ARTBASE (3)
PORTFOLIO (2)
BIO
Christina McPhee http://christinamcphee.net
Berlin Transmediale 03 Diaries, part 3: Relational Aesthetics
Berlin Transmediale Diaries part 3 Relational Aesthetics
Transmediale
Transmediale
berlin transmediale diary part 2: the end of travelling
------ Forwarded Message
From: Christina McPhee <christinamcphee@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 16:57:06 -0800 (PST)
To: rachel@rhizome.org
Subject: berlin transmediale diary part 2: the end of travelling
the end of travelling, berlin transmediale 03 diary,
part 2
Babylon by bus on a bright morning: entered the
Transmediale video universe, including installation,
game, deconstructed collaborative improvisations,
spatialized narratives, animations, a rich hyphenated
brew, a magic potion, a traumraum. Formally and
discursively, video goes archaeological by way of
superlative timewaves, over and under, like digging
through trash middens left over from the most intimate
and anonymous fragments of lives, found, lost. From
a general call for entries to the Images category,
Transmediale 03 organized thematic groups, among them
dreamworlds,? playing games, americanals, tv and back,
documentary, storylines, and architextures? sometimes
the screenings were of just one artist or artist
collective, others were curated groups of short works.
Inside the retro sixties atmosphere reigned of
Transmediale?s interiors, monitors and the big screen
were blasts into phenomena at the edges of memory and
amnesia, the zapping of urban fields like
Bull.Meletic?s WHIR., the typologies of urban
poverty, the implosions of inidividual identities into
units of commodity and surveillance., prime example,
Coco Fusco?s ?Dolores from Ten to Ten?. The mapping
of the world codes itself into a self aware and
autonomic system who dreams in video. A condition in
which the image and sound transfer population mimics
the human explosion of populations on the move,
nomadism all over// people seeking refuge, asylum and
work in the community, while, meanwhile, borders shut
down, possibly permitting movement inside but
difficulty getting into and out of places: the
megacity as a transparent prison. Was it really
possible to play global? --all this nomadism but
between and to places whose hypperreality had invested
itself, an insidious nonnative plant species, to
borrow from the cultural metaphors of Wong Hoy Cheong,
one of the artists in the documentary ?The End of
Travelling.? Around Transmediale some said that
although video was still a rich medium, that it is of
the past, the really important art is in code. How
strange to register an avantgarde ? the old next big
thing ? in surroundings that were mainlining
nonlinearity, looping, recursion, streaming,
bordercrossings, playing fields. Like you could put
art in a lineup still even though culture, our
culture, is in a total mix remix. Narratives,
micronarratives, cresting like froth on waves of
transmutable sound and image...whether interactive or
not...linking estranged dialogues? an ocean of video
that seems to be moving hypnotically, trance dance.
Movement as nonmovement: phenomenology of a condition
of both cultural and formal (aesthetic) nomadism
within nested closed circles or sets signals ?an end
of travelling?, predicted by Virillio, and especially
in a video of the same name, by Heman Chong of
Singapore and Isabella Cornaro of France. The project
was a linguistic response to the state of exhibitions
as clusters of cultures squeezed into a single
platform, like the Biennale model. The sense of
shortened distances, despite the real extent of
physical spatial and temporal separations. A
supermarket infofest. The Asian context, outside of
Asia, telescopes into a cultural flux both mediated
and continuous. The documentary was constructed from
loosely flowing conversation-interviews with Asian
artists. In all of this there was the profound
attenuation of the human strand. the stranded human.
within the reality code. a situation worthy of
Beckett. Or as mez has noted, thinking Shakespearean
tragicomic trope, we become characters in a drama
whose dimensions exceed the boundaries of the stage
and whose alignments are to stars in constellations of
code not disclosed, ghostly, virtual, dissipated.
