MONDOFUNZA

Panel 4: Media Addicts II
Media Addicts II
Moderation: Fuller, Matthew [nl/uk]
Akademie der Künste

Media Addicts II
Many people today surround themselves with a panoply of digital gadgets. Mobile phones and MP3-players, GPS and navigation systems, as well as a multiplicity of media channels for information and entertainment are part of their everyday lives. Wavering between the terror of consumption and comprehensive auto-surveillance, these ‘Media Addicts’ move through a world determined by technologies, in which the borders between the individual, media prostheses and the hybrid layers of cyberspace are blurred. How is our subjective perception of these ‘augmented realities’ changed by mobile media, and what are the effects on social cohesion and on the public sphere? Which desires and which necessities drive us to enter these extended media realities?

Panel Members:
Angerer, Marie-Luise [de]
Bull, Michael [uk]
Cardiff, Janet [ca]

Well Michael Bull is kinda interesting, because he has studied the use of the iPod. He starts off by quoting some users of the iPod, saying that the gadget has made it possible for them to take back control over their life. They are no longer disturbed by the sounds of other people or muzak in shops. They obtain a new social control.
Another quote: “Instead of being a senseless receiver of uncontrolled noise I gain control.” The man uses his iPod for listening to music without commercials and djs, but also to learn Japanese and listen to news talk radio or tech programmes and listening to books. He does not wear it in the shower but everywhere else when he is alone - which seems to be pretty much of his time. He even listens in bed before going to sleep. And when he meets other people, he talks about what he just heard.
Bull says that a lot of iPod users listen to their iPod, when they work. Is it a colonization of personal space or a liberation?, Bull asks.

The users want to make personal spaces and take control of themselves in the space of the city - otherwise the control of their own life tends to fall apart.

Bull had to finnish too soon. The complete lecture will be available for download later. Everything at Transmediale is delayed. Very badly organized. Lots of queues and bureaucracy about tickets etc. And I expected German efficiency
Wondering….why don’t they podcast all this?

Danish readers: Please check Harddisken for an interview with Michael Bull.

Over to Janet Cardiff, who does “audio walks”. She started out with walkmen in 1991. And bineural stereo. The sound becomes 3D like. On a physical site like a castle or a street Cardiff records her voice and talks about the site. She manipulates the tracks with music etc. and the feeling becomes cinematic, when people do the walk with Cardiff in their ears. Interesting.

I have to stop here. My mind wanders off. Danish embassies burning in the Middle East. It is hard to concentrate. I will try to do some podcasting.

Interesting observations on blogging an Mohammed cartoons from Danish blogger Trine-Maria - in Danish of course. You have to take those nightclasses. It’s a nice language

hovedetpaabloggen.dk » Blog Archive » Danmark og Jyllands-posten i weblogs verden over:

“Danmark og Jyllands-posten i weblogs verden over
Bloggere på alverdens weblogs beskæftiger sig ligesom alle andre medier med sagen om Jyllandspostens tegninger, boycot af danske varer i Mellemøsten (herunder Arla) og den diplomatiske og meget alvorlige udvikling af sagen.

For et øjeblik siden så top-5 søgning på Technorati (en søgemaskine, der indekserer indhold fra 27 mio weblogs) sådan ud:

De 4 mest søgte ord har altså at gøre med sagen.

Jeg har også lavet en graf (en service der også tilbydes af Technorati), som viser, hvor mange gange ‘Jyllands-posten’ er blevet nævnt i weblogs i de seneste 30 dage (5.379 gange lige nu):

Og hvis man søger på weblogs, der har skrevet om Danmark (92.972):

Og læg så kommentarerne oveni
Og det man ser i graferne ovenfor er kun de indlæg, som er skrevet af bloggere på deres egne weblogs. Dertil kommer så alle kommentarerne fra læserne af de mange weblogs - og n”

(Via hovedetpaabloggen.dk.)

This may sound strange, but here it is:

Monochrom is an art, philosophy and tech-group from Vienna, Austria.

They did not want to represent Austria at the Biennale in Sao Paulo because of the rightwing governement i Austria in 2000, so they invented Georg Paul Thomann - a fictious Austrian digital artist. And they wrote his biography of 500 pages! Then they went to the biennale as his tech support group. He never showed up, but there were many stories about him and even a couple of interviews.

