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.  

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.

19:00 Michael Rybakov (art project) – Monk

The Monk and his friends – dead animal and lion’s head

So we have this bucket, standing on a chair, placed in a locked room in the basement of an old industrial complex somewhere in Germany. It is the gathering point of half of the evil in the world. You see, every time a person writes a curse, a damnation, or a threat on twitter, a drop of water falls from the ceiling into the bucket, and the curse is spelled out by the bucket in a nonchalant, robotic voice. Fuck you sideways, you stupid bitch.
    Like taking a few drops of water from a real-life river makes the volume of the stream indiscernibly smaller, gathering the hatred and anguish from the twitter stream in this lonely room makes the rest of the world less contaminated. As for the water, I invite all the good people to visit and take a few sips, since I can’t drink it all by myself (my request to store it at Gorleben was ignored).
    It is an anti-prayer, as magical as the faint feeling of fat warmth you get as soon as you pronounce the phrase “tea with bacon”. Try it.

Michael Rybakov (*1984 Leningrad, USSR) is a media artist, media hacker, researcher, and an overall great guy. Since 2006 he has been studying media art at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe.
    Michael’s work encompasses interactive sculpture, photography, video, and web-art as well as the smell of dust and leaded gasoline. Through different media it centers on experimenting with an active state of inaction. The kind you had as a kid while staring at the old wooden floor in your grandfather’s house, while your mother was making pancakes in the kitchen.
    His latest installation “The Monk and his friends – dead animal and lion’s head” received critical acclaim in form of a pat on the back, and a cup of black tea (Orange Pekoe).

18:30 Timothy Druckrey – Re-thinking Games

Re-thinking Games
The typical notion of computer games is that they provide a multi-dimensional ‘narrative’ into performativity and agency. Instead, these game forms (in such a complex historical framework) come to elide reflection in favor of feverish engagement. In the game ‘alienation’ comes as a substitute for agency and collapses the world for its model in which consequence is abandoned or dismissed in favor of some vague ‘victory’ over the algorithm. Yet the game provides a decisive convergence where the cinema and the ‘special effect’(in Norman Klein’s terms) merge into a perverse cathexis.
    This talk will present a film that attempts to re-enliven the computer game as a resource for environments that are a charged by their artificiality as for their possibility!

Timothy Druckrey is Director of the Graduate Photographic and Electronic Media program at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. He also works as a curator, writer, and editor living in New York City. He lectures internationally about the social impact of photography, electronic media, the transformation of representation, and communication in interactive and networked environments.
    He co-organized the international symposium Ideologies of Technology at the Dia Center of the Arts and co-edited the book Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology (Bay Press). He also co-curated the exhibition Iterations: The New Image at the International Center of Photography and edited the book by the same name published by MIT Press. He edited Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation and is Series Editor for Electronic Culture: History, Theory, Practice  published by MIT Press. These books now include Ars Electronica: Facing the Future, net_condition: art and global media (with Peter Weibel), Geert Lovink’s, Dark Fiber, and Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film (edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel), Stelarc: The Monograph (edited by Marquard Smith), Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Siegfried Zielinski). Recent exhibitions he has curated include Bits and Pieces, Critical Conditions and co-curated New Media Beijing (2006).  He has been Guest Professor at the University of Applied Art, Vienna (2004) and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair for the Visual Arts at the University of Hartford (2005). 

18:15 Mel Alexenberg – TorahTweets4M&M@

TorahTweets4M&M@52
The Book of Creation (SePheR Yetzirah), the oldest of kabbalistic texts, begins: “The universe was created with three SePhaRim, with SePheR (form), with S’PhaR (quanity), and with SiPuR (narrative).”  The SPR root of the Hebrew word for narrative has emerged in the word for SPiRal in many languages, ancient and modern, and in the English words SPiRitual and inSPiRation.  The biblical narrative continues to be written by scribes in a spiral scroll form, a SePheR torah, following a millennia old tradition.    
    Midrash is two thousand years of creative narratives designed to elucidate the biblical narrative.  It takes the biblical narrative and spins out tales that read between the lines of the biblical text and that reveal messages hidden in the white spaces between the Hebrew letters.  These inspirational stories form a vast literature illuminating biblical texts from countless alternative viewpoints.  Postmodern art provides media and contexts in which traditional story telling can be transformed from a verbal activity into visual one.  Postdigital narrative art is visual midrash.
    My artwork for the past four decades has been visual midrash, personal narratives that explore interrelationships between art, science, technology, and Jewish consciousness. The blog particularly lends itself to creating unfolding narratives for a networked world.  My current blogart project is a collaborative artwork being created with my wife, artist Miriam Benjamin, in celebration of our 52nd year of marriage.  We were married motzei Simhat Torah, the Jewish holiday when the torah scroll is rewound to begin the annual cycle of reading it.  During each of the 52 weeks of our 52nd year, we will post six photographs reflecting our life together with torah tweet captions that relate the weekly torah reading to our lives, past and present.  People worldwide are invited to follow our postdigitial narrative “TorahTweets4M&M@52” at http://torahtweets.blogspot.com. 

Mel Alexenberg is an artist who creates artworks at the interface between art, science, technology, and culture. His artworks explore interrelationships between postdigital narratives and Jewish consciousness, space-time systems and electronic technologies, blogart and wikiart, participatory art and community values, high tech and high touch experiences, and responsive art in cyberspace and real space.
Born in New York, Alexenberg earned degrees at Queens College, Yeshiva University, and New York University (interdisciplinary doctorate in art, science, and psychology). Alexenberg is Head of the School of the Arts at Emuna College in Jerusalem and Professor Emeritus at Ariel University.  He was Professor and Chairman of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute, Professor of Art and Education at Columbia University and Bar Ilan University, Research Fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and Dean of Visual Arts at New World School of the Arts, University of Florida’s arts school in Miami. He lives with his wife, artist Miriam Benjamin, in Petah Tikva, Israel.
He is the author of the books: The Future of Art in the Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness, Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture, Dialogic Art in a Digital World: Judaism and Contemporary Art (in Hebrew), Aesthetic Experience in Creative Process, and with Otto Piene, LightsOROT: Spiritual Dimensions of the Electronic Age. He has contributed chapters to the books: Digital Visual Culture, Interdisciplinary Art Education, Semiotics of Visual Culture: Sights, Signs, and Significance, and Community Connections: Intergenerational Links in Art Education. 

18:00  Michael Bielicky – Introduction

Michael Bielicky (* 1954 Prague, Czechoslovakia) 1969 emigration to West Germany, 1975-1979 studies in medicine, 1980-1982 New York, photographer and horse cab driver, 1984-1989 Master of Arts under Nam-June Paik at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dusseldorf, 1989-1990 assistant to Nam-June Paik, 1991-2006 return to Prague, founder and professor of the New Media Art department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, from 2006 professor of Digital Media Art department at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe / ZKM.
    Over the last twenty-five years Michael Bielicky has participated in numerous international exhibitions, festivals and symposia using communication, navigation, video and VR technologies. In recent years he has made performances using real time web-based information technologies in public spaces, often developed in collaboration with ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica Linz, High Tech Center Berlin-Babelsberg etc. Bielicky has exhibited his work in Centre Pompidou, Paris, MOMA New York, National Gallery Prague, Kunsthaus Zurich, ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica Linz etc.

1. International Symposium for Postdigital Narratives
25. November 2010
ZKM Vorlesungssaal

18:00  Michael Bielicky – Introduction

18:15  Mel Alexenberg – TorahTweets4M&M@52

18:30  Timothy Druckrey – Re-thinking Games

19:00  Michael Rybakov (art project) – Monk

19:15 – 19:35  Break

19:35  Adam Rafinski – Towards a Ludic Existentialism

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

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

20:20 – Discussion

21:00 – End

Documentation on Vimeo

Without contextual sensibility, brilliant ideas are unable to put even a foot in our everyday world. The correct initiative within an existing system is just as important as an understanding of and creative openness to the system. For this reason, the questioning of public space is essential in the teaching and research of digital arts. In the field of “Go Public Narratives” one experiments with different concepts of the public and what is commonly accepted as “real”. Public space is becoming increasingly privatized and commercialized. This also stands true in the case of public spaces on the Internet. These spaces must be re-cultivated at all costs – sometimes even in subversive ways. The new-media artist must be sure to take back physical and virtual space. In doing so one reaches an audience that avoids cultural institutions. These works support the raising of mankind’s general sensibility.

The Digital Game is the leading media form of the current generation. These games represent digital art in the form of mass media and actively transmit their social relevance. Thus, the semantics and the argumentation structure of digital games are of central importance in the teaching of media art. Innovative game concepts need to be developed in the area of Gaming Narratives. These new works can be critically, pedagogically, or also playfully, motivated. The digital game is a rising art form that reaches beyond the conflict of body and spirit.  Digital Gaming, through the paradox of game-play, creates a contemporary vehicle for existential questions. The medium of digital art, mirroring other cultural forms of expression, contemporarily answers the age-old question: “What is the excitement of being alive today?” The computer game has yet to find its own media-specific language. Thus, it is especially crucial for young artists to have access to technologies such as Augmented-Reality, Global Positioning System (GPS), Mobile Devices and stereoscopical 3-D Representation as they continue to blur and transcend the borders between fiction and reality.