+ [(d.tached)fixion m.asking as veiled f.act(ion
scripts)]
- context re.placement vs statistical fiction
[Ring?TheRing?Videodrome]
- diss.embl[M].ing reality coding via displays
d.note.ing the
opposition of
g.rap[e]hic pornography
- p.oe[uvre]sis re.Align.ment via hip_h.op[t]ping thru
the i[co]n.verse
of
shakes.p[e]aring terrorTory
But perhaps there is a way to think of the collapse of
the global space, the end of travelling, as a place
for a laboratory of investigations, into the art of
contextual living, Phenomena become propositions of a
sublime, lookjing for the deep structures of everyday
life on the local scale.
More to come...Berlin transmediale diary part three
Relational aesthetics.
=====
<http://www.naxsmash.net>
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
http://shopping.yahoo.com
------ End of Forwarded Message
From: Christina McPhee <christinamcphee@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 16:57:06 -0800 (PST)
To: rachel@rhizome.org
Subject: berlin transmediale diary part 2: the end of travelling
the end of travelling, berlin transmediale 03 diary,
part 2
Babylon by bus on a bright morning: entered the
Transmediale video universe, including installation,
game, deconstructed collaborative improvisations,
spatialized narratives, animations, a rich hyphenated
brew, a magic potion, a traumraum. Formally and
discursively, video goes archaeological by way of
superlative timewaves, over and under, like digging
through trash middens left over from the most intimate
and anonymous fragments of lives, found, lost. From
a general call for entries to the Images category,
Transmediale 03 organized thematic groups, among them
dreamworlds,? playing games, americanals, tv and back,
documentary, storylines, and architextures? sometimes
the screenings were of just one artist or artist
collective, others were curated groups of short works.
Inside the retro sixties atmosphere reigned of
Transmediale?s interiors, monitors and the big screen
were blasts into phenomena at the edges of memory and
amnesia, the zapping of urban fields like
Bull.Meletic?s WHIR., the typologies of urban
poverty, the implosions of inidividual identities into
units of commodity and surveillance., prime example,
Coco Fusco?s ?Dolores from Ten to Ten?. The mapping
of the world codes itself into a self aware and
autonomic system who dreams in video. A condition in
which the image and sound transfer population mimics
the human explosion of populations on the move,
nomadism all over// people seeking refuge, asylum and
work in the community, while, meanwhile, borders shut
down, possibly permitting movement inside but
difficulty getting into and out of places: the
megacity as a transparent prison. Was it really
possible to play global? --all this nomadism but
between and to places whose hypperreality had invested
itself, an insidious nonnative plant species, to
borrow from the cultural metaphors of Wong Hoy Cheong,
one of the artists in the documentary ?The End of
Travelling.? Around Transmediale some said that
although video was still a rich medium, that it is of
the past, the really important art is in code. How
strange to register an avantgarde ? the old next big
thing ? in surroundings that were mainlining
nonlinearity, looping, recursion, streaming,
bordercrossings, playing fields. Like you could put
art in a lineup still even though culture, our
culture, is in a total mix remix. Narratives,
micronarratives, cresting like froth on waves of
transmutable sound and image...whether interactive or
not...linking estranged dialogues? an ocean of video
that seems to be moving hypnotically, trance dance.
Movement as nonmovement: phenomenology of a condition
of both cultural and formal (aesthetic) nomadism
within nested closed circles or sets signals ?an end
of travelling?, predicted by Virillio, and especially
in a video of the same name, by Heman Chong of
Singapore and Isabella Cornaro of France. The project
was a linguistic response to the state of exhibitions
as clusters of cultures squeezed into a single
platform, like the Biennale model. The sense of
shortened distances, despite the real extent of
physical spatial and temporal separations. A
supermarket infofest. The Asian context, outside of
Asia, telescopes into a cultural flux both mediated
and continuous. The documentary was constructed from
loosely flowing conversation-interviews with Asian
artists. In all of this there was the profound
attenuation of the human strand. the stranded human.
within the reality code. a situation worthy of
Beckett. Or as mez has noted, thinking Shakespearean
tragicomic trope, we become characters in a drama
whose dimensions exceed the boundaries of the stage
and whose alignments are to stars in constellations of
code not disclosed, ghostly, virtual, dissipated.