In 2005 Thomann was killed and had a tombstone. He has stopped not to exist. Finally.

The Monochrom guy also sang a praise to the overheadprojector. IT really can’t be reproduced in writing. This is fun!

They have a new project together with Cory Doctorrow, where you and I should take a digital camera to the movies and make a snapshot of the copyright text at the start of the film and mail it to Monochrom “Instant blitz copy fight”.

Something wonderful strange words in German: Raubkopierer sind Verbrecher.

Well Monochrom has to be experienced. I give up. Words are not enough.

Seems like it is the clash of cultures happening. Here are some people in London supporting free speech and Denmark….

Supporting Denmark | Samizdata.net: ”
 
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The ever industrious Dissident Frogman was toiling into the wee hours last night to produce some splendid graphics for blogs and other websites who want to show their support for Denmark. We now sport one of these graphics in our sidebar because we need to defend our imperfect but hard won rights ”

(Via samizdata.net.)

It is getting harder and harder to see how this conflict can be solved. This a perfect and very terrifying example of how to create serious gaps between people and nations. Sad. I have just been to the Jewish Museum in Berlin today. The thought about how hatred and misunderstandings can drive people to do terrible things haunts me. Will this never stop? Apparently there was a rumor in Syria that Danes would gather on a sqaure in Copenhagen to burn copies of the Koran. This has been spread by SMS by rightwing activists in Denmark (I hear, but is it true?) as a very bad joke. Yet another misunderstanding. And an embassy on fire.

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Embassies burn in cartoon protest: ”

Embassies burn in cartoon protest

Hundreds stormed the site in Damascus
Syrians have set fire to the Norwegian and Danish embassies in Damascus to protest at the publication of newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Angry protesters attacked the Norwegian mission after storming the Danish site amid chants of ‘God is great’.

(Via BBC.)

Panel with Shu Lea Cheang, Jens Hauser and Katrien Jacobs, the latter whom I did not hear, but here is a link.

Shu Lea Cheang (artist) talks about her work at the boundary between art, sex and pornography. How she was banned in Norway in july 2004 because of her exhibition of a “sextent”, where she wanted to make a live-sexfilm. And how she was supposed to do a sf-porn movie for the Zentropa company Pussypower called “Fluid”, where bodyfluids turn people into addicts or something along that line… The fluids being milk! Odd. But she seems to be entertaining. No limits.

Her next project was 56k - tv-bastardchannel = a sexchannel on a website in Switzerland. But a week before the opening the curator got into trouble about the funding and Cheang couldn’t finish her work.

Funny enough she says that for the moment, she just wants to be normal and not transgress anything. Reminds med of the lyric by Ian Dury: “I wanna be straight/no more drugs and staying up late/I wanna be straight/I wanna conform with the welfare state”.

And now she has made a children’s themepark consisting of giant teacups with steering wheels that play lovesongs, when the children use them. Quite cute and not porn at all. I like her.

Link to images of Cheang.

Jens Hauser talks about biotech art. Curator of “L’Art Biotech” where 11 artists working with biotechnology as a form of expression participated. It took place in 2003, and he shows a lot of examples. But why aren’t any of them on exhibition here at Transmediale? It would have been nice. He also mentions biotechkunstneren Eduardo Kac - know for his luminous rabbit. I did an article about him in 1993. Please read it, it’s in Danish, so you have to take a nightclass, sorry

He shows a video of cooks preparing a meal of “Edible, “semi-living sculptures”, which “were cultivated out of isolated muscle cells from frogs on biodegradable polymer scaffolds in bio-reactors” = made without killing animals. He says that the taste of the steaks was questionable. The steaks look like grass and are very very very small.
Here is some documentation from the website:

In Disembodied Cuisine2, a performative installation whose theme was “meat production without victimization”, Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr and Guy Ben-Ary from the Australian Tissue Culture & Art Project cultivated tissue to create a pseudo-positivist junk-food alternative to massive factory farming. Edible, “semi-living sculptures” were cultivated out of isolated muscle cells from frogs on biodegradable polymer scaffolds in bio-reactors. Bio-artists ‘fed’ them daily with a nutrient solution during their cell-cultured lives in a gallery-laboratory featuring a sterile hood and CO2 incubators. Eight weeks later, at a nouvelle cuisine cookout whose invited guests included the happy creatures spared from slaughter as a direct result of the project, they were flamb�ed in Calvados and devoured. Menu-handbills advertising the barbecue were distributed at the local farmers’ market so that the typical contemporary art audience could be enriched by the presence of butchers interested in the prospect of alternative meat production.

