recent series of works «The 1 Review Tour» !Mediengruppe Bitnik with their co-⭐artists Selena Savić and Gordan Savičić look at how online rating systems shape the perception and experience of a place. One of the most widely used evaluation schemes online is the five-star system which is widely used in contemporary data-driven environments and shapes choices regarding, for example, selecting a doctor, shopping or dining out. The popularity of the five-star system stems from the ease of judgement it proposes, its implied clarity (five is better than one) and the way it transforms personal opinions into objective values by way of aggregation (individual reasoning doesn’t matter if many people come to the same conclusion). In this work group we will look at the materiality of this data, its specific textures and aesthetics. What types of views on the city can we generate from the data? How can we approach the data in interesting ways? Can we use the collected data as a form of critique and for artistic research?

16:00 – 17:30: Lecture by Prof. Dr. Audrey Samson
Intelligence? An interpretation
Audrey Samson intends to present an interpretive account of how representational abstraction materially reorganises land and the species inhabiting it, through the consideration of early photogrammetry apparatuses which served to interpret crop analysis. This media archaeology informs the legacy of early pattern recognition and interpretation in today’s geospatial intelligence systems. In addition to this critical historiography, she will examine the technological development of software such as Descartes, sketching the stakes of space as a territory of pre-emption, and its concomitant ontological implications, which marks a shift from “interpretation” to “intelligence”.

& Lecture by Dr. Simon Roloff
AI Noir: Scientific-Literary Experiments with Large Language Models
Moderation talk: Dr. Jonathan Harth
This talk explores the intersections of generative AI as a form of “artificial communication” (Elena Esposito) and contemporary literary experimentation. By analyzing Allison Parrish’s Compasses, Hannes Bajohr’s Berlin/Miami, and his own work Unsolvable Cases, he investigates how working with AI literature can highlight technical aspects, narrative structures and meaning-making of language-related AI. The presentation argues that generative AI opens a space for rethinking literature as an experimental dialogue between artificial and human communicators, advancing both critical and poetic perspectives on data-driven culture.

18:00 – 19:30: Keynote by Dr. Gemma Galdón-Clavell
AI: don’t believe the hype!
Moderation: Prof. Dr. Matthias Kettner

Registration via data@uni-wh.de.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik are contemporary artists working on, and with, the Internet. Their practice expands from the digital to physical spaces, often intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms. In the past they have been known to subvert surveillance cameras, bug an opera house to broadcast its performances outside, send a parcel containing a camera to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and physically glitch a building. In 2014, they sent a bot called «Random Darknet Shopper» on a three-month shopping spree in the Darknets where it randomly bought items like keys, cigarettes, trainers and Ecstasy and had them sent directly to the gallery space. !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s works formulate fundamental questions concerning contemporary issues.

Their works are shown internationally, most recently in exhibitions at:
CAC Shanghai, LOAF Kyoto, Annka Kultys Gallery London, House of Electronic Arts Basel, Eigen + Art Lab Berlin, Super Dakota Brussels, Centre Culturel Suisse Paris, Aksioma Ljubljana, Kunsthaus Zurich, FACT Liverpool, Onassis Cultural Center Athens, Public Access Gallery Chicago, Kunstverein Hannover, Nam June Paik Art Center South Korea, Fondazione Prada Milano, Shanghai Minsheng 21st Century Museum, The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts Moscow, Cabaret Voltaire Zurich, Beijing Contemporary Art Biennial and the Tehran Roaming Biennial. They have received awards including: Swiss Art Award, PAX Art Award, Prix de la Société des Arts Genève, Migros New Media Jubilee Award, Golden Cube Dokfest Kassel, Honorary Mention Prix Ars Electronica.
More info about !Mediengruppe Bitnik

Prof. Dr. Paul Feigelfeld is a cultural and media scholar. He is a professor of digitality and cultural mediation and part of the Institute for Open Arts at the Mozarteum University Salzburg, as well as co-director of the Data Arts Forum. Until 2025, he is also a guest professor in the Chair of Media Theories at Humboldt University of Berlin. His work explores transcultural and transmedia approaches to media and knowledge history, critical perspectives on technologies, and their intersections with art and design. He works with and advises art institutions such as HKW Berlin, Vitra Design Museum, and the MAK Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, where he was guest curator for the 2019 Vienna Viennale with the exhibition “Uncanny Values. Artificial Intelligence & You.”

