Press release

From Mediaspace

PRESS RELEASE

mediaspace_09 / November 2008
>>> deutsch

In addition to the 22nd Filmwinter by now the 9th Media-Space takes place from November 22nd-25th. Media Space is an independent section within the overall Filmwinter program which works based on a blank canvas principle for art media presentations. Thereby Media-Space studies the changing of artistic and social positions under the influence of information- and communicationtechnology. For the first time Wand 5 e.V. announced an open competition to select the Media-Space 09 curator team. There were no limitations on the means of implementation. The purpose of this open competition was to establish a new experimental space - an >open space< in which artists can perform.

At the End of October 2008 the Media-Space was starting the online curator blog-discussion http://blog.media-space.org/ to establish a new experimental space and built up the program for the show in January.

„The current global economic crisis has an overall impact, even language suddenly became ambivalent in a new way. Financial terms, nobody of us really knew some weeks ago, sum meanwhile up to be a significant part of our daily information flow. It disseminates slowly into our conciousness that the movements or downfalls of stock market by stock market effect our very personal experiences.

So how do artists react to such a self-made global crisis? Which strategies do they develop to deal with the topic? Which artistic practices do they use to explore the complexity of the theme? These questions defined the very actual topic the invited curator team took as point of departure for their discussion.

The topic and related works connect not only the local to the global, but might make a leapfroging shift from local to global - to ‘lobal and glocal’ or any other hybrid form of it. Certain ways of trading and traditional thought processes encountered their own catastrophic collapse, which has its reasons in the way economy was flying high in subsonic speed during the last twenty years.

The current financial crisis certainly marks a rupture, if not an end to the most recent form of neo-liberalism. What will be the effects? Can we find different ways to think and reflect about these processes, as suddenly it came to our awareness, that they are crucial functions of systems we heavily relayed on?

Will there be a wider forum for non-commercial, or just not that strictly commercial art forms? The slight reference made to the 90s terminology ‘Betriebsystem Kunst’, which occurred just days before the crash, when artist Damien Hirst started his big sell-out, was immediately dismantled as a sole event for some isolated super rich. But is there a comparison of this event to the big sell-outs or/and deals of the banks and other risky gamblers, who are playing just with some more or less virtual ‘assets’ on the stock market?

And when finally all went wrong and the world drifted into the financial crisis - it has an undenyable overall effect. And not just concerns some big stock gamblers, who are shocked that someone might be against having them receiving their ‘million bonus’. So will this in the end allow to raise a more substantial discourse? Will it indeed shift the focus towards the immaterial aspects which lie behind the traded assets and effects?

Currently our total debt bubble is three times bigger than all the world’s total values. So as the markets go down the bubble deflates and gets closer to world’s real value. Then the question is why this bubble was invisible so far? In fact some knew that this was coming, some wrote about it. But it seems like a complex situation to get our heads around, to be aware of it. There was and is a ‘global lobotomy’. And ’democratic control’ is a sort of nice construction…

Looking again to artists’ reaction: which practices do they define to as their method work? It seemed pretty appropriate to use as a classification for the works the way they make their material and aesthetic choices to translate this current actuality of ‘im-materiality’.

The processual strategies which seemingly subdue the current financial crisis seem to find an analogy in works, which use generative strategies as they more appropriately seem to embody a certain distance to their material sources. It is a certain consense among the curators, that there is a new generation of –generative– artworks, which could raise these questions of how to improve our awareness for such complexities. So, but what are the current examples of it? How are they to be incorporated in a set of historical artistic references? How will they find a coherent position with regard to the current state of production and social relations? How are they to be incorporated in a set of historical artistic references?

It is the teams ambition to find such works, which rather deal with attention towards the awareness of generally increasing complexities. An inherent beauty is as defining to the ‘translations’ of generative expressions, as their ability to visualize a mind blowing amount of abstract data. The works selected might be able to combine these aspects and find a way of transforming their complex content into a ‘real’ Media-Space event.”