+ [(d.tached)fixion m.asking as veiled f.act(ion
scripts)]
- context re.placement vs statistical fiction
[Ring?TheRing?Videodrome]
- diss.embl[M].ing reality coding via displays
d.note.ing the
opposition of
g.rap[e]hic pornography
- p.oe[uvre]sis re.Align.ment via hip_h.op[t]ping thru
the i[co]n.verse
of
shakes.p[e]aring terrorTory
But perhaps there is a way to think of the collapse of
the global space, the end of travelling, as a place
for a laboratory of investigations, into the art of
contextual living, Phenomena become propositions of a
sublime, lookjing for the deep structures of everyday
life on the local scale.
More to come...Berlin transmediale diary part three
Relational aesthetics.
=====
<http://www.naxsmash.net>
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
http://shopping.yahoo.com
------ End of Forwarded Message
berlin diary transmediale part 1:wings of desire
------ Forwarded Message
From: Christina McPhee <christinamcphee@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2003 00:37:50 -0800 (PST)
To: rachel@rhizome.org
Cc: list@rhizome.org
Subject: berlin diary transmediale part 1:wings of desire
Berlin Diary Transmediale 03: Play Global! (1)
wings of desire
Sunday night made the fast train from Hamburg. Dropped
off gear at the hotel, then raced to catch the S-Bahn
from the west side through snow falling in regular
slash marks against the ink. Traveling across the city
to the east, I was headed for Club Maria at the base
of the Schillerbr?cke, the Schiller Bridge. The
streaming snow muffled concrete details of the vast
topographies of Schloss Bellevue, Freidrichsplatz,
Potsdammer Platz.
All was as ink and sliver as the angels? perceptions
in ?Wings of Desire.? From the train window , the
vast new architectural project of central Berlin
slipstreamed, limned now , post Wenders, in realtim
by the white noise-like slash marks of ten thousand
electronic illuminations. Cyber urbanity like a skein
enveloped and cached the hidden old city and its
fierce memories. The Ostbahnhof station was deserted.
Lost by an erroneous exit, I had to hunt for the
soundstage of Transmediale?s club scene below parking
lots and empty kiosks.
Through an empty boulevard whose snows, punctuated by
taxis and the occasional black dog, feathery snow
trails led down to the base of a prewar bridge, where,
tucked against pylons, stood Transmediale?s Nighttown
incarnation. Club Maria am Ufer, announced its
concrete block and stucco presence with the touch of
surveillance cameras and a neon sign, as if to slouch
like a cowboy bar in Wyoming after closing time. The
intelligence inside was powered by (at that moment)
Random Incorporated?s ?de(feat)? on sound and image
sampling from Jesusalem streets--interpolation of two
divided cities in a multiplicity space.
Thus Berlin unfolded its austere pleasures. The city
as noir cinema prelude to a daytime explosion.
The synoptic /synaptic festival zipped manically
from one high intensity node to another. By day
Transmediale was brightly ensconced rom in a swank
sixties surround in parkland? at the House of Culture
of the World, built in 1959. Elsewhere, venues like
Podewil for sound workshops and performances, and the
Akademie der Kunst for retro shows like Valerie
Export?s pioneer performance/video made for an always
already saturation of action?jodi was in another part
of town,?you had to just try to forget that you
couldn?t clone your body into the multiple tvenues.
The House of Culture, on John Foster Dulles Alle,
held core conference, lectures and workshops.
Ironically the military/industrial epic tone of the
building accentuated the utopian feel of ?Play
Global?. With its swoopy auditorium curves, its
marble slab details and paneled Kennedy style glam,
the House of Culture acquiesced to the hacker invasion
as if to descendents of the fab four. www.maas.de
created an elegant solution for a media lounge with
beanbags and monitors that seemed to seemed to float
with an airy nonchalance. TV screens looped videos
from the images section of the transmediale
competition, in case you had to miss the theatre
screenings, a humane touch, since it was so hard to
make it to everything. These played together with
monitors for the software art and interactive works
online.