Dr. Gemma Galdón-Clavell is a pioneer and global force in AI safety and auditing, ensuring that machine learning tools truly serve society. She is the founder and CEO of Eticas.ai, a venture-backed organization that identifies, measures and corrects algorithmic vulnerabilities, bias and inefficiencies in predictive and LLM tools. Eticas’ software, the ITACA platform, is the first solution to automate impact analysis and monitoring, ensuring that AI systems are high performing and safe, explainable, fair and trustworthy. Her impactful work earned her recognition as a Mozilla Rise25 honoree in 2024, Hispanic Star Awardee at the United Nations in 2023, an Ashoka Fellow in 2020 and a finalist at the EU Prize for Women Innovators awarded by the European Commission in 2017. In 2023 the BBC acknowledged her as one of the “people changing the world” and in 2024 she was honored by Forbes Women as one of the “35 Leading Spanish Women in Technology”, praised as “a pioneer in algorithmic auditing software”. Dr. Galdón-Clavell is an active advisor to international and regional institutions such as the United Nations (UN), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), European Institue of Innovation and Technology (EIT) and the European Commission, among others.
More about eticas

Dr. Simon Roloff studied Cultural Studies, Philosophy, German Studies and Literary Writing at the HU Berlin and the German Literature Institute Leipzig. Doctorate (Dr phil.) at the Bauhaus University Weimar. Then junior professor at the Hildesheim Literature Institute, currently research assistant at ICAM at Leuphana University Lüneburg. In summer 2024, substitute for the professorship for media aesthetics at Leuphana University. Out in December 2024: »Digitale Literatur. Zur Einführung«.
More info about Simon Roloff

Audrey Samson is an artist-researcher, currently a Stanley Picker Fellow and a member of the duo FRAUD. She is a Professor in More-Than-Computational Arts at l’École de Recherche Graphique. She explores the intersection of technology and critical ecologies. Current investigations: https://frauds.site/.
More info about Audrey Samson

Dr. Jonathan Harth has been researching and working for several years on questions concerning the use of extended reality technologies and sociality under the conditions of artificial intelligence. He studied sociology, philosophy and psychology at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Vienna and works as a research assistant at the Chair of Sociology at Witten/Herdecke University. He is also a scientific advisor for digital projects at the Theater an der Ruhr and regularly gives workshops on art and AI – including at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality Dortmund and the Department of Media / Mixed Reality and Visualization (MIREVI) at the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences.
More Info about Jonathan Harth

Dr. Kerrin Jacobs is a practical philosopher specialized in philosophy of psychiatry. Currently associated researcher at the Institute for First Person Research at the Department of Psychology, Witten/Herdecke University and at the Medical University of Graz for the Department of Medical Psychology, Psychosomatics, and Psychotherapy, as well as EMMAUS research fellow of the CJ Munich with a project on the role of intuition in spiritual life practice. Until February 2024 she was an Associate Professor of Practical Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Hokkaido (Japan). There she was a core member of CHAIN (Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience). Previously, she worked at the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück and at the Philosophical Seminar at the University of Göttingen. She was a Fellow-in residence at the Nietzsche Kolleg of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.
More Informationen about Dr. Kerrin Jacobs

Prof. Dr. Sven Meister holds the Chair of Health Informatics at the University of Witten/Herdecke and is a Senior Scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering in Dortmund. He has been working on digitalization in the healthcare sector since 2006 and explores questions such as how digitalization is changing the way healthcare works. He heads the project DIM.RUHR: Data Competence Center for Interprofessional Health Data Use (www.dim.ruhr). His research is supported by a large number of doctoral students from the fields of medicine, computer science, psychology and economics.
More information about Prof. Dr. Sven Meister

Prof. Dr. Matthias Kettner is professor of philosophy at the Department for Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Witten/Herdecke University. He studied psychology and philosophy at Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-University, Frankfurt, where he collaborated with Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas and later on also completed his postdoctoral lecture qualification (Habilitation). After eight years at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KWI) at Essen in research-groups on issues related to media and democracy, he accepted in 2002 a position as full professor at Germany’s first and pioneering private University. He has published on a wide range of issues in discourse ethics, medical ethics and ethics committees, human dignity, philosophy of culture, and theory of psychoanalytic interpretation. His current research focuses on intercultural ethics in economic and other domains, and on philosophical approaches to the current transformative cultural process of digitalization.
He is co-editor of the volume “Philosophische Digitalisierungsforschung” (transcript, 2024), which brings together the results of a series of conferences of the same name at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum.