Read more: Link

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Well, this year’s theme is humor. Why is art not fun? Why are artists always so sincere and introvert? In fact it is a question I would like to make after spending most of the day with this crowd that is almost as exciting as the inside of a black hole. I know I’m not being very polite here, but apart from some very nice robotics-guys upstairs, people seem to be very absorbed by themselves and their brilliant knowledge of art.
This afternoon I managed to fall asleep while watching a bunch of so called “artvideos”. Some of them pretended to be funny, but I guess you have to be part of this incrowd artscene to really appreciate the joke. I hope I didn’t snore to much.

Now we have live humans on the stage for a panel about humor! The moderator Brian Holmes (a culture critic, society theorist and activist according to the programme) says that humor has become the last resort for people living in a society ruled by large corporations, corrupt governments and stupid media.

Ah, he talks about satire - “the devastating power of mediasatire as we can see it in a racist Danish newspaper these days” - “watch tv tonight” he says and asks if the cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten will spark the first European civilwar! Very interesting to hear how this story filters through the academia in other countries.

I did not agree with the paper when they first printed the cartoons, but neither the editor nor the cartoonists are racists. In fact the cartoonists are traditional left wing sort of alternative politically correct Danes. In my opinion there was no reason to provoke, but on the other hand they used their freedom of speech to point at some very undemocratic elements in the Danish society. Namely the imams. But unfortunately in a rather clumsy way that insulted a lot of other muslims as well.

And now the case has taken a turn to be about freedom of speech that is attacked by religious dictatorships and fanatical fundamentalists in the Middle East. The case is being used by oppressing regimes to take the pressure off internal political matters. And Denmark is being held hostage.

Now Holmes talks about socially engaging humor - subversive humor. Which is concerned about how to “fuck the media”. An Indian group walking around just laughing as a protest. He praises Yesmen (my friend Andy aka Dr. Bichlschnaps as he fancies the Danish Red Aalborg a lot) Danes for Bush (my friend and former digital pupil Mads Brügger). Holmes calls it “a collective protest against new liberalism” and claims that “fair trade is an incredible joke”. He is more predictable than I feared…

On the panel: Sebastian Lübcke - programmer, artist and author. Gerald Rauning - philosopher and art critic, has written a book about art and revolution. Anne Marie Duguet professor of art, audiovisual and tv at University of Paris. Book “Video; memory in your fist”.

Her presentation does not work, but she claims that it is “extremely foenni” and everybody laughs! Nothing as funny as a presentation at a conference that does not work. No picture no sound and now it comes. Kinda Residents like. In French. FOENNI…. not really, nobody laughed. Probably they do not understand French…
I liked the video from the first session with the Mongolian military orchestra during the SARS scare a lot more. But then again, we laughed at people from another culture acting ridiculous, so we were probably being racist according to the society theorist Mr. Holmes…

This session is suffering from the fact that you can’t theorize about humor without killing it. Even the other guys on the panel look very very bored. Well, this is not fun. It is serious humor. Slow death in the afternoon and my battery is running low. Soon I will have to leave and consume German beer with a Danish photographer, who has a very loud laughter, which leaks out of him like bursts of steam all the time.

Gerald Rauning takes over. I hate speakers who are reading aloud from a manuscript. And even more when they are not at all good at reading aloud.

…..somehow The Beach Boys force their way into my mind:
“Well she got her daddy’s keys and goes cruising just as fast as she can now/seems like she forgot all about the library like she told her old man now/she goes cruising to the hamburgerstand now/and she’ll have FUN FUN FUN ’till her daddy takes the T-bird away…” or something like that.

Roger over and I’m out….where’s my T-bird?

Finally arrived in Berlin. I haven’t been here since 1990 right after the wall had come down. In fact my only map still included the wall. I bought a new one at Tempelhof Airport. It’ll be fun to compare the two.

Pga. spam og en flytning til Wordpress, der trækker ud, så er FUNZAFUNZA midlertidigt flyttet til MONDOFUNZA.COM. Her vil du blandt andet få oplevelser fra Transmediale06 i Berlin i de kommende dage.

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Wiedersehen…