Ambition to ?Play Global? propelled an aggressive
foray into representations of modes of being and
presence. Conferences, performances, lectures,
screenings and workshops invoked a communal, often
dissonant social space as the realm of the moment .in
digital practices among collaborative visual,
performance, sound and video artists, coders, dancers,
gamers, tactical media and net workers. Roles
blurred. Sheer simultaneity of works in multiple
locations turned transmediale 03 into a microcosm of
its own desire for a global layered representation.
Moving about was like having a situationiste brain
scan.
I was hunting for a place to stop playing. I wanted
that moment of still reconnaissance, when you know you
are seeing something for the first time that is at the
same time something that seems to have been known,
watched, desired or loved for a duration, before you
or after you, antecedent to your consciousness,
subliminal to your expectations, recursive to your
desires. Something takes you into a suspension with
wings inside the circus spaces of the festival.
Simultaneous transference or global play generates a
game curve on the inside of your skin and heart. This
happened on the intimate scale of a hundred
conversations by day and late into the night; as the
glowing ganglia of the artwork lost out at its edges
to the intense human to human synapses. Torolab,
bootlab, trinity session, de waag. Kunst was inside
the connections.
(more in part 2, transmediale 03
the end of traveling)
??????????????christina mcphee www.naxsmash.net
www.christinamcphee.net
=====
<http://www.naxsmash.net>
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com
------ End of Forwarded Message
From: Christina McPhee <christinamcphee@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2003 00:37:50 -0800 (PST)
To: rachel@rhizome.org
Cc: list@rhizome.org
Subject: berlin diary transmediale part 1:wings of desire
Berlin Diary Transmediale 03: Play Global! (1)
wings of desire
Sunday night made the fast train from Hamburg. Dropped
off gear at the hotel, then raced to catch the S-Bahn
from the west side through snow falling in regular
slash marks against the ink. Traveling across the city
to the east, I was headed for Club Maria at the base
of the Schillerbr?cke, the Schiller Bridge. The
streaming snow muffled concrete details of the vast
topographies of Schloss Bellevue, Freidrichsplatz,
Potsdammer Platz.
All was as ink and sliver as the angels? perceptions
in ?Wings of Desire.? From the train window , the
vast new architectural project of central Berlin
slipstreamed, limned now , post Wenders, in realtim
by the white noise-like slash marks of ten thousand
electronic illuminations. Cyber urbanity like a skein
enveloped and cached the hidden old city and its
fierce memories. The Ostbahnhof station was deserted.
Lost by an erroneous exit, I had to hunt for the
soundstage of Transmediale?s club scene below parking
lots and empty kiosks.
Through an empty boulevard whose snows, punctuated by
taxis and the occasional black dog, feathery snow
trails led down to the base of a prewar bridge, where,
tucked against pylons, stood Transmediale?s Nighttown
incarnation. Club Maria am Ufer, announced its
concrete block and stucco presence with the touch of
surveillance cameras and a neon sign, as if to slouch
like a cowboy bar in Wyoming after closing time. The
intelligence inside was powered by (at that moment)
Random Incorporated?s ?de(feat)? on sound and image
sampling from Jesusalem streets--interpolation of two
divided cities in a multiplicity space.
Thus Berlin unfolded its austere pleasures. The city
as noir cinema prelude to a daytime explosion.
The synoptic /synaptic festival zipped manically
from one high intensity node to another. By day
Transmediale was brightly ensconced rom in a swank
sixties surround in parkland? at the House of Culture
of the World, built in 1959. Elsewhere, venues like
Podewil for sound workshops and performances, and the
Akademie der Kunst for retro shows like Valerie
Export?s pioneer performance/video made for an always
already saturation of action?jodi was in another part
of town,?you had to just try to forget that you
couldn?t clone your body into the multiple tvenues.
The House of Culture, on John Foster Dulles Alle,
held core conference, lectures and workshops.
Ironically the military/industrial epic tone of the
building accentuated the utopian feel of ?Play
Global?. With its swoopy auditorium curves, its
marble slab details and paneled Kennedy style glam,
the House of Culture acquiesced to the hacker invasion
as if to descendents of the fab four. www.maas.de
created an elegant solution for a media lounge with
beanbags and monitors that seemed to seemed to float
with an airy nonchalance. TV screens looped videos
from the images section of the transmediale
competition, in case you had to miss the theatre
screenings, a humane touch, since it was so hard to
make it to everything. These played together with
monitors for the software art and interactive works
online.
