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The Week in Germany: Culture February 9, 2007 Transmediale: Man with Three Ears Dazzles at Berlin Festival for Art and Digital Culture While Hollywood and Berlin gear up for celebrations of what was certainly the most powerful visual medium of the 20th Century - film - a smaller Berlin festival is reminding the world that visual culture in the 21st century may look very different.Rather than letting itself be crushed under the creeping steam roller of obsolescence, Berlin's Transmediale has kept pace with a cutting edge that increasingly seems to vanish into the horizon. In fact, this year, the festival for art and digital culture has made never-ending change into its motto: “Unfinish! is the battle cry and the curse of digital work that knows no conclusion, but only consecutive versions,” declared the curators of the festival, which ran at the Academy of the Arts last week. When it was first conceived in 1988, Berlin’s Transmediale was a festival of video art. The creators felt that video offered expanded expressive possibilities as opposed to film, which is typically feted in opulent style across town at the Berlinale around this time each year. While magnetic tape may have been an edgy alternative to celluloid at the time, the distinction seems rather quaint in the digital era.
On display at the 20th iteration of the yearly festival was work by artists who “challenge finiteness”, according to the curators. A popular motive in these explorations of the infinite was the interpretation of streams of data into lights, sound, or images. For instance, the Canadian David Rokeby’s “Taken” refracted images from surveillance cameras in the exhibition hall to create a sort of whole room kaleidoscope of activity. Austrian Herwig Weiser’s “Death Before Disko” is an imposing machine reminiscent of the engine room on the starship Enterprise that transforms data streams from space observation into lights and sound. Not all of the living media sculptures were so high-tech; the German Aram Bartholl’s “Random Screen” is a 5x5 arrangement of “pixels” that are, in fact, foot-wide boxes with tea lights in them. Using the same technology as the famous Saxon “Christmas Pyramids”, the heat wafting from the tea lights makes modified beer cans spin, projecting warm silhouettes onto the pixel faces.
One artist was set out to challenge not only finiteness, but weak stomachs as well. The performance artist “Stellarc”, who was born in Cyprus but lives in Australia, was in attendance to display a third ear made of live tissue that he had doctors implant into his arm. According to reports from Der Spiegel, the ear originally had a Bluetooth receiver and a speaker installed, which could convert WLAN signals from the room into nonsensical noise. The concept, apparently, was that his third ear could thereby whisper sweet nothings into his natural ears. Unfortunately, it seems that the artist’s body did have its limits after all; the get up worked, but had to be removed due to an infection. Next year, the Canadian Stephen Kovats will take the reins as curator of the Transmediale. The architect and current curator of the “V2 Institute for the Unstable Media” in Rotterdam plans to bring more irony into next year’s festival, decrying a stubborn earnestness in today’s media theory. Links:
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