Anders Weberg // Video Robert Willim // Sound

project url: beingthere.se

Duration: 6min40sec

Tourism is growing in many parts of the world. Curious people, with bags and cameras, are in search of various exciting experiences. Places of interest are visited and documented. An important ingredient of the tourism industry is the concept of authenticity and the lure of the unique. But the question is: What would be the most authentic experience? Attractive places are targets for more than travel agencies.

This art project twists the authenticity hunt. We offer a number of audiovisual excursions beneath the gloss of the tourism rhetoric. Six films, imagining six places. It is an attempt to disclose the nervous system that is underlying tourist experiences.

The places we have chosen are high density, they are tourist magnets and global hotspots. They are places associated with pleasure, but also with terror. With the shortfilms coupled to the different places we want to examine the tension between pleasure and fear.

The films are made solely from clips out of tourist movies and similar material. The clips have been twisted into a surreal atmosphere. And the sound accompanying the visuals are based on manipulations of one or two sounds that are often used to give stereotypical associations to the various places, eg. demo sounds from sample libraries. The audiovisual whole express an evocative imaginary geography.

Screenings 2008

-Dislocate08 Yokohama,Tokyo, Japan. Aug 30 - Sep 23 -Transmediale.08 'conspire' festival for art and digital culture, Berlin. Germany. January 29 – February 24

2007

-Screened at: ASU Gallery, Arizona, USA. November 26-28 -Screened at backup_festival , at the e-Werk of Weimar in Germany. October 18-21. -Screened at MMU, Alsager gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, UK. October 15-26 -Screened at SparkVideo Spark Contemporary Art Space in Syracuse NY, US. Sept 27 -Exhibited at ElectroOnline ElectroFringe, Newcastle, Australia. Sept 27 – Oct 1st -Screened at New Forms Festival Vancouver, BC, Canada. Sept 7-16th -Exhibited at Studio 27, San Fransico, US. Curated and presented by Tomonari Nishikawa. 20 July -Screened at The Pocket Films Festival, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 8-10 June 2007. -Screened at Simultan03. Video and New Media Art Festival in Timisoara, Romania -Screened at Vertical, Catalonia, Spain. -Screened at Cartes Flux vol 2. Espoo, Finland, 17-24 April. -Screened at 700IS in Egilsstaðir, Iceland 24-31 March. -Screened at Connect. Signal-to-Noise, in Malmö, Sweden. March 28-29th.

2006

-Exhibited at Live Herring. Nordic Net art Exhibition, 16-19 November 2006, Jyväskylä, Finland. -Screened at New Media Meeting, 1-2 December 2006, Norrköping, Sweden.