Das Performativ, das Objektiv und das Selbst

Seitdem das medial aufgezeichnete Leben zur mentalen Konkurrenz des gelebten Lebens wurde (mit dem Doppel von Video und Performance), ist Bewegung und Beschleunigung zusammen mit Auf- und Abtritt, der Körper-Präsentation, zum Zentrum des inszenierten Dazwischen-Seins der Medien, zum PERFORMATIV geworden. Zu diesem Thema hielt Gerhard Johan Lischka im Mai 2011 einen Workshop im Seminar von Michael Bielicky. Das Rückgrat dieses Prozesses ist die apparategestützte Bild, Text und Ton Produktion, die durch eine unvorstellbare Miniaturisierung und zugleich explosive Streuung von Information – vor allem durch die Digitalisierung – voran getrieben wird. Das Leben wird durch das OBJEKTIV zum Objekt der Projektion entmaterialisiert, auf Energieeinheiten reduziert und als solche distribuiert. Das verbindende Moment, in dem sich die Aufmerksamkeit in der Überlagerung von Performativ und Objektiv ereignet, ist das SELBST. Womit jede /r Einzelne sich sowohl konstituiert als auch in der Masse der Globalität zerstreut. Deshalb sind wir gezwungen, mit der Sprache der Klischees uns selbst in den Polylog einzubringen. Indem wir die Apparate der Distribution zur Darstellung der von uns generierten Differenz verwenden: zur Selbstdarstellung.

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     English version

Since the media taped life became the mental competition of the lived life (with the duplicate of video and performance), movement and acceleration became together with the appearance and exit of the body presentation to the centre of this produced inbetween being of the media, the PERFORMATIV. On this subject Gerhard Johan Lischka had a Workshop in the seminar of Michael Bielicky in May 2011. The spine of this process is the apparatus-supported picture, text and tone production which is sped up by an inconceivable miniaturization and at the same time explosive dispersion of information – above all by the digitization. The life is dematerialised by the OBJECTIVE to the object of the projection, reduced to energy units and as such distributed. This ITSELF is the connecting moment at which the attention occurs in the overlapping of the performativ and the objective. Everybody becomes established with it as well as scattered in the mass of the globality. Therefore, we are made to introduce ourselves in the polylog with the language of the stereotypes. While we use the apparatuses of the distribution for representation of the difference generated by us: to the selfrepresentation.

DIE ORGIE

Seminar von Adam Rafinski

Was ist „die Orgie“, wie funktioniert sie und welche Bedeutung wurde und wird ihr gesellschaftlich zugebilligt?

Im Seminar werden wir uns diesen Fragen nähern, indem wir uns mit dem Spannungsfeld von Kontrolle und Kontrollverlust genauer auseinandersetzen. Die Grenzüberschreit von Konventionen und Normen wird in der Orgie von einem zeitlich und räumlich verorteten Rahmen gehalten, in dessen Zentrum das Paradox des Spieles steht.
Wir werden einen genaueren Blick auf diesen Rahmen anhand historischer und zeitgenössischer Beispiele werfen. Es werden nicht nur Brüche von sexuellen Konventionen behandelt, sondern auch andere Formen der spielerischen Grenz überschreitungen zur Diskussion gestellt.
Das Seminar ist für Praktiker und Theoretiker gleichermaßen ausgerichtet.

Neben einer regelmäßigen Teilnahme, wird von den Seminarteilnehmern erwartet, sich der Lektüre von Autoren wie Platon, de Sade, Nietzsche, Artaud, Bataille und Foucault hinzugeben.

Das Seminar ist offen für alle.
Anmeldung an: arafinski(at)hfg-karlsruhe.de
Beginn: 14. April / donnerstags, 11 – 13 Uhr, 14-tägig / Raum 323 (Entropia)

UNITY GAME / ART ENGINE

 

Workshop mit Jens Stober (Lehrbeauftragter) und Michael Bielicky. UNITY ist eine multiplattform Game-Engine, die dieses Semester für das Gamelab im Hause installiert wird. Sie bietet große Freiheit und hohe Flexibilität bei der Erschaffung interaktiver Kunstwerke und virtueller Echtzeitumgebungen.
Natürlich kann auch jegliche Form von Game damit umgesetzt werden: von Jump & Run über Adventures und Rennspielen bis hin zu Shootern. Sie ist desweiteren ein Tool zur schnellen Visualisierung von Architektur, Produkten oder Konzepten. Entwickelt wird unter Windows oder MAC. Mit einem einzigen Klick auf den Export-Button stehen folgende Plattformen bereit: standalone Games für MAC & PC; Webbrowser; Ipad & Iphone; Android Phones & Tablets und Konsolen wie Xbox 360, Wii oder PS3.

