The deliberations of the international jury composed of Annick Bureaud (Paris), Bronac Ferran (London), Juha Huuskonen (Helsinki), Pooja Sood (New Delhi), and Christoph Tannert (Berlin) ended with the selection of eight works being nominated for the transmediale Award 2009:
Perry Bard
Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake
Interactive Video Web Project, us, 2007 / Work in Progress
The New York video artist Perry Bard invites people to a collaborative web based and database generated montage experiment: Analog to Dziga Vertovs masterpiece from 1929, participants from all over the world can upload footage on the website next to scenes of the original film. On the website dziga.perrybard.net the development of this interactive artwork is explained: All digital media such as photo camera, video camera, mobile phone and screen-grabs are allowed and data can be uploaded next to Vertovs original scenes. The length and the image are adjusted to the original scenes through a specific software, which calculates a new video every day. Vertovs impressions about the Sovjet cities in his experimental silent film are transferred with this remake into the 21st century and becomes a global montage. The website is available in three languages, English, Spanish, French and soon also in Chinese.
Ewen Chardronnet & Bureau d'études
The Laboratory Planet
Journal, fr, 2008
The Laboratory Planet is a periodic journal of philosophy of science and critics of technique, published in two versions, English and French, print and internet based. The editor Ewen Chardronnet with Bureau d´études, Montreuil, produces Laboratory Planet with a team of artistic researchers and activists. As a journalistic multimedia piece its online platform discusses geostrategic, tactical media and speculative issues lurking behind the ambiguous headlines of the mainstream press.
Petko Dourmana
Post Global Warming Survival Kit
Multimedia Installation, bg, 2008
The interactive multimedia installation consists of a two-channel projection and shows infrared images of the North Sea as post-apocalyptic landscape which the observer can only see by using a night vision device. Dourmana develops with his installation a dystopian szenario in order to solve the problem of the global warming and flooding, caused by the melting of the pole. With Post Global Warming Survival Kit he shows a 'nuclear winter', realized by political groups in order to cover the whole surface of the earth with ashes. His installation aims to be an understandable technological fiction with limited options. Without the technology we would be blind in a world covered with ashes, as we are in matters of environmental pollution and ecological destruction.
Graham Harwood, Richard Wright, Matsuko Yokokoji
Tantalum Memorial
uk, 2008
The telephone-installation is a memorial to the more than 3 million people who have perished in the complex wars that have gone on in the Congo since 1998, often referred to as the 'Coltan Wars'. The ore coltan is used as the raw material for the metal tantalum, which is an essential component of mobile phones and computers. Therefore tantalum is coveted by dozens of international mining industries and local warring groups, and is nowadays more valuable than gold. Built of electromagnetic 'Strowger' telephone switches, invented in 1938, and connected to a computer, the installation serves not only as a memorial, but functions also as a center of a social telephone network that is used by Congolese immigrants living in the UK. The network 'Telephone Trottoire' builds on the traditional Congolese communication practice of passing around news and gossip from pedestrian to pedestrian on the street to avoid state censorship. In cooperation with a London based radio program it calls Congolese listeners and plays messages, which can be commented and forwarded. The project, which classifies as a mean of communication between tradition and modernity, can note so far about 1.800 users.
mediashed.org/TantalumMemorial
Hiroshi Matoba
Overbug
Music-Performance, jp, 2008
Overbug is a music-performance tool designed to compose Minimal and Dance Music. Through looping and newly arranging sound patterns, called 'Bugsounds', the program creates complex, polyrhythmic sounds. Overbug differs from conventional linear controlled music sequencers, which arrange the sound into a linear timeline from left to right. In Overbug is the sound arrangement of the repeating music loops equal to the visual abstraction of circular actions which built the interface through circles.
Michiko Nitta
Extreme Green Guerillas
uk, 2007
Nitta’s project takes current green trends to the extreme: The Extreme Green Guerillas are a network of amateur self-sustaining people who have shortened their lifespan to the ultimate green lifestyle, e.g. rejecting the usage of the Internet or mobile phones as this will tie them to big corporations. In order to reduce the CO2 emission caused through the common mail delivery, they support the idea of carrier pigeons. They also cook rats and pigeons so that they decrease the extent of urban vermins. Their premature death, they think, can solve the problem of the overpopulation. The purpose of this individual, provocative gesture is to call the attention of the community in order to perceive and discuss the causes of the environmental disasters. To achieve that, they use the radicality of irritation of the ordinary. The position, the guerillas represent, turns into irony and sarkasm while using creative and self-explanator systems which are realized in a playful and artistic way.
Rudolfo Quintas
Burning the Sound
Digital, Interactive Sound Performance, pt, 2008
The interactive sound performance is about the nature of rituals, power and control. It uses fire from a regular lighter to subvert patterns of rhythm, thus using technologically mediated computer sound to exorcise the sound as a spiritual strategy. The performers gesture in relation to his instrument not only shows the performers emotional state, but it brings the instrument to live. In this action, it is explored and established as a synaesthesic symbolic metaphor in the sense that is from the flame that the sound is shaped. This intensifies the synaesthesic quality of the sound being perceived as burned by the flame.
Fire was probably the first technology to exist and is knowledge based and ritualistic. Within Burning the Sound digital, new media and ancestral technologies fuse to question contemporary strategies of invisible control.
de.
Reynold Reynolds
Six Apartments
Double Video Projection, us/de, 2007
Reynolds video installation Six Apartments is a poetic narration of resignation and decline which documents the life of six people in their apartments. The inhabitants live isolated, unaware of each other, without drama – they eat food, sleep, watch television – even though the mass media overshadows their lives with problems of the larger world and the upcoming ecological crisis. Their connection to the world is somewhere else located: It can be found in the microscopically process of decomposition of their bodies, food and living spaces, in their passive existence towards consumption which appears to approach the death. In Reynolds compositions of images with strong Vanitas-motives, the human being does not have the control of its life.
reynold-reynolds.com/six
reynold-reynolds.com