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.

Institute for Postdigital Narrative (IPN)
Michael Bielicky

There is no question that contemporary generations operate within the various hybrid realities of our digital age with a distinctive naturalness and implicitness, as if the world had been such for centuries. Real-time experience, virtuality, interactivity, nonlinearity, and telematics especially determine young people’s perception of reality. We can no longer rely on one-dimensional representational systems to understand the complexities of our contemporary world. There is a need for more accessible variable systems, as they help us comprehend the interwoven realities of our times. Though above all, it is most important to develop the ability to embrace and humanize the often-alienating characteristics of digital culture.
Mankind has always operated on narrative to explain and understand its own existence. Our times, in particular, call for the exploration, expression, and especially, creation of new story-telling formats. Although the contemporary generations are finding themselves increasingly confronted by their digital reality, they still remain material, or analog, at their core. Man cannot flee his physicality and location. It is also becoming increasingly apparent in our digitally influenced quotidian-culture that the physical is of a special fascination and attractiveness. The dilemma of virtual representation and analog imprisonment will only be overcome when a close interplay between these seemingly opposing conditions is attained.
There are indeed serious indications that a postdigital consciousness is slowly being established. The concept of postdigitalism was coined by Prof. Dr. Mel Alexenberg, and appropriately summarizes the reverberatory exposure of our times to the digital vortex. New formats are becoming more important. Take Serious Games for example: these are digital games that undertake serious content such as political or social themes. In these games the serious content is directed to groups that normally do not have direct access to such themes. In this way, the computer game has become a medium that is able to critique.
Postdigital qualities can also be observed in the area of WEB 2.0, in which the Internet user makes the transformation from consumer to producer. Social networks (social media) have gained importance through the enabling of social interaction and collaboration. This seems to be only the beginning of a forward tending era, as the Internet still has so much un-tapped potential. One should not overlook, that this medium became a collective hard-drive and a collective processor of humanity.

Long-term goals of research:
1. Gamming Narratives
2. Data driven Narratives (InfoArt)
3. Go public Narratives

These seemingly different areas naturally are closely interwoven and combinable.

 

See the docomentation on vimeo

Partner:
Prof. Dr. Mel Alexenberg, Emuna College, Jerusalem
Dr. Konstantin Akinsha, independent scholar
Prof. Dr. Norman Klein, University CalArts, Los Angeles
Prof. Dr. Cai Xinyuan, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan