berlin transmediale diary part 2: the end of travelling

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From: Christina McPhee <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 16:57:06 -0800 (PST)
To: [email protected]
Subject: berlin transmediale diary part 2: the end of travelling



the end of travelling, berlin transmediale 03 diary,
part 2

Babylon by bus on a bright morning: entered the
Transmediale video universe, including installation,
game, deconstructed collaborative improvisations,
spatialized narratives, animations, a rich hyphenated
brew, a magic potion, a traumraum. Formally and
discursively, video goes archaeological by way of
superlative timewaves, over and under, like digging
through trash middens left over from the most intimate
and anonymous fragments of lives, found, lost. From
a general call for entries to the Images category,
Transmediale 03 organized thematic groups, among them
dreamworlds,? playing games, americanals, tv and back,
documentary, storylines, and architextures? sometimes
the screenings were of just one artist or artist
collective, others were curated groups of short works.
Inside the retro sixties atmosphere reigned of
Transmediale?s interiors, monitors and the big screen
were blasts into phenomena at the edges of memory and
amnesia, the zapping of urban fields like
Bull.Meletic?s WHIR., the typologies of urban
poverty, the implosions of inidividual identities into
units of commodity and surveillance., prime example,
Coco Fusco?s ?Dolores from Ten to Ten?. The mapping
of the world codes itself into a self aware and
autonomic system who dreams in video. A condition in
which the image and sound transfer population mimics
the human explosion of populations on the move,
nomadism all over// people seeking refuge, asylum and
work in the community, while, meanwhile, borders shut
down, possibly permitting movement inside but
difficulty getting into and out of places: the
megacity as a transparent prison. Was it really
possible to play global? –all this nomadism but
between and to places whose hypperreality had invested
itself, an insidious nonnative plant species, to
borrow from the cultural metaphors of Wong Hoy Cheong,
one of the artists in the documentary ?The End of
Travelling.? Around Transmediale some said that
although video was still a rich medium, that it is of
the past, the really important art is in code. How
strange to register an avantgarde ? the old next big
thing ? in surroundings that were mainlining
nonlinearity, looping, recursion, streaming,
bordercrossings, playing fields. Like you could put
art in a lineup still even though culture, our
culture, is in a total mix remix. Narratives,
micronarratives, cresting like froth on waves of
transmutable sound and image…whether interactive or
not…linking estranged dialogues? an ocean of video
that seems to be moving hypnotically, trance dance.
Movement as nonmovement: phenomenology of a condition
of both cultural and formal (aesthetic) nomadism
within nested closed circles or sets signals ?an end
of travelling?, predicted by Virillio, and especially
in a video of the same name, by Heman Chong of
Singapore and Isabella Cornaro of France. The project
was a linguistic response to the state of exhibitions
as clusters of cultures squeezed into a single
platform, like the Biennale model. The sense of
shortened distances, despite the real extent of
physical spatial and temporal separations. A
supermarket infofest. The Asian context, outside of
Asia, telescopes into a cultural flux both mediated
and continuous. The documentary was constructed from
loosely flowing conversation-interviews with Asian
artists. In all of this there was the profound
attenuation of the human strand. the stranded human.
within the reality code. a situation worthy of
Beckett. Or as mez has noted, thinking Shakespearean
tragicomic trope, we become characters in a drama
whose dimensions exceed the boundaries of the stage
and whose alignments are to stars in constellations of
code not disclosed, ghostly, virtual, dissipated.

+ [(d.tached)fixion m.asking as veiled f.act(ion
scripts)]

- context re.placement vs statistical fiction
[Ring?TheRing?Videodrome]
- diss.embl[M].ing reality coding via displays
d.note.ing the
opposition of
g.rap[e]hic pornography
- p.oe[uvre]sis re.Align.ment via hip_h.op[t]ping thru
the i[co]n.verse
of
shakes.p[e]aring terrorTory


But perhaps there is a way to think of the collapse of
the global space, the end of travelling, as a place
for a laboratory of investigations, into the art of
contextual living, Phenomena become propositions of a
sublime, lookjing for the deep structures of everyday
life on the local scale.

More to come…Berlin transmediale diary part three
Relational aesthetics.





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