2-DAY "OPEN FIELDS" CONFERENCE, 6 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS, 80 PRESENTATIONS, 3 EXHIBITIONS, PERFORMANCES, AND JUST 140 AVAILABLE SEATS
Moderator: Oksana CHEPELYK
Stefanie RAU. Feeding back (or: And still we keep holding on to our spoons)
The starting point of the text is the occasion of receiving three silver spoons by my grandmother. They carry her personal history of migration, of having had to leave her hometown Riga at the age of 19. The text then unfolds into a contemporary reflection of the migration of people, data, capital and images.
I understand the silver spoon not just as a tool or a symbol but through its greater historic relationships of believe systems, value, trading and exploitation. The silver spoon serves as a metaphor that allows me to speak about different notions of ‘feeding’ and ‘being fed’, the role of technology and our dependency within a paradox media-materialist reality. To reflect about the a ‘virtual silver spoon’ then is a logical consequence of looking at my grandmothers gift through a perspective of computation and value creation.
The material both of digital devices and spoons carry similarities that can be drawn between data mines, silver mines and urban mines as a specific example of today’s nature-culture-waste-relationships. Throughout the text the image of the soup and spoon returns in order to circle around the development of currencies, its colonial history as well as image production.
Biography. Stefanie Rau studied at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and worked as an assistant in the Media Theory department at the Institute for Time-Based Media (UdK). Consequently has been involved in publication and exhibition projects such as the Atlas of MediaThinking and MediaActing in Berlin which was exhibited at Transmediale Festival 2016 and the exhibition Allah’s Automata at ZKM – Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. Her artistic practice takes the approach to think through objects, situations or places to unravel their histories and implicated cultural, political or theoretical connections, and explores writing as performative or voiced articulations. With her practice she aims to inhabit an artistic space in-between disciplines and is interested in offering different perspectives and critical understandings that manifest in the form of essays, lecture performances and essay films.
Currently she is finishing her Masters at the Critical Studies Department at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam and lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin.
Greta HAUER. Proximity Of The Enemy
In 2013 volcanic eruption caused the appearance of a new island in the Pacific Ocean – maritime set of an ongoing dispute between neighbouring nations. The rise of Nishinoshima caused the expansion of Japans Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) – an area which stretches 200 nautical miles of a national coastline, allowing individual countries to exercise sovereign and jurisdictional rights such as the exploitation of resources. The Volcano Island catalyses the ongoing economic and geopolitical conflict of the East China Sea and its undefined borders. ‘Proximity of the Enemy’ (2016) uses various artefacts to reenact the sudden rise of the Island and its political and environmental implication. Outcomes are not contained objects, but rather a point of departure replicating the ridiculousness of a maritime dispute and the past and future of the island.
Biography. Greta Hauer (* 1984, Germany) lives and works in London. Her work crosses reality and the imaginary by observing and reenacting environmental, cultural and political systems. Through an extensive research into a place, condition and history projects result in the design of speculative narratives often presented in form of simulations, objects and films.
Hauer completed her MA at the Royal College of Art (2014). Recent exhibitions include All’s One, Roomservice Gallery NY (2016); Of The Sea, Chatham Historic Dockyard (2016) and Things We Didn’t have Before, Pumphouse Gallery (2015). Hauer recently participated in a residency at Villa Lena Art Foundation (2017) and Roomservice Project Space (2016). Next to her practice she is teaching at Goldsmiths University.
Jaana KOKKO. What There is to See (About Film, 24 min, 2017)
The idea of the film What there is to See is based on the relationship between an urban utopia and nature landscape. The film is a kind of chain of associations: The starting point for the work is the pioneer of romantic landscape painting, Caspar David Friedrich, a white European man. The romantic landscape, that was followed by nationalist and colonialist landscape, are examined in the film, for example, through a French children’s book by Jean de Brunoff. In the true spirit of colonialism, Babar the Elephant presents us with a utopian city in a civilized country.
These two key ideas form the basis of the story, and they are viewed against the background of a new residential area in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki.
Biography. Jaana Kokko is an artist living currently in Helsinki, Finland. In my work I am interested not only in the exploration of the expressive and historical aspects of art, but I find it equally important to understand and be aware of the fact that a finished piece of art and the act of displaying it publicly are political comments. She is Ph. D. Student at Art Department at Aalto University, University of Art, Design and Architecture in Helsinki.