Aude Florence Bertrand-Höttcke is a research associate at the WittenLab at Witten/Herdecke University. She is an affiliated researcher at the cultural sociology observatory L’Observatoire at the MESHOPOLIS research institute in Aix/Marseille. In the academic year 2024/25, she will be a visiting researcher at the Institut ACTE Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, examining the archive of theRencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. Before and in addition to her dissertation on the philosophy of contemporary art with Prof. Matthias Kettner, she was involved in a large number of art projects between the Rhine and Ruhr. Before that, after studying international economics at ESCP, she worked as a consultant for business and non-profit organizations.

Photo Header: FAM_EVENTS, as part of “Blue Skies. Bodies in Trouble”, 10.-14.07.2019, PACT Zollverein, Essen, © Killa Schuetze;
Photo: !Mediengruppe Bitnik, © Iris Janke, Berlin; Photo: Audrey Samson, @Toscane Thieffry; Photo: Gemma Galdon-Clavell, © Dani Blanco, ARGIA; Photo Prof. Kerrin Jacobs © I.Klujce; Photo: Prof. Dr. Matthias Kettner © Kunstpatenaktion

VIDEOS & MAGAZINE: PEER TO PEER – A Month of Media Art in NRW

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VIDEOS & MAGAZINE: PEER TO PEER – A Month of Media Art in NRW

Venues: FFT Düsseldorf | Academy of Media Arts Cologne | Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne | Burg Hülshoff – Center for Literature (CfL), Havixbeck near Münster | PACT Zollverein, Essen.

Office medienwerk.nrwFestival

Opening of the festival at FFT: Friday, 1 September 2023
Duration of the festival: 1– 30 September 2023

With the Peer to Peer – A Month of Media Art in NRW event series in September 2023, the Office medienwerk.nrw and cooperation partners invite to a journey through the diverse and charismatic media art landscape of North Rhine-Westphalia. In workshops, performances, presentations, talks and urban walks, we look at current debates in the field of tension between art and technology on five consecutive weekends in Düsseldorf, Cologne, Havixbeck (near Münster) and Essen and position these jointly in a broader socio-political context. The starting point is provided by the sponsored projects from the programmes Medienkunstfonds and Medienkunstfellows of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Magazine

Program

Nature #Infrastructure #Ecology #Anthroposcene

01. – 02.09.23 | FFT Düsseldorf
More info about the program

#Archive #Agency #Memory #Blank Spaces

07. – 09.09.23 | Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM)
More info about the program

#Interfaces #Interaktionen #Überschreibungen

15. – 16.09.23 | Burg Hülshoff – Center for Literature (CfL), Havixbeck
More info about the program

#Body #Politics #Artificial Intelligence #Bias #Body #Politics #Bias

22. – 23.09.23 & 29. – 30.09.23 | PACT Zollverein, Essen
More info about the program

Peer to Peer – A Month of Media Art in NRW was organised by medienwerk.nrw in cooperation with Burg Hülshoff – Center for Literature, Havixbeck | FFT Düsseldorf | Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln | PACT Zollverein, Essen | Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne.

The Büro medienwerk.nrw and the event series were sponsored by: the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Team Büro medienwerk.nrw:
Fabian Saavedra Lara (Director)
Klaas Werner (Deputy Director)
Riccarda Hessling (Head of Communication)
Mareen Biermann (Project Management)
Alina Homann (Project Assistance)

The Büro medienwerk.nrw is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, on whose behalf it organises coordination, professionalisation and consulting in the field of media art. The Office medienwerk.nrw is located at HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.

Credits: Photos FFT Düsseldorf: © Plzzo | Photos Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum + Kunsthoschule für Medien Köln: © Dörthe Boxberg | Photos Burg Hülshoff – Center for Literature (CfL), Havixbeck und PACT Zollverein, Essen: © Dirk Rose

VIDEO DOCU: TOWARDS PERMACULTURAL INSTITUTIONS – CURATING TRANSFORMATION

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VIDEO DOCU: TOWARDS PERMACULTURAL INSTITUTIONS – CURATING TRANSFORMATION

Location: Temporary Gallery – Centre for contemporary art, Cologne

Office medienwerk.nrwWorkshop

Workshop series on the role of art institutions in socio-ecological transformation processes.

