2009: my first Transmediale ever!
Topic: Deep North.

Mmmmh, was not sure about the trendy title but finally there is much more in this that I thought! Not the best exhibition display but some good works and very good debates. I never thought that a media art festival (usually used to be self-centered) could bring so much political, social and ecological engagement.

I will not reveal yet what exact direction it will make me take (but I can already say that I’m quite busy researching on generic architecture and activism in urban environment). However, I can already point at projects I saw there and that I really want to share (of course some received an award).

Michiko Nitta: Extreme Green Guerillas
This design project takes current green trends to the extreme. By proposing a community of people called “Extreme Green Guerillas” (E.G.G.), Michiko gives “a critical point of view on the current general green visions, because many green activities are used as a medium of consumerism.”

Therefore, she proposes extreme green solutions for sending messages (no emails, mobile phones or postal ways are allowed), eating (no CO2 footprints) and overpopulation (death at 40 years old).

Don’t forget: WE MUST NOT CONSUME WE MUST BE CONSUMED

Reynold Reynolds: Six apartment
This video project presents a view of six persons isolated in their own apartment with their own loneliness. A voice over of radio news talking about diseases and consequences of climate change is the only contact with the outside world, while these persons stand still in their own drift.

It makes of course echoes to our inability to act and our isolated lives in urban environment which (will) constitutes over to 80% of human environment.

Besides these projects, there is of course a lot more.. Just to give some names: HeHe with “Nuage Vert“, the “Tantalum Memorial” dedicated to the deaths caused by the Coltan war,…

Luckily, besides these serious issues, there was Club Transmediale! And the ArtKillArt party, and … well, welcome to the never ending festival!

This week-end, Juan Duque and I opened the door of our new atelier in Ghent where we showed our work in progress and research materials on the topic of contemporary landscape. We presented both video works, Juan showed also drawings and an installation in the studio and I presented my photographic and painting works.

Here is a little text about Juan:
Architect and Urban Designer with studies in Media Art, Juan Duque works on the ‘visuality’ of the Landscape and the process of ‘decontextualization’, ‘alteration’ or migration of the images. Implementing different media, his work focuses on research on ‘extended’ landscapes resulting from digital or physical alterations and distortions.
http://www.betweencorners.blogspot.com

It was quite interesting to present different approaches of the contemporary landscape in general and I’m really curious to see how our collaboration will evolve. I’d like to experiment more things in my video work and to propose a collaborative screening on this topic.

Finally, even if I was missing some friendly faces, we could say that it was a success, lot of people and some good feedbacks. Long life to the OA!

ps: thanks to Hallveig G.K. Agustsdottir for the pictures!

Transmedia is now over and I’m proudly graduated, after some deserved rest and a move to a new city that brought me closer to simultaneous happiness and loneliness, I can now show some screenshots of the video I’ve presented for the TM jury.

This work is part of my research on non-places, places of transit, displacement in relation to Marc Augé’s perception analyzed in “Non-Places, an Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity”. My interest in these places is when you stop or erase the movements or the elements that connect them to us. Then, they start to float, they become suspended, dis-connected and turn into this prophetical evocation of spaces described by Augé.

In the video work I presented I’ve worked with superimposition of video layers with 1 frame delay. In the final result there is up to 10.000 video layers and the work as been presented as a triptych of 1′03” projected in loop. While each video shows subtle changes in light, colours and shadows of individual movements, the triptych bring them in an uniform composition, erasing all identity or particularity. A certain boredom comes out of the repetition of this 1min video, but is necessary to avoid narration. This double repetition leads to a certain temporal suspension.

Just click on the images to enlarge them.

stills of video triptych, 1′03”, 2008

Last week-end, iMAL presented Stream On You, an event around streaming art practices with audio/visual performances.

One of the most accomplished installation was performed by nocinema, presenting a live video screening and live audio performance. nocinema proposes web interludes drawing upon strings of live streaming webcams across the world and sound from a shared soundfiles database which is fed and updated by a team of sound artists/partners.

You have to know that the choosen webcams are showing mainly non-sens or empty places, like a field, a construction space, a deserted parc, a road, a forest,… The sound can be digital or captured from everyday life environments.

I was really interested by the lag created between what you know beeing live streamed and the a-temporal aspects of the images and sound. This notion of present time soon desappears while the work becomes timeless, suspended, contemplative.

The fact that the stream is slowed down amplifies also this perception of a distorted time, but this effect is mainly due to the kind of images. Even if you often have a date and time on the video capture, the non situation of the image in a specifical time-space (due to the absence of individuals or event) makes it a-temporal. You could say, that it’s some garden or field from the early 21st century, but the banality of the scene and it’s non-narrative aspect make the scenesuspended in the time.

The variation of resolution between the different video captures was also visually interesting and probably contributed to the non-situation of the scene in a certain time-space.

The overall impression is to have a contemplative experience of live streamed sound and images that break any relation with their fundamental constitution: the present.Here and now seem to be extended.

On Thursday 4th of october, the opening of this brand new space for digital culture in Brussels, has brought togheter installations and performances as Pyrognenesis (2006), a music piece by Pascal Baltazar (FR), done with a custom electroacoustic gestural instrument.

Have a look to the brand new website of Imal

Have a look to the pictures of the opening (txs marc!)

And watch deliciously the video of Pyrogenesis (txs utube!)