2-DAY "OPEN FIELDS" CONFERENCE, 6 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS, 80 PRESENTATIONS, 3 EXHIBITIONS, PERFORMANCES, AND JUST 140 AVAILABLE SEATS
Moderator: Hiba ALI
Winnie SOON, Sarah SCHORR. Screen Shots: Critical Codes of Capture
What is the distinct materiality of screen shots as a mode of capture? Print Screen (or PrtSc) is a button commonly found in present keyboards, where the computer commands, such as “screencapture” and “scrot,” are used in various operating systems to reproduce a computer screen. Before making the screenshot, the objects in the frame are moved in the act of composition and the shot then captures the ephemerality of objects that are both immaterial and material, physically occupying a space in computer memory. What material substrates are being captured? What kind of artistic practices have emerged from and through the act of screen capturing when computer code is performed underneath? In the following presentation, we discuss two of our artworks that use screenshot practice, highlighting the inherent entanglement of humans and nonhumans, subjects and objects in order to explore the materiality of this specific mode of capture. These two works, My Dad’s Networked Watch (Schorr 2017) and Unerasable Images, (Soon 2017) both arise from the shared impulse to archive the screen as artists but employ contrasting strategies. We argue that the screen shot practice interrogates the specific materiality of ephemeral digital space, in which nothing can be fully erased (Kirschenbaum 2012). Through our two works that employ screenshots as part of artistic processes, we analyze how creating screen shots can produce affective, compositional and evidential traces within and beyond the frame of the shot.
Biographies. Winnie Soon is an artist-researcher who resides in Hong Kong and Denmark. Her work approach spans the fields of artistic practice and software studies, examining the materiality of computational processes that underwrite our experiences and realities in digital culture. Winnie’s work has been presented at festivals, conferences and museums throughout the Asia Pacific, Europe and America, including but not limited to Transmediale2015/2017, ISEA2015/2016, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Si Shang Art Museum, Pulse Art + Technology Festival, Hong Kong Microwave International Media Arts Festival, FutureEverything Art Exhibition. Currently, she is Assistant Professor at the Department of Digital Design in Aarhus University. www.siusoon.net
Sarah Schorr is an American artist and researcher. She received her PhD from the department of Aesthetics and Communication at Aarhus University in Denmark and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY. Her research focus is photography, social media, and visual methods. These fascinations often intersect with her photographic art projects. Since her first solo show in 2004 at Scalo Project Space in New York City, she has exhibited her work internationally. “Borrowed Glitter,” a catalogue of her visual work is available through the Yancey Richardson Gallery.
Raivo KELOMEES. From Net Art to Post-Internet Art: The Cyclical Nature of Art Movements
It makes sense to look back at the experience of net art in the 1990s. This was an era of innocence, eagerness and heroes of a kind, when net art works as art were brand new.
In the 1990s, art had to be brought to the internet, settled there and only then was it possible to see how the environment influenced the content, whereas in the current post-digital and post-internet era, the internet environment is like nature: it surrounds us.
The most significant names were Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, Jodi.org, Vuc Ćosić, Graham Harwood and Heath Bunting, and the theoreticians were Tilman Baumgärtel, Josephine Bosma, Geert Lovink, Pit Schultz and others. The brightest star was Shulgin, the author of the fictitious birth story of the term “net.art”.
I am discussing work of a great emotional potential by Estonian Laur Tiidemann “Piano” (2000).
How to characterize artistic trends in context of following terms: post-internet art, post-digital, post-media?
I am drawing sketchy development curve from net art to post-internet art.
The critical voices on net art were heard since its birth. In 1997 I interviewed Lev Manovich, Geert Lovink, Andreas Broeckmann and Alexei Shulgin, tentatively touching upon the emerging trend. The rising “wave” was clearly perceived.
I am discussing terms: post-media, the post-media condition, Mainstream Contemporary Art (MCA) and New Media Art (NMA). The last ones as they were proposed by Edward Shanken in an article in 2010 and dicussed during Art Basel in 2010 between the curators Nicolas Bourriaud and Peter Weibel.
Finally I am diving into list of post-internet art definitions to ask a question about new media trends in context of the history of last 25 years.
Biography. Raivo Kelomees, PhD (art history), artist, critic and new media researcher. Studied psychology, art history, and design in Tartu University and the Academy of Arts in Tallinn. Has published in main cultural and art magazines and newspapers of Estonia since 1985. Book author, “Surrealism” (Kunst Publishers, 1993) and an article collections “Screen as a Membrane” (Tartu Art College proceedings, 2007), “Social Games in Art Space” (Estonian Academy of Arts, 2013). Doctoral thesis „Postmateriality in Art. Indeterministic Art Practices and Non-Material Art“ (Dissertationes Academiae Artium Estoniae 3, 2009).