Against the backdrop of multiple social and ecological crises, the workshop series TOWARDS PERMACULTURAL INSTITUTIONS: CURATING TRANSFORMATION took reflections on the application of permacultural principles in the cultural sector as the starting point for a three-part workshop series. The focus was on the question of what role art institutions can play in urgent transformation processes towards an ecologically just and decolonial society and what options they have for action.

As a reaction to the precarious effects of hyper-capitalist modes of production and relationships, permaculture as a practice and philosophy is arousing increasing interest in the cultural sector when it comes to thinking about new approaches to institutional processes, program work and spatial practice.
What potential do principles and ethical concepts offer for cultural institutions? Which aspects can be transferred to the cultural sector and translated into context-specific actions?

The term permaculture is made up of the words “permanent” and “(agri-)culture” and brings different types of knowledge and practices together. Permaculture combines methods from organic cultivation as well as principles for designing social processes that aim for holism, regeneration, horizontality and reciprocity. The design of permaculture processes and systems is based on a cycle of observation, experimentation and adaptation. It is built on three ethical principles: 1) Earth Care: Care for the planet and all more-than-humans. 2) People Care: Care for people and equitable access to all the basics of life. 3) Fair Share: Fair distribution of limited resources.

The workshops aimed to transfer the content into your own institutional practice and offered the opportunity to analyze the institutional/individual status quo, outline visions and strategies and identify first steps for action.

Following the summer seminar Towards Permacultural Institutions: Exercises in Collective Thinking, organised by the Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen in cooperation with CCA Temporary Gallery, the Curating Transformation series creates space to critically question permaculture and think about a translation of its ethics, principles and methods into the art field. What could a permacultural (= socially and ecologically just) art institution look like?

Curated by Aneta Rostkowska and Nada Rosa Schroer

Based on the ethical principles of permaculture, TOWARDS PERMACULTURAL INSTITUTIONS – CURATING TRANSFORMATION covered three specific topics:

Block 1 – People Care: Allyship and Climate Justice

Friday, 20th Oct 2023, 2 – 8:30 p.m.
Saturday, 21h Oct 2023, 10:30 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Lecture: Friday, October 20th, 7:30 p.m., Antonia Alampi

In the spirit of People Care, the workshop on the topic of “Allyship” deepens the question of ways to support local environmental groups and climate justice activists and asks about ways to build solidarity and reciprocal relationships between actors and communities in the so-called Global South and North.

Program

Critical friend report of Angela Serino

More about Block 1

Video: © Claudia List

Block 2 – Fair Share: Degrowth

Friday, Nov 3, 2023, 2 p.m. – 8:30 p.m
Saturday, Nov 4, 2023, 10:30 a.m. – 8:30 p.m
Lecture: Friday, Nov 3, 2023, 7:30 p.m.

In the spirit of Fair Share, the “Degrowth” workshop looks critically and constructively at the approaches of the post-growth movement, especially education for sustainable development, and questions central strategies regarding their transferability to the cultural sector.

Program

More about Block 2

Critical friend report: © CentrumCentrum

Video: © Lucas Dülligen

Block 3 – Earth Care: Grounding

Friday, Dec 1, 2023, 2 p.m. – 8:30 p.m
Saturday, Dec 2, 10:30 a.m. – 8:30 p.m
Lecture: Friday, Dec 2, 2023, 7:30 p.m., Lucia Pietroiuisti

In the spirit of Earth Care, the “Grounding” workshop is dedicated to curatorial and institutional practices that aim at ecological regeneration and asks about the interaction between ecology, pedagogy and physical-mental care.

Program

Critical friend report of Guila Bellinetti

More about Block 3

Video: © Lucas Dülligen

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 the Temporary Gallery – centre for contemporary art

The workshop series is a cooperation between Büro medienwerk.nrw and the Temporary Gallery – centre for contemporary art, Cologne.