Anmeldung an: jstober(at)hfg-karlsruhe.de
Beginn: 13. April, 18 – 20 Uhr

LUDOLOGY – WELTEN REGELN

 

Seminar von: Adam Rafinski, Sebastian Felzmann, Michael Bielicky

Das Digitale Spiel erinnert uns daran, dass der Zustand des „Wir-tun-mal-so-als-ob“ einen Raum eröffnet, in welchem die Menschen das Alltags-Absurde prozessual transzendieren. Das Spiel neigt dazu, aus Unzusammenhängendem und scheinbar Bedeutungslosem Sinn zu generieren. Im Seminar werden wir daher der Frage nachgehen, welche Bedeutung dieser Bewusstseinszustand für den Umgang des Menschen mit seiner Welt hat und wie dieser, anhand der Analyse von verschiedenen Spielsystemen, funktioniert.

Das Seminar besteht aus zwei Teilen:
Der theoretische wird wöchentlich vormittags stattfinden, der praktische alle 14 Tage am Nachmittag.
Am Vormittag werden wir verschiedene ludologische Positionen aus der Philosophie, der anthropologischen Kulturtheorie, der Game Studies und des Game Designs sowie den Literaturwissenschaften hinsichtlich des regeltheoretischen Potenzials des Spieles kennenlernen. Deren Niederschlag im konkreten Spielverständnis werden wir anhand praktischer Übungen am Nachmittag genauer verfolgen. Hierbei haben Studenten nicht nur die Möglichkeit, verschiedene Techniken zur Erarbeitung von Spielkonzepten kennenzulernen, die von klassischen Gesellschaftsspielen, Konzeptkunst und Performances bis hin zu Computerspielen reichen, sondern werden diese auch in Hinblick auf ihre Bedeutungsebene kritisch zu reflektieren lernen. Eine regelmäßige Teilnahme am theoretischen und praktischen Block wird gefordert.

Das Seminar ist offen für alle.
Beginn: 13. April, 14 – 18 Uhr / Zeit: mittwochs, 11 – 13 Uhr (wöchentlich) und 14 – 18 Uhr (14-tägig) / Raum: 323 (Entropia)

ORIGINS, ARCHAEOLOGIES, HISTORIES: EPISODES IN THE HISTORY OF MEDIA

Das Seminar wird in Englisch gehalten. Seminarleiter: Timothy Druckrey & Michael Bielicky.

The history of ‘media art’ is not limited to the deployment of specific technologies – electricity, the development of the telegraph, the recording of sound, the introduction of photography or cinema, the launch of radio, the blast-off of television, the emergence of video, the reverberations of the computer, or the growth of networks.

Rather the development of modernity itself is embedded in the reverberations of both its vision machines and its temporal apparatuses.

By looking backward into the pre-history of 20 th century culture we will aim to develop an approach in which the arts (broadly) as intricately woven into social, scientific, and creative upheavals that led to a constant eruption of radical art and media – much of it assimilated into progressive notions of the ‘avant-garde.’

This seminar will probe the history of the apparatus and rethink the role of the so called ‘media’ as the crucial form in the radical experiment of the 20th century. The starting point, as Agamben says, is that the apparatus is “anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions or discourses of living beings.

Beginn: 14. April / Donnerstags 15-18 Uhr / Raum 323 (Entropia)

GO PUBLIC / BEYOND / SOMMERLOCH

Seminar von Michael Bielicky

In diesem Seminar werden Ausstellungsprojekte konzipiert, die sowohl Indoor, als auch Outdoor, realisiert werden sollen.

Ziel dieser Veranstaltung ist die Präsentation des Instituts für Postdigitale Narrativität am Beyond Festival und am Sommerloch im großen Studio der HfG zu gestalten.
Anspruchsvolle und ungewöhnliche Arbeiten sollen diesen Event zu einem medialen Happening wachsen lassen. Hierfür können sich Studenten mit bereits bestehenden Arbeiten bewerben oder neue Arbeiten gezielt dafür entwickeln.

