Connecting Cities @ transmediale - festival for art and digital culture berlin
Public Art Lab as a platform for Urban Media Art Projects invites local and international actors to come together during transmediale Vorspiel and transmediale from 23.1 until 1.2.
VORSPIEL: CONNECTING CITIES @ TRANSMEDIALE
22. – 28. January 2014
Venue: Public Art Lab, Brunnenstr. 72, 133555 Berlin - Wedding
23. January
Connecting Cities – Urban Media Kitchen
7pm – 00am
As a start to a series of events, on this evening Public Art Lab will open its doors in a kitchen-like atmosphere to bring together Berlin based and international urban media initiatives. Our guests are amongst others: Momentum (Skyscreen), Screencity (Daniela Arriado), DAM Galerie (Wolf Lieser), Genius Loci Weimar (Anke von der Heide), MediaCity (Bauhaus-University Weimar), trampoline (Anette Schäfer und Miles Chalcraft), W33 (Martin Stebbing), LEAP (Sandra Moskova), Collegium Hungaricum Berlin (Jan-Gunnar Franke), University Leuphana (city planning Prof. Ursula Kirschner), Urban Aestetics (Tanya Toft, NY), Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss (Associated artists ZKM, Fraunhofer Society), Soenke Zehle & Henrik Elburn (xm:lab), Supermarkt (Ela Kagel), The Constitute (Christian Zöllner), Pfadfinderei (Toby & Codec).
The Urban Media Kitchen also opens the Telepresent Gallery.
23.-28. January
Connecting Cities – Telepresent Gallery
7pm – 00am
The show room windows of Public Art Lab will become a Telepresent Gallery to show surveillance cameras from the cities of the Connecting Cities Network, which focuses on the worldwide presence of urban screens and media facades. The Telepresent Gallery is a depiction of an expanded perception of video control, of how we observe the world from its spy cam point of view. It focuses on questions, such as: How does the world look like from a spy-cam-perspective as video surveillance has become omnipresent? How do we think surveilance/sousveillance and video sniffing as observation becomes visible again, only as soon as something spectacular happens? What has become of the state of panic about loss of control and privacy and what do surveillance cams tell us about this? Away from performativity as a side effect when in presence of a visual recording device, Telepresent Gallery explores CCTV between invisibility and a certain surveillance-resistance.
28.-29. January
Connecting Cities Lab – Artists’ Camp
10am – 6pm
Together with the Connecting Cities curators, the internationally selected artists of the open call 2014 will meet and discuss their projects, strategies and practices, which will provide basic material for the Connecting Cities Workshop. The Artists’ Camp as an open forum is an attempt to identify, re-read and question media façades in a post-digital discourse.
28. January
Telepresent Gallery – Lecture / Artist Talk
7pm – 00am
Vilém Flusser has shaped the term telepresence. Daniel Irrgang, scientific assistant of Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski, scientific supervisor of the Vilém Flusser Archive at the University of the Arts Berlin and researcher in the project Archaeology/Variantology of the Media, will introduce this theoretical concept in a short lecture. Also, the artists Paul Sermon and Charlotte Gould will show the project “Picnic on the Screen“ as well as the selected project for Connecting Cities.
TRANSMEDIALE: CONNECTING CITIES @TRANSMEDIALE
29. January – 2 February 2014
Venue: Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)
31. JANUARY
CONNECTING CITIES PANEL: BLACKOUT
11.30am – 01.30pm
Room: K1
By the Fukushima nuclear disaster setsuden, saving elec-tricity, had long gained a citizens’ initiative nature. The first thing the Tokyo Electric Company (TEPCO) blacked out on 11.3.2011 in reaction to the Tōhoku-Earthquake and the nuclear meltdown in reactors 1 to 3 of the Japa-nese atomic power plant Fukushima Daiichi, was the central light supply in major cities, causing streetlights and LED-screens to go still. After a massive power out-rage, they return from their long blackout, but are screens still the same? As they have deliberately been blackened and their “memory” erased, the role urban screens play after the city “wakes them up” again, has to have drastically changed and their notion is to be rede-fined. Although still overtaken by the same commercial content, media façades carry traces of their own ab-sence in the memory of citizens.
What does blackening out then mean in the context of urban screens and what goes lost after the sudden shut-down and restart? How to find ways to restore or re-think information after this severe blackout? – a panel discussion with the Connecting Cities artists, curators and the transmediale visitors.
Panel Speakers: Susa Pop (Public Art Lab, Berlin), Alain Mongeau (MUTEK, Montreal), Mike Stubbs (FACT Liver-pool), Yves Bernard (iMAL, Brussels), Paul Sermon (Uni-versity of Brighton), Martin Brynskov (Aarhus University)
01. FEBRUARY
CONNECTING CITIES WORKSHOP: MEDIA FACADES AS PUBLIC PLATFORMS
11am – 3pm
Room: K2
When billboards and advertising screens are the first to be unplugged after earthquakes, it again becomes evi-dent, how those are only being used for commercial content. How can screens and media façades then be-come platforms for artistic and cultural interventions in urban space? And how can they generate relevant con-tent instead of being reduced to oversized transit-surfaces?
The workshop offers artists from the open call 2014 the context “participatory city” as a discussion forum. There, the results from the Artists’ Camp (Vorspiel) will be dis-cussed, again with focus on strategies and DIY-practices in the context of participation through mobile units and media façades after the “total breakdown”.
As the workshop is about working with categories and evaluating them, the artists also become scientists. The ambition is to carve out types of urban interventions in order to critically reflect the thinking of media façades in a suggested discourse of the post-digital.
Workshop Moderator: Susa Pop (Public Art Lab, Berlin), Minna Tarkka (m-cult, Helsinki), Yves Bernard (iMAL, Brussels), Nerea Calvillo (Medialab-Prado, Madrid)
Connecting Cities Artists: Christian Zöllner (The Constitute), Paul Sermon, Charlotte Gould, Moritz Behrens, Nina Valkanova
The Workshop is open for 11 participants, please register until 30. January under transmediale@connectingcities.net