Credits:
Photos of the weekends of 20 + 21 November 2023 + 1 + 2 December 2023: © Luise Flügge
Photos on the weekend of 3 + 4 November 2023: © Lucas Dülligen

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

Ben J Riepe 1

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.
More info about Video Digest

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, punk as well as new wave aesthetics and the contributions of the various collectives were at times intertwined, Infermental strengthened the idea of an encyclopedia 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.

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.

BOOKLET

VIDEOMAGAZINE

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

EVENTS FOR THE PROJECT VIDEO DIGEST

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.
More info about the IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute

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 300 entries.
More info about the Videonale e. V.
More info about the online video archive
More info about VIDEONALE.scope

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 Peter Ritter

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 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.

EVENTS FOR FULLDEMO.cracy

Premiere: December 6, 2023
More performances: 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.
More info about Studio Trafique

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.
More info about WEHR51

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

Image: ©Tobias Weikamp

FFT DÜSSELDORF | Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences: „RE-IMAGINING PUBLIC LIFE“

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FFT DÜSSELDORF | Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences: „RE-IMAGINING PUBLIC LIFE“

FFT DÜSSELDORF | Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences

Media Art FundResearch

Duration Juni 2022 until Juni 2023

Interventions at the interfaces of urban and digital public spheres, explorations in Düsseldorf’s urban space.

The philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre called for the “Right to the city” in 1968. The Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences and the FFT Düsseldorf (Forum Freies Theater) conducted field research along these lines. In the Re-Imagining Public Life project, they explored the urban environment through research and art.

Cities are changing and with them the public. Construction projects such as the Kö-Bogen II area in Düsseldorf’s city center with the so-called Ingenhove-Tal and the redesign of Gustaf-Gründgens-Platz promise a sustainable “repair” of the urban landscape and urban life. But what forms of the public sphere are taking place here? What role do privatisations, investment, city marketing and design play? What happens to traffic and what is ‘green architecture’? For the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences and the FFT Düsseldorf, the Ingenhoven-Tal became a field of experimentation for playful formats. In workshops, an exhibition in the foyer of the FFT, a performative city walk and a table discussion, they explored current trends in urban development and questioned the narratives that accompany urban development interventions and planning. In doing so, they did not follow the (unconscious) logic of optimisation, but re-imagined forms of a different way of living together.
With the opening of an Unbedingten Universität (Unconditional University) in the open air or the city walk Sichtgrün – Die steinernen Täler und grünen Hügel der Stadt with the performer Hauke Heumann, the photographer Jan Lemitz and the dramaturge Moritz Hannemann, they intervened in the everyday structures of the living and working world – playfully, speculatively, exploratively, performatively, also in the sense of cultural hacking, i.e. affirmatively-critically, intervening and changing at the same time.

PROJECT PARTICIPANTS:
Moritz Hannemann, Hauke Heumann, Jan Lemitz, Janna Lichter, Marcel Mücke, Laura Oldörp, Lukas Röber, Anja Vormann und Studierende der HSD Düsseldorf; sowie Kai van Eikels, Alexander Konrad und Wen Wu im Rahmen von Workshops und Klaus Englert, Sebastian Kirsch, Dagmar Pelger, Christoph Schäfer und Laura Strack iin the context of the table talk.

EVENTS FOR THE PROJECT RE-IMAGINING PUBLIC LIFE

RE-IMAGINING PUBLIC LIFE Talks & Workshops, Social/Urban Movements

The table talk gathers artists, scientists, and protagonists from architecture and urban development to discuss current transformations in the relation between cities and the public sphere.

THE UNCONDITIONAL UNIVERSITY – TRYOUTS

The unconditional university is not necessarily nor exclusively situated within the walls of what we nowadays call a university. It is not necessarily, not exclusively, not exemplarily represented by the figure of the professor. It occurs, it seeks its site, wherever this unconditionality announces itself.” – Jacques Derrida, The Unconditional University

Anja Vormann and students of the design faculty at the Hochschule Düsseldorf experiment with the foundations of their own discipline, between the FFT and urban space. In the context of the demand for a “right to the city” (Henri Lefebvre,) in which the urban society should act as the motor for transformation within urban life, the role of design will be scrutinised and examined. How can designers, employing the artistic means at their disposal, their knowledge and their experience, do things that eschew following the (subconscious) logic of optimisation and consumerism?
It is with this question in mind that we head out: We conduct field research under the open sky, analysing the urban environment we come upon, in the production of which we are involved. The so-called Ingenhoven-Tal valley and the redesigned Gustaf-Gründgens-Platz square will become fields of experimentation for playful formats that are both work as well as teachings. Visitors are encouraged to participate in our courses and to experience the rhetoric power of design in text, imagery, and space in relation to the urbanscapes.