Von den teilnehmenden Studenten mit ausgewählten Arbeiten wird großes Engagement für das Gelingen der gesamten Ausstellung erwartet.

Beginn: 18. April / 11 Uhr / Raum 323 (Entropia)

Workshop Miriam Ommeln “Bewegung und Cipher”

Das Seminar von PD Dr. Miriam Ommeln erarbeitete Hintergründe der Gleichzeitigkeit von Kunst und Mediengestaltung. Denn diese bedeuten immer auch “to chiper”.

Jede Kommunikation ist von einer Bewegung der Gleichzeitigkeit charakterisiert. Sie weist die Merkmale ‘attack and defense’ aus der Informationstechnologie auf. Offensichtlicher wird diese soziale Komponente z.B. bei der Walzsprache und ihren (Gauner-)Zinken, den Strichcodes, Codebüchern, der Kryptologie bis hin zum Netzjargon der jeweiligen sozialen Netzwerke. Die heutige mediale Welt ist deutlich von der Verschlüsselung geprägt: sei es die konventionelle ISBN-Codenummer der Bücher über die Stilometrie, die im Internet die Autorschaftsbestimmung von anonymen Schriftstücken analysiert, bis hin zu den Medienhacks und -fakes. Wir werden bedeutet immer auch to cipher.

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     English version

The seminar of PD Dr. Miriam Ommeln compiled backgrounds of the simultaneousness of art and media creation. Since these mean always also “to chiper”.

Every communication is characterised by a movement of the simultaneousness. It shows the signs ‘attack and defence’ from the information technology. This social component becomes more obviously with e.g. the ‘Walzsprache’ and their (crook) prongs, the bar codes, code books, the Cryptology up to the net jargon of the respective social networks. Today’s media world is clearly marked by the encoding: if it is the conventional ISBN-code number of the books about the Stilometrie which analyses the authorship regulation of anonymous documents on the Internet up to the media hacks and fakes. We are means always also to cypher.

Norman M. Klein – The Dismantling of the American Psyche

20:00  Norman M. Klein – The Dismantling of the American Psyche

The Dismantling of the American Psyche:
MediaBuzz, Political Branding, and Collective Amnesia – 1973 to the Present. Notes from a new history, to be written next year.

Certainly, within the past twenty years, the computer has embedded itself into material culture on a scale that is difficult to compare (i.e. architecture, cities, the body, the genome). The term that I use to describe this phenomenon is “cross-embedding.” For example, very early cinema was cross-embedded with theater, and with the street rhythm of cities like Paris, London, New York; and with print illustration and mass publishing; and so on.
    This lecture will introduce what the narrative implications of cross-embedding are, its possible directions today, more on how to construct a history for cross-embedding (essentially a new field that must be developed).
    We must begin by assuming that all media are cross-embedded, by definition. For the sake of argument, we set aside the poetics of pure form, in order to investigate narrative from a “cross-embedded” point of view.

Additional notes (selections):
 1. Embedding is always a two-way process. If the computer is essentially embedding into urban space, or into the body; then the urban and the body are also embedding themselves into digital systems as well.
 2. Embedding is often a form of cultural amnesia, because the media that are absorbed often are “forgotten” afterward…
 3. Embedding is a process of inversion, from gigantic to micro, from public to private, and so on, a process of dislocating sociability…
 4. Embedding changes how stories are told… It invents stories about new systems of power that are changing our sense of the real (ontology; what is “solid”). Its narratives often require new forms of social ritual, of epistemology, even of intimacy (seduction, eroticism, pornography, the erogenous as architecture).

Norman M. Klein is a cultural critic, media historian and novelist. His work concentrates on how consumer spectacle and confused urban planning hide social conditions. He has expanded these interests into two series of books, one on cultural histories of forgetting, another on the history of special effects environments.
    Among his best-known work: The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory; The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects; Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-86; Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales; and Seven Minutes: the Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon. Currently, he is the author and co-director of a science-fiction media novel, on how the twentieth century was imagined before it began (1893-1925). Entitled The Imaginary Twentieth Century, it has been already appeared in seven exhibitions internationally, most recently at DOX in Prague; in 2015, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It will be published in the Spring of 2011. (For updates, see  www.imaginary20thcentury.com). Afterward, his next book The Dismantling of the American Psyche (1968-Present) – will appear in 2011 (Verso). Klein is a professor at the California Institute of the Arts.  

