History Will Repeat Itself
Trimester 3, April-July 2011
Thematic Project Tutor: Inke Arns
Cornelia Solfrank, Le Chien Ne Vas Plus, © Tranquillium Photography, 2006
In contemporary (media) art there has been an almost ‘uncanny’ longing for the performative repetition or re-creation of historical situations and events. The seminar History Will Repeat Itselffocuses on current strategies of re-enactment in contemporary (media) art and performance, and discusses various artistic positions and strategies.
In general, a so-called re-enactment is a historically correct recreation of socially relevant events, such as important battles or other historical events. In a re-enactment, the audience that normally remain passive or at a certain distance of the documented event become immediate witnesses of a (repeated historical) event, which unfolds in front of their eyes, or they become participants in an action, in which they actively participate.In contemporary art there has been an increasing number of artistic re-enactments – the performative repetition or re-creation of historical situations and events. For example, in his work “The Battle of Orgreave” (2001) the British artist Jeremy Deller had a violent clash between miners and police from the year 1984 re-enacted by ex-miners, ex-police and other re-enactors.
Unlike popular historical re-enactments, like e.g. the re-enactment of historical battles, artistic re-enactments are not performative re-stagings of historic situations and events that occurred a long time ago; rather, events (often traumatic ones) are re-enacted that are viewed as very important for the present. Artistic re-enactments are not simply affirming what has happened in the past, but rather they are questioning the present via repeating or re-enacting historical events that have left their traces in the collective memory. Re-enactments are artistic interrogations of media images that try to scrutinise the reality of the images, while at the same time pointing towards the fact that collective memory is essentially mediated memory.
Works by the following artists will be discussed:
Guy Ben-Ner (IL/DE), Walter Benjamin (US), Irina Botea (RO), C-Level (US), Jeremy Deller (UK), Rod Dickinson & Tom McCarthy (UK), Rod Dickinson (GB), Nikolai Evreinov (RU), Omer Fast (IL/DE), Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard (GB), Heike Gallmeier (D), Felix Gmelin (SE), Pierre Huyghe (F), Evil Knievel (US), Frédéric Moser / Philippe Schwinger (CH), Cornelia Sollfrank (DE), Kerry Tribe (US), T.R. Uthco & Ant Farm (US), and Artur Zmijewski (PL), a.o.
References:
History will repeat itself. Strategies of re-enactment in contemporary (media) art and performance, ed. by Inke Arns and Gaby Horn for Hartware MedienKunstVerein and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Revolver – Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, Frankfurt am Main 2007
Inke Arns (DE),Dr. phil., is the artistic director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein (www.hmkv.de) in Dortmund, Germany, since 2005. She has worked as an independent curator and writer specializing in media art, net cultures, and Eastern Europe. Since 1993 she has curated exhibitions in Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Kosovo, Poland, Serbia, Slovenia, and Switzerland. Recent exhibitions include: Irwin: Retroprincip 1983-2003, 2003; History Will Repeat Itself, 2007–08; Awake Are Only The Spirits, 2009–10; Building MemoryArctic Perspective, 2010; Inter-cool 3.0: Youth Image Media, 2010. She lived in Paris (1982–86), studied Slavic Studies, Eastern European studies, political science, and art history in Berlin and Amsterdam (1988–96) and has held teaching positions at universities and art academies in Berlin, Leipzig, Rotterdam, Zurich, and Dortmund. She has lectured and published internationally. www.inkearns.de
Sniff, Scrape, Crawl…
Trimester 2, Jan.-March 2011
Thematic Project planned by: Aymeric Mansoux, Michael Murtaugh, Renee Turner
The Results of this Thematic Project will be presented at ISEA Istanbul 2011. For more information see: Sniff, Scrape, Crawl (Part 1) and (Part 2)
Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance…
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979), p. 217
We are living in an age of unprecedented surveillance. But unlike the ominous specter of Orwell’s Big Brother, where power is clearly defined and always palpable, today’s methods of information gathering are much more subtle and woven into the fabric of our everyday life. Through the use of seemingly innocuous algorithms Amazon tells us which books we might like, our trusted browser tracks our searches and Last.fm connects us with people who have similar tastes in music. Immersed in social media, we commit to legally binding contracts by agreeing to ‘terms of use’. Having made the pact, we Twitter our subjective realities in less than 140 characters, wish dear friends happy birthday on facebook and mobile-upload our geotagged videos on youtube.
Where once surveillance technologies belonged to governmental agencies, the web has added another less optically-driven means of both monitoring and monetizing our lived experiences. As the line between public and private has become more blurred and the desire for convenience ever greater, our personal data has become a prized commodity upon which industries thrive. Perversely, we have become consumers who simultaneously produce the product through our own consumption.
Sniff, Scrape, Crawl… is a thematic project examining how surveillance and data-mining technologies shape and influence our lives, and what consequences they have on our civil liberties. We will look at the complexities of sharing information in exchange for waiving privacy rights. Next to this, we will look at how our fundamental understanding of private life has changed as public display has become more pervasive through social networks. Bringing together practical exercises, theoretical readings and a series of guest lectures, Sniff, Scrape, Crawl… will attempt to map the data trails we leave behind and look critically at the buoyant industries that track and commodify our personal information.
Public Lecture Series:
This thematic project is accompanied by a public lecture series under the same title. The following guests have been invited:
08/02/2011 - Seda Guerses and Michelle Teran
16/02/2011 - Dmytri Kleiner & Mirko Tobias Schäfer
16/03/2011 – Joris van Hoboken, Nicolas Maleves and Aymeric Mansoux
22/03/2011 – Screening (Manu Luksch & the Bureau of Inverse Technology) + Lecture by Steve Rushton
Trimester 1, Sep.-Dec. 2010
Thematic Project Tutors: Moddr
Rule #1: Fear not! Ignorance is bliss, anything worth doing is worth doing wrong, and two wrongs can make a right.
Nicolas Collins, The Seven Basic Rules of Hacking, 2009
Build, Break and Broadcast II is a thematic project dedicated to radical hands-on research, the perils of trial and error and hacking within mediated environments. Building on the 2009 edition of this project, we will be exploring critical system design at the intersection of user interfaces, networked applications and digital hardware. Our research will be oriented towards an integral understanding of the underlying structures of modern everyday technology.
On a practical level, students will learn how to solder, wire and program an Arduino board. They will also be applying hardware hacks to embedded devices and learn powerful UNIX applications. Next to tinkering with hardware and testing different software, we will be reading for each session a selection of related theoretical texts from the Build, Break and Broadcast II Reader. Through close readings and critical discussions, the aim is to stimulate and contextualize DIY practice-based research within a broader frame of reference.
*Moddr is your ‘unfriendly’ neighbourhood medialab. Co-founded by Danja Vassiliev, Walter Langelaar & Gordan Savicic. A large part of their practice involves the modification (modding) and re-creation of already existing technology. They have presented their projects at various national and international festivals and received critical attention for their project, the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. For a comprehensive view of their projects see: http://moddr.net/
Guest lecturers:
Julian Oliver: a New Zealander based in Berlin who is active in the critical intersection of art and technology and an advocate of the use of free software. Projects: Men In Grey / Artvertiser / Newstweek
Martin Howse is a programmer, theorist, performer and explorer of open hardware who founded the ap project in 1998 to implement a truly artistic operating system (OS) in its most expanded sense and within a free software context. Projects: ___-micro research [London/Berlin]