EXPOSED GREEN – THE CITY’S STONY VALLEYS AND GREEN HILLS
URBAN WALK

The 20th century built using exposed concrete, the 21st century builds exposed greens. The Düsseldorf city centre houses Europe’s largest green façade: On the Kö-Bogen II areal, between Schadowstraße, Hofgarten, and Schauspielhaus, a business and office building is situated, and its sides and roof have been planted with roughly 30,000 hornbeams. Trimmed to a uniform height of 1,35 metres, they form a hedge of roughly 8 kilometres in length. This architecture has been hailed as the harbinger of a tendency in urban redevelopment that has been summed up as “from baroque city to Green City” by Klaus Englert, in his recently published “Architekturführer Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Architectural Guide)”.

The Green City of the future is anything but devoid of automobiles – the traffic has been newly regulated, led through tunnels, and it has become invisible now. Instead, the mostly tubed and overbuild Düssel shall be exposed again at many sites, producing a blue-green ring of watercourses and park spaces that connect the city’s cultural hotspots in passing. In a recourse on the historic cityscape, the post-war building “eyesores”, occasionally framed as “Düsseldorf’s second destruction”, will be ironed out. And the Gustaf-Gründgens-Platz redesign transformed an inhospitable transit space into an attractive public square. The city, according to the promise, will be repaired and returned to its citizens – as a habitat that sustainably integrates and connects the needs of humans and nature, of culture and shopping, of climate and urbanism. How coherent are those narratives that complement urban development intervention and planning? While exposed concrete relinquishes the cover-up of the supporting construction, the exposed green does not only engulf the concrete masses used in building, but also the states of ownership and work that mark the emerging cityscape.

Actor and performer Hauke Heumann and photographer and artist Jan Lemitz developed an urban walk that confronts text and imagery with specific locales in urban space. The path to the city’s stony valleys and green hills makes the experience of historic projections perceptible and questions toward current urban development loud. What space is there for urban population in the face of construction processes oscillating between the imitation of nature and investment? And which forms of public life could unfold in this urbanscape?
By and with: Moritz Hannemann, Hauke Heumann, Jan Lemitz. Audioaufnahmen: Simon Nieder. Flyer design: Marian Fitz. Thanks to: Theatermuseum Düsseldorf / Dumont-Lindemann-Archiv, Katrin von Chamier / human voice studio.

The walks took place in July and September 2023.

In the podcast episode, Sophie Emilie Beha talks to project participants Anja and Moritz as well as design students from Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences about how they approached this form of urban design critically, playfully and experimentally in urban walks and workshops.

The FFT Düsseldorf (Forum Freies Theater) is an international production venue for independent performing arts and acts in a network of production venues, theatres and further partners, regionally as well as internationally. As such, it is a part of the Alliance of International Production Houses, supported by the Federal Commissioner for Culture and Media. In addition to theatre, performance, dance and music, it also presents formats at the transitions between different artistic disciplines and media. In doing so, it not only offers artists production opportunities and a stage, but also explores new ideas and spaces for public exchange and collaboration. The focus is on democratisation, urban life and activity, post-colonialism and a transcultural approach, as well as networking and digitality.

Paradise– Park–, the Hochschule Düsseldorf (HSD) broadcast van explores the question of how we want to live together in cities in the future. Designers are producers of atmospheres, living spaces and desires, often under the direction of market-shaped strategies. Paradise– Park– works in the opposite direction: designs and spaces are deconstructed by means of artistic interventions in order to reveal their intentions and functions. As a mobile urban laboratory, Paradise- Park- understands itself as an instrument of participation that allows citizens to understand design media and become actively involved in shaping the city. Design expands into the fields of criticism, mediation and the production of alternative urban concepts. Paradise-Park- is run by Anja Vormann, professor of audiovisual media, and the team members Janna Lichter, Laura Oldörp and Patrick Kruse.