Ambition to ?Play Global? propelled an aggressive
foray into representations of modes of being and
presence. Conferences, performances, lectures,
screenings and workshops invoked a communal, often
dissonant social space as the realm of the moment .in
digital practices among collaborative visual,
performance, sound and video artists, coders, dancers,
gamers, tactical media and net workers. Roles
blurred. Sheer simultaneity of works in multiple
locations turned transmediale 03 into a microcosm of
its own desire for a global layered representation.
Moving about was like having a situationiste brain
scan.
I was hunting for a place to stop playing. I wanted
that moment of still reconnaissance, when you know you
are seeing something for the first time that is at the
same time something that seems to have been known,
watched, desired or loved for a duration, before you
or after you, antecedent to your consciousness,
subliminal to your expectations, recursive to your
desires. Something takes you into a suspension with
wings inside the circus spaces of the festival.
Simultaneous transference or global play generates a
game curve on the inside of your skin and heart. This
happened on the intimate scale of a hundred
conversations by day and late into the night; as the
glowing ganglia of the artwork lost out at its edges
to the intense human to human synapses. Torolab,
bootlab, trinity session, de waag. Kunst was inside
the connections.
(more in part 2, transmediale 03
the end of traveling)
??????????????christina mcphee www.naxsmash.net
www.christinamcphee.net
=====
<http://www.naxsmash.net>
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com
------ End of Forwarded Message
-Empyre- in January: Mechanisms of Exposure
-Empyre- for January 2003: Mechanisms of Exposure: Cyberpresence and the
Poetics of Spatialized Film
-Empyre- welcomes in the new year with two European performance and sound
artists, Maria Tjader-Knight of Finland and David Knight of the UK to
discuss their work, "Mechanisms of Exposure".
Based in Brussels and Helsinki, Maria Tjader-Knight and David Knight create
film like spatializations in cd rom and installation. The sheer enormity of
the disparity between the scale of content expressible by code versus the
scale of content experientially and cognitively recognized through human
contextual and analog processing makes us long for perfect code, that is to
say, a complete unified field ideology and syntax. Beneath the nostalgia for
coherence and developmental controls one feels the cold winds of the
totalitarian past, when in the mid twentieth century another obsession with
the topdown comprehensive code of development - comprehensive planning and
development - a unified field- as the mode through which architectonics,
place, and human presence locate and are determined led to much violence.
Humans and their sense of the local and particular themselves became the
OEsublime
Poetics of Spatialized Film
-Empyre- welcomes in the new year with two European performance and sound
artists, Maria Tjader-Knight of Finland and David Knight of the UK to
discuss their work, "Mechanisms of Exposure".
Based in Brussels and Helsinki, Maria Tjader-Knight and David Knight create
film like spatializations in cd rom and installation. The sheer enormity of
the disparity between the scale of content expressible by code versus the
scale of content experientially and cognitively recognized through human
contextual and analog processing makes us long for perfect code, that is to
say, a complete unified field ideology and syntax. Beneath the nostalgia for
coherence and developmental controls one feels the cold winds of the
totalitarian past, when in the mid twentieth century another obsession with
the topdown comprehensive code of development - comprehensive planning and
development - a unified field- as the mode through which architectonics,
place, and human presence locate and are determined led to much violence.
Humans and their sense of the local and particular themselves became the
OEsublime
Erato, muse:<http://www.naxsmash.net/flash/stream.swf
<
Erato, muse of erotic poetry and memory play me naxstreamscape my memory of
this day
>
<http://www.naxsmash.net/flash/stream.swf
<
-------------
<http://www.naxsmash.net>
Erato, muse of erotic poetry and memory play me naxstreamscape my memory of
this day
>
<http://www.naxsmash.net/flash/stream.swf
<
-------------
<http://www.naxsmash.net>