Ilva SKULTE, Normunds KOZLOVS. Hauntological Aspects of Steampunk’s Philosophy
In the era where terms such as ‘post- digital’ and ‘post-media’ are becoming the most obvious terms in description of cultural life, everyday practices and forms of communication the question rises of what kind of philosophical background can be used to better understand and interpret developing strategies and tactics of use and non-use of technologies by people. Some elements of program connected to use of low tech technologies as opposite to high tech digital technologies (e.g. mechanical vs. electronic devices) can be found in the aesthetic paradigm of steampunk – subculture with a rich history in several fields of arts including literature, film, design and contemporary art. Steampunk’s aesthetic ideology contribute to philosophical grounds of technological (de)modernization and hauntology as revitalizing of somehow ghostly retro-futurism of high modernity’s technological advancement.
In the scholarly literature of last decades, the term hauntology was called to life via passage in the “Specters of Marx” by Jaques Derrida who used it: “to describe a concern with apparitions, visions, and representations that mediate the sensuous and the non-sensuous, visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, reality and not-yet-reality, being and non-being.” (Lincoln, Lincoln, 2014, 191).
Steampunk refers to hauntology as pro-active philosophy of Spiritism – one within various traditions of retro-futurism while hauntology itself remains nostalgic retroscpection of un-dead futures represented by the figure of ghost. Ghosts are located in haunted places and things and you can access them through certain spiritist practices (ouija board, etc.). Media technologies can be used to extend man’s perceptual abilities and note, record and preserve traces of haunted.
Biographies. Ilva Skulte is, Dr. Philol.,Assoc. Prof. has a doctoral degree in the history of language from the University of Latvia. Since 2001, she has worked at the Department of Communication in Riga Stradins University, Latvia, spendingthe last ten years as a Director of the Master Programme for Communication and Media Studies. Having taught and written about the history of media and reflecting on the changes in culture caused by new media shediscovered the importance of understanding how new environments cause complex changes in the system of cultural codes and practices including reading, texts, images, multimodality and media literacies (especially, digital literacies) in the context of childhood and school – the areas of research where some of her latest contributions have been made.
Normunds Kozlovs has a background in philosophy and sociology. He is currently lecturing at Riga Stradins University in the Studies Department and in Liepaja University’s New Media Art programme. His academic interests include counter-culture ideology and youth subcultures. http://riga.lat, http://rsu-lv.academia.edu/NormundsKozlovs
Mikko LIPIAINEN. The Potential of Augmented Reality Technology for Building Sites for Translocal, Transcontinental and Intercultural Dialogue: The Case of Digital Ghost of Resistance Monument Project
In addition to desk research a series of interviews and discussions has been conducted in three Brazilian indigenous Pataxó communities inquiring the history of Resistance Monument: a collective public sculpture by the Pataxós which was destroyed by Brazil’s military police while in making in 2000. Prototypes of GPS based augmented reality applications run on mobile devices and utilizing the gathered material are currently under development to be introduced as proposals for further collective, Pataxó inclusive and intercultural building of an online media site which would function in future as a focal point for fostering the public memory of the Resistance Monument and the accounts surrounding it that is currently erased from the physical public sphere and scattered as small information pieces in various medias. This process, called as ‘The Digital Ghost of Resistance Monument’ as its working title is also assumed to provide concrete example of digital technology application to be debated in connection to production of discourse enabling Brazilian indigenous ethnicities specific conceptual and practical development of technologies, as well as their critiques in dialogue with other approaches on technology. The presentation, based on two main observations: that the smart phone provides an important common interface for the Pataxós and non-Pataxós to connect spatially, socially, temporally and culturally and that the indigenous led development of digital technology related discourse is yet underdeveloped – perhaps caused by the lack of design and production side experience – proposes that the potential of mobile devices based augmented reality solutions is worth for further investigation in the context of intercultural dialogue in extreme south of Bahia, Brazil.
Biography. Mikko Lipiäinen is an artist-activist who´s work is mainly socially engaged and multi-disciplinary varying from community organizing to problematize gentrification, challenging art world and mainstream media to touch issues related to migrant labour through open source product design processes and reflect the discourses and roles adopted by media-activists through performance and participatory drama. He has been working mainly in Finland, co-designing and facilitating many local and international activities in a Tampere based DIY cultural center Hirvitalo together with its politically and culturally active public. Lately he´s been slowly developing informal learning and citizen science activities in rural Bahia, Brazil throught the experimentation of hackerspace form. Mikko Lipiäinen is also part of the organizing body of Pixelache festival, one of the notable new media art events in Europe.