The publication DOCUMENTATION OF THE FUNDED PROJECTS 2021-2023 on the Media Art Fund & Media Art Fellows can be downloaded here. (only available in German)

Credits: Photos Urban Walk @ Jan Lemitz & @ PLZZO

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

STERNA | PAU & Lisa Passing: “AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION LAB”

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STERNA | PAU & Lisa Passing: “AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION LAB”

FELLOW: lisa passing

Media Art FellowsResearch

Duration: June 2022 to the end of 2023

Theatre performance with audience participation, interaction, sensors, data and IoT.

A show that can only come about through the active participation of the audience: The performance group STERNA | PAU and web designer Lisa Passing created digital tools for a show that playfully combines theatre and computer games.

The pandemic was a time in which new digital practices were developed. Interactivity and the active influence of the audience took on a whole new meaning in performances that suddenly no longer took place in the theater space, but in front of the screen. The performance group STERNA | PAU wanted to bring these same techniques and modes of action, which we are primarily familiar with from computer games, back into presence theater. Tools from computer games such as input and feedback or input and output were tested for their suitability for the theater space. The participation concept for the ghostlike production was developed on the basis of questions: Should data be constantly collected from the audience without them having to become active – for example, by recording sounds with microphones and using them to influence projections? Or are controllers used that are only available to individual people in the audience and that, for example, activate motors in the performers’ clothing and thus let them know how they should behave or move? ghostlike is influenced by the genre of so-called rogue-like games, a subgroup of computer role-playing games. The name is based on the 1980 role-playing game Rogue, in which an amulet consisting of various levels must be found in a dungeon populated by monsters. For the production, flashlights were distributed in the audience and color-coded light sensors were attached to the stage – the audience, who were always also participants here, were thus able to actively influence the course of the performance using light feedback.

WHERE: Essen (Residenz im Maschinenhaus Essen), Berlin (Haus Kunst Mitte), Bochum (BlueSquare, Ruhr University), Düsseldorf (FFT Forum Freies Theater Düsseldorf)

The premiere of ghostlike took place on 25 February 2023 in Düsseldorf. Further development and evaluation of the tools by the end of 2023.

TEAM ghostlike: Concept and play development: Maren Becker, Yasmin Fahbod, Lisa Passing, Laura Pföhler, Hannes Siebert, Jolanda Uhlig. Directed by: Laura Pföhler. Performance: Maren Becker, Yasmin Fahbod, Hannes Siebert. Creative technology: Lisa Passing. Gamedesign: Hannes Siebert. Bühne & Video: Christopher Dippert. Stage design assistance: Lea Deckers. Costume: Jolanda Uhlig.
Music: Maren Becker, Laura Pföhler. Production management: Laura Zielinski. Veranstaltungstechnik und Lichtdesign: Julius Kindermann. Sounddesign: Simon Nieder. Dramaturgie: Aidan Riebensahm, Laura Zielinski.

Lisa Passing works as creative technologist and artist with a focus on interaction with technology on an individual and societal level. They combine experience in software and video game development with activism as well as policy work around open source and open data. They is a member of the feminist hacker collective Heart of Code.
Find out more about Lisa Passing

STERNA | PAU is a theatre and performance network from Bochum, Dortmund and Berlin. The artists create theatre for young people and adults and are constantly trying out new forms of participation. They enjoy working with non-human actors and transferring theatre into digital spaces. The focus is primarily on living together and relationships in all forms, as well as the question of how these are shaped by technology, digitality and pop culture. STERNA | PAU is a theatre collective that produces queer-feminist performances for young audiences that deal with topics such as mythology, punk, digitalisation and music. They are searching for ways to develop feminist storytelling and feminist dramaturgy. STERNA | PAU’s works have been invited to the WESTWIND Festival, FAVORITEN Festival and HAU4 Artist Lab, among others. The collective is part of the Freischwimmen network and is working together with FFT Düsseldorf on the current productions ghostlike and trolllike.
Find out more about STERNA | PAU

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

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

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

MIREVI (Hochschule Düsseldorf) | 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.

In the podcast, Sophie Emilia Beha talks to Vesela Stanoeva and Elisabeth Drache about You better don’t know

Ruhrgebieterinnen is a collective of female artists founded in 2021 by Vesela Stanoeva and Elisabeth Drache and specialises in digital performance. In various performative and installation projects, they explore new forms of encounters and differences as well as the potential of diversity.
More info about Ruhrgebieterinnen

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.
More info about MIREVI

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

Credits: @ Ruhrgebieterinnen

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

Echo, Damian, Scheinleistung

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

To the recording

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 presented the German translation of the book for the first time.

