Impressions III

Sexy

Artistic director of Castle Plueschow, Udo Rathke

Woody on stage

Woody and Judy

Joachim, long time regular on DL and director of photography

Trixie G., André Werner and the enchanting Ms. Cosima Reif from Vienna

Heroes at dawn
Klaus W. Eisenlohr and Audio supervisor Andreas aka DJ Parry Hotter

Guardian Angels of the bar, Thomas Grandola & Ania

Queen of the Team Judy Schlesinger in talk with technical supervisor Jobst Buerkle

Presenting Nadya Cazan: Actress and Fairy

Nadya Cazan in talk with Holger Ernst

Daniela Hendel and Martin van den Oever during Q&A

The Laptop Orchestra Berlin

The Laptop Orchestra Berlin

The Laptop Orchestra Berlin

Fabiana Roscioli, NEM (Nadya Cazan), André Werner

Klaus W. Eisenlohr introducing Live From Second Life

The upper part of the screening room

Showdown at Stimmann Creek

(JB) Some more on two films from yesterday's Urban Research block. Like André Werner's “Flash” from the opening evening, Berit Hummel's “Ein weites Land” (2007) is a dissection of film clichés, this time of Hollywood's male Western Hero. Unlike Werner's high-speed romp through Horror cinematography, Hummel's take on the genre archetype is rather a precise surgical undertaking, reduced to the performative reconstruction of immediately recognisable token gestures & movements. In a series of – if I recall correctly – fourteen scenes, we witness the encounters of two male figures; even though stripped from the usual iconography and plot progression, each and every interaction seems to be taken straight out of a classic Western. Which it is not, as Berit Hummel told me; but obviously, we do not have to rely on cowboy hats and tumbleweed to know our Hollywood staple heroes, even if they are clad in business suits and filmed solely on the grounds of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz.

Of course, the Potsdamer Platz & the Businessmen and the Cowboys & their homelands collide on several levels. There is the bizarre quality of the Potsdamer Platz itself – raised in no-man's land by former chief urban planner Hans Stimmann and a selection of international star architects – which echoes the fakery of the Spaghetti Western's “american” setting (while being far less entertaining, unfortunately), the slightly frivolous historicism of the post-modernist buildings and the artificial insertion of patches of a “natural” landscape, which allude to the suppressed dream of the untamed – hence natural – male conqueror expressed through the genre narrative. For which we, obviously, can find some parallels in the figure of the carnivorous yuppie businessman; we do all know that Pat Bateman is still out there, somewhere.

(On a side note - in a irritating, though interesting twist, Hummel's Film was shown in half of its original speed due to an technical mishap – which at least I mistook for intentional, as slow motion is another staple effect of the Western genre and thus seemed rather natural)

There was also a very short and very formalist film by Steven Ball – “No-Way Street” from 2007 – depicting police cordons and traffic re-routing in London, which might or might not have been shot with the 2005 London bombings in mind. On his website, he calls this a “strategy of producing public spaces of exception” – I suppose I have ranted enough on politics and public space in the previous posts, but even besides actual interferences into urban transit, there is a rather strange correlation between terror and security issues on one hand and architectural and aesthetic decisions on the other. The formal representation and organisation of dangerous or endangered spaces is something we might want to keep in mind as it affects our environment in a quite subtle but still immediate way.

OK – I'm off to the lounge again, see you later!

Cheers, JB

Who watches the Watchmen?

(JB) Lets stick to Thursday's surveillance issue with the aptly named Surveillance Camera Players and their piece “1984”. The SCP hail originally from New York, although – according to their website – similar groups have been organized in other cities. We have seen a lot of anti-surveillance-art post 9-11, but the SCP have been around since 1996, and draw their inspiration from classical media and performance art (think Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, Vaile Export etc.) rather than the technological or critical-studies-infused takes on surveillance we are used to by now through the Transmediale or Ars Electronica. Klaus W. Eisenlohr had placed their video within a screening named “Psychogeography”, after a term coined by the Lettrist & Situationist movement in the fifties, and I would say that the SCP fits very well into the radical absurdist style of their predecessors.

The Surveillance Camera Players both used and protested again CCTV recording with playacts specifically designed for surveillance cameras.
Sari Carel photographs abandoned contemporary houses in Israel. She thus reflects on the left behind dreams, promises and plans connected with single-family houses.
Thomas Fuerhapter and Ken Paul Rosenthal give a voice to psychological effects of urban experiences, not avoiding the irony of the possibility to overrate such experience.
Elke Marhöfer deconstructs the interaction of political talks by young international artists, and confronts those with her own media interaction with young black youths in the streets of New York. She is thus reflecting the mixture of failure and need of such practise.

Also, the piece we've seen is quite paradigmatic for classical Media Art with its usage of recording & transmission on multiple levels. Basically, the SCP stage drastically abridged versions of popular plays or texts (Jarry's Ubu Roi, Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Orwell's Animal Farm & 1984 – well, you might see a common theme emerging ...) which are performed using big cardboard signs with text passages in front of “public” surveillance cameras. The performance “1984” was staged in a subway station in NYC, and recorded from the monitor attached to the surveillance camera; thus, the whole thing retains its performative aspect as we don't see a recording of a theatrical performance itself, but simply the recording of a surveillance screen attached to a camera, currently – and independently of the artists actions – recording a theatrical performance.

Even without the video-of-a-video-of-a-performance cleverness, I really like the “parasitic” concept of SCP's work. Some of you might have seen a work with a similar concept - “Stealing Beauty” by Israeli Artist Guy Ben-Ner in Berlin's DAAD Gallery earlier this Winter; Guy Ben-Ner basically staged a short film with his family using the displays in an IKEA store as a setting (obviously, he was kicked out from several IKEAs before he could finally complete the movie).

Kim Collmer, curator of Monumental, withSophia New and friend

The parasitic abuse of “public space” (please note the quotation marks for inherent suspicion and/or paranoia) and its shady equipment is taken to another level in the charmingly nerdy “Palpatine am Platz der Vereinten Nationen” by Sven Kalden (2007), shown during the screening of Films selected by Kim Collmer. To a MIDI rendition of appropriate Star Wars tunes, the black-robed demagogue remodels the rather ungainly fountain on the “Platz der Vereinten Nationen” into a bizarre installation, re-routing the water flow to something we might interpret as a symbolic light saber replica from the Star Wars canon. Finally, the now water-soaked “Palpatine” takes his very own place as the heroic saber wielder in a monument to, well, himself.

The comic capers of the Star Wars antagonist reinforce an inherent absurdity of their setting; the “Place of the United Nations”, formerly the site of a Lenin monument (and accordingly named Leninplatz until 1992), is indeed a involuntarily ironic comment in itself, on both the failed representative agenda of the GDR and the dubious naming choice of a veritable non-space by its successor (which might lead to some rather serious questions about Germany's commitment to the idea of a international community).

Check back soon for more on Friday's screenings -

Best, JB