Doville DAGIENE. Anthropology of memory and imagination: time and place in photography
The creative and research parts of the proposal submitted for the Open Fields 2017 conference constitute the extention of the topic examined during previous years – Image and text: the problem of interpretation of photographs and poetry. This survey served as a significant initial impulse for the further more extensive exploration that aims at understanding the relations and interconnections of memory and interpretations of visual language. Creative and research components of the artistic project seeks to verify the hypothetical assumption that personal memory of concrete individual and topographical historical memory of a particular locus determines the peculiarity of photography as visual language, its perception and understanding. It is presupposed that a narrative in photography is indistinguishable from place and time, however, the question immediately arises – how is time represented in photograph? The dimension of time in photography is distinct from present in cinematography, in spite of the superficial similarities of two visual technologies. One may say that in photography, where the moment is halted, the temporal dimension is absent completely or represented only indirectly.
The latest research has been conceived as a reflection of creative experience in pursuit of the ways to capture memory and imagination through the medium of photography.
Biography. Dovilė Dagienė (born 1981) is a photographer and lecturer who lives and works in Vilnius. In 2007 graduated from Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts, Photography and Media Art with MA degree. She is PhD student in the Photography and Media Art Department at Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts.
Her research interests include memory, imagination, time and place in photography. Currently she’s working the boundaries of analogue photographic mediums with her latest project on astrophotography.
Violetta DE SAGA. Transcendence in Immanence
“Transcendence in Immanence“ is an Art-Science project in progress with series of performative and interactive installations that will include sound & visual art, as well as contemporary postmodern technical technologies, interdisciplinary science fields and science-related new media art:
“ Blue in Green ” is a video-installation based on the philosophy of suprematic forms of Kazemir Malevich and the philosophy of cosmism. It is about life and death, a merging point of transcendence and immanence where life and death affirms the organic synthesis of dialectal opposites that are transcendent through staying immanent within actual or present awareness. “ … Between sky and earth, having overcome gravity, geometricized structures were formed in weightlessness …“ R. Khidekel
“Soundscapes of Tide A“ is an interactive video-installation and sound scape created with a help of an analog oscillator.This work gives you the opportunity to create your own rhythms and sounds , through analog generated oscillator. Determinism of the video entangles with with the indeterminism of the sound scape of the oscillator.
Earthly spaces that lead us to find outer worlds and creating spatial-pictorial fantasies…
“Soundscapes of Tide D“ an interactive video-installation with a digital oscillator. Creating your own rhythms and sounds, through digitally generated oscillator.
“Landscapes of Movements“ an interactive video-installation with a sensor that detects movements. This work gives you the opportunity to change the video by movements.
Biography. I am an Ukrainian-Armenian artist based in Berlin, Germany. I was born in Aserbajdjan, grew up in India, studied and lived in Kiev, Amsterdam, Croatia and Berlin. Through my eclectic life experiences of radically different cultures, concepts like borders, nationality and other symptoms of closed mentalities became increasingly foreign to me. And of course it has been reflected in my interdisciplinary artistic practices starting from my early stages of artistic research, through theatre, music (jazz vocal), painting and performance art. In the past few years my artistic expression, approaches and methods grew into practice of abstract visual and sound art, as well as greatly, in contemporary postmodern technical culture, philosophy, interdisciplinary science fields and science-related new media art. As a result I pursued studies at Science Underground Academy, Dubrovnik, Croatia and Master course “Media & Art”, Prof. Dr. phil. Alberto De Campo, in the University of Arts in Berlin, Germany. Performances and exhibitions that I created were shown in Museum of Modern Art of Strasbourg, France (2014), Multi-Media Festival Diffrazzioni in Florence, Italy (2016), Art galleries of Austria, Spain, Croatia, Ukraine and Germany.
Cristina COCHIOR. In The Company Of Bots
With the increase in the number of visitors on Wikipedia came new challenges of maintaining the reliability of information. The Wikipedia editor community has built and sustained what it calls a ‘culture of verifiability’ through the efforts of both humans and algorithms. An example of the latter is Cluebot NG, one of the most prolific bots on the platform and currently the sole based on a neural network, which scans the newest edits to detect and revert vandalism attempts.In my presentation I argue that the illusion of Cluebot NG’s autonomous operativity propelled its success as a policing agent and had the effect of anthropomorphising the algorithm while simultaneously reducing the social complexity of new editors to data points. Through the process of assigning human attributes to the bot, it becomes an agent in a mutating form of bureaucratic governance that is replacing charismatic humans, as Mathieu O’Neil proposed in his book Cyberchiefs, with charismatic code.
Bringing in focus one of the bots reflects larger patterns in the relationship between what are essentially human and non-human contributors collaboratively working together on a knowledge platform. This paper seeks to reveal how power is redistributed within this environment and what can be said about the human community by peering deeper into the algorithmic actors ecology.
Biography. Cristina Cochior (RO/NL) is a researcher and designer working in the Netherlands. With an interest in automation practices, disruption of the interface and peer to machine knowledge production, her practice consists of research investigations into knowledge sharing and bureaucratic systems. Having recently graduated from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, she is currently examining ecologies of algorithmic workers on digital platforms.