After the talk at the FFT Düsseldorf, all interested parties were invited to join a public viewing session: Together we watched the livestream of internil’s performance Blackout in the foyer and interacted via chat bot with the stage of Theaterdiscounter Berlin.
More info about Blackout

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.
Geert Lovink in the Collective Chronicle of Thoughts and Observations, 2017
More info about the Institute of Network Cultures (INC)

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.
More info about POP. Kultur und Kritik
More info about Journal of Global Pop Cultures

KASSIA & the Convent(ion) A Performative Archive

KASSIA_landscape_visual

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 aims to 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.
More info about the KASSIA-Archiv

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.
More info about the cooperation

In our podcast Olga Felker talks to Mirjam Schmuck about the Kassia project

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.
More info about kainkollektiv

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.
More info about sputnic

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.
More info about MIREVI

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

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

Watch the video recording

With Dr. Inke Arns, Prof. Dr. Adrian Daub and Jonas Lüscher
Moderated by: Dr. Iuditha Balint and 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 invited 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 was 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 brought 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, were named and deconstructed.

The event was 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.

A cooperation between the Fritz-Hüser-Institut für Literatur und Kultur der Arbeitswelt, the HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein and the medienwerk.nrw office.

The programme was funded by NEUSTART KULTUR and Stiftung Kunstfonds.

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

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

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

11:00	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	Intervention I Diana McCarty: Be(coming) media – Techno feminist Pasts, Presents & Potentials, (ENG)
12:30	Intervention II Anja Breljak: Staging Affect? Digitization as a socio-affective process (DE)
13:30	Break
14:30	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)
16:00	Break
16:15	Discussion about the Tele-Panel
17:00	End

Reading Artists’ Books: Problems for Computer

Film program MedienKunstTage NRW 2025

Fake Futures! A minifesto making exercise

More Future! Media Art Days NRW 2025

Program of MedienKunstTage 2025

MELT presents: A Data Set of Screams

Science meets art | DATA POETICS / DATA POLITICS

VIDEOS & MAGAZINE: PEER TO PEER – A Month of Media Art in NRW

Nature #Infrastructure #Ecology #Anthroposcene

#Archive #Agency #Memory #Blank Spaces

#Interfaces #Interaktionen #Überschreibungen

#Body #Politics #Artificial Intelligence #Bias #Body #Politics #Bias

VIDEO DOCU: TOWARDS PERMACULTURAL INSTITUTIONS – CURATING TRANSFORMATION

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

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

Studio Trafique | WEHR51: “FULLDEMO.CRACY”

FFT DÜSSELDORF | Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences: „RE-IMAGINING PUBLIC LIFE“

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

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

STERNA | PAU & Lisa Passing: “AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION LAB”

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

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

KASSIA & the Convent(ion) A Performative Archive

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

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

Fringe ensemble | Fehime Seven: “SHARING SPACE”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Symposium „Digital Culture“ | NEXT LEVEL 2021

WORKSHOP | Copyright in digital event formats

WORKSHOP | Technical realisation of digital event-formats

Artist Talk with Holly Herndon | #TdM2020

LOUIS BETONG & BALZ ISLER: COVIDITY INTERVENTIONS

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

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

Programme on Thursday, March 19, 2020

KULTURKONFERENZ RUHR 2019 – Cultural potentials of technology

BLUE SKIES #1 – BODIES IN TROUBLE

ON/LIVE – The theatre of the digital natives

META MARATHON 2019 – ROBOTICS

Screening and talk: BALLADE – Céline Berger

Short film programme “Working Life”

ENJOY COMPLEXITY – Conference on digitality and theatre

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

Workshop: Contemporary tactics for net-activism

Virtual Art – Forum Europe Ruhr

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

Afro-Tech – movies about technology and science-fiction

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

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

Virtual Desires

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

KEYNOTES

PERFORMANCE

FILM PROGRAM

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

Sailing under false colours? Transdisciplinary and transgressive Practices in Contemporary Art

DIGITAL FOLKLORE