Jens M. Stober (art project) – 1378 (km)

19:50  Jens M. Stober (art project) – 1378 (km)

1378 (km), through the medium of the computer game, allows for an immersive and interactive journey into sections of the inner-German border year 1976. There are two parties in the game, the first being the East German Border Guards, and second being the East German Refugees. The objective of the refugees is to get over the death strip to flee to West Germany. The objective of the border guards is to prevent that refugees cross the border. At first glance 1378(km) appears to be an ordinary first-person shooter, which is due to the fact that it is based on one. However the modifications made on the first-person shooter for 1378(km) completely change the usual experience of such a game.
    Through the personal identification as either an East German Refugee or an East German Border Guard, and growing familiar with the border sections represented in the game, the players will become interested in this part of Germany’s past. The game is addressed mainly to a young generation that grew up with computer games as their defining medium. In this computer game, as opposed to, for example, a documentary film, – I personally have control over my actions and reactions, which take place in real time and in changing situations.
    The game 1378 (km) does not force someone playing as the “border soldiers” to shoot the “refugees”. Players are left with the freedom of choice. The border guard has the ability to arrest refugees without the use of violence. They even have the opportunity to be a refugee. You are only able to win the game when you do not shoot. The rules of the game are inspired by the situation at the former Inner German Border. Border camps, death strips, and orders to shoot are what make the game brutal.

Jens M. Stober (* 1986 Karlsruhe, Germany) is a media artist and game designer. His works are focused on handling computer games in an artistic way. Since 2007 he has been studying media art at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe under Prof. Michael Bielicky.
    In 2008 he developed in cooperation with “goldextra” the game “Frontiers – Welcome to Fortress Europe”, shown at the EMAF-Osnabrück and part of the exhibition “world of games” in ZKM Karlsruhe. In 2010 he developed the game 1378(km) as pre-diploma about the inner-German border. The game has sparked much controversy in Germany over the question of whether a computer game should be allowed to cover this period of recent German history.

Towards a Ludic Existentialism – Adam Rafinski

Every generation has not only the right, but also the inner drive to define it’s own existentialism. The need to install a fundamental notion of time into consciousness has always moved the way people grasp the significant conflict of their world. But what could an existential conflict be in a world dominated by mass media that tends to place human beings as a variable within a logical system?

I want to argue in my contribution, that this generation’s struggle manifests itself in contemporary games. Games make believe in the absurd; or in other words: Games create reason out of the unreasonable. A generation without an existential conflict redefines their personal notion of existence through the paradoxicality of the artificial. By accepting the “As-If”-structure, which is the minimal condition of every playful activity, the participant is devoting himself to a secret knowledge which promises a peak behind the curtain of reality.

The rise of digital games as a mass medium in recent years has not only opened up the main achievements of media art for a broader audience, but has outlined “game-play” as a fundamental mediating activity of mankind. It alters not only aspects of aesthetic experience, but also the way we define, describe, and communicate reality. We have become accustomed to finding information online that we didn’t know we were searching for, as well as communicating with other humans via playful algorithmic online platforms. Through work and consumption we are collecting points, and while doing this we are constantly wary of Rabbit Holes, which show that the world is not as it seems. The question remains: Are we working or playing as we do all these things? The playful diffusion of games into of our social, economical and political existence guarantees a very exciting era, in which we view the world through the eyes of a child; observing the phenomena around us as if for the first time.

 

Adam Rafinski (* 1983 Chorzów, Poland) is a researcher, philosopher, art and media theorist, and media artist. His work focuses on the aesthetics of digital culture, the role and embodiment of the subject, playfulness in culture and art, as well as the issue of presence in performance art.
Since 2007 he has performed under the title “I am here”. His performances have taken place in Karlsruhe, Berlin, and New York among other locations. In 2010 he graduated in Art and Media Theory at the University of Art and Design (HfG) writing his thesis on the Experience of Digital Games under Prof. Boris Groys and Prof. Wolfgang Ullrich. Since 2010 he has been a lecturer at the Media Art Department and Institute for Postdigital Narratives of the HfG and co-founder of their GameLab. He conducts theory classes on digital games and the culture of play.