[rohrpost] (fwd) Lunch Bytes Conf., Berlin: Thinking About Art and Digital Culture

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Lunch Bytes Conference: Thinking About Art and Digital Culture
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

20 + 21 March 2015

Lunch Bytes examines the consequences of the increasing ubiquity of 
digital technologies in the art world by addressing the role of the 
internet in artistic practice from a wide range of perspectives. The 
series consists of events, each dedicated to a different topic and 
bringing together artists, media scholars, designers, curators and 
intellectuals. The conference in Berlin marks the conclusion of the 
discussion series which took place in many different cities: 
http://www.lunch-bytes.com/events/

Participants include: David Joselit, Ilja Karilampi, Ben Vickers, 
Diedrich Diederichsen, Kerstin Stakemeier, Christoper Kulendran Thomas, 
Stephan Dillemuth, Constant Dullart, Hito Steyerl, Maria Lind, Jesse 
Darling, Cecile B. Evans, Cornelia Sollfrank and others.

Conference website:
http://www.lunch-bytes.com/events/upcoming/lunch-bytes-36/


CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

20 March 2015 6-9pm

Performance
"SEO City"
◆ Paul Kneale, artist, London
Paul Kneale's performance explores how meaning is re-routed, 
transferred, and affected by the technological and architectural 
infrastructures it travels through and depends on. His performance is a 
reiteration of a script of a Lunch Bytes talk in London with the title 
"Digital Infrastructures and the Organisation of Space." After a video 
of the discussion was uploaded to YouTube, the platform automatically 
generated a transcript using language recognition software in order to 
make its content searchable. Kneale subsequently worked with this 
generated script and staged it in a video and an installation, each 
taking into account the distinct architectural and material framework it 
was shown in. “SEO City” is the most recent iteration of the work and 
combines video material created in anticipation of it's arrival at the 
HKW with elements of live performance.

Welcome
Johannes Ebert, Secretary General of the Goethe-Institut, and Bernd Scherer,
Director Haus der Kulturen der Welt

Performance
"Noise Tribe Speaking-Out-of-Control"
◆ Jenna Sutela, writer and artist, Helsinki
Jenna Sutela's written, directed, installed, and performed projects seek 
to identify and react to precarious social and material moments – most 
recently, the relationship between the body and its technologically 
mediated environment. Exploring language and artificial intelligence, 
Sutela’s performance "Noise Tribe Speaking-Out-of-Control" treats 
language as a virus and encryption as poetry. It includes a linguistic 
scramble suit and audio CAPTCHA.

Introduction
Melanie Bühler, curator Lunch Bytes, Amsterdam

Keynote Lecture
"Dark Cloud: Shapes of Information"
◆ David Joselit, Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, 
New York
This lecture will explore how the metaphor of "the cloud" as an elastic 
and scalable information storage system applies to artists' efforts to 
demonstrate the shapes that information can assume – in other words, 
information’s plasticity. Two primary themes will be addressed: 
profiling, as a technique for personifying configurations of data, and 
extraterritoriality, as the capacity for information (like the weather) 
to break free from particular locations and thus to challenge 
territorial forms of sovereignty. Are spaces of extraterritorial 
information also sites from which political claims can be made? Or, on 
the contrary, do we need to protect ourselves from the exposure of 
information’s easy circulation – operating not from a darknet but from a 
Dark Cloud?

Performance
"Kapital FM"
◆ Ilja Karilampi, artist, Berlin
Ilja Karilampi’s installations, videos, and texts juxtapose industrial 
effects with biographical anecdotes, staging mythologies in which 
mainstream cultures and subcultures are synthesised. His performance for 
the Lunch Bytes Conference is a mixture of a live version of his weekly 
radio show “Downtown Ilja” on Berlin Community Radio, fragments of the 
Lunch Bytes talk he was part of in Helsinki entitled “Structures and 
Textures: Sound,” which examined signature sounds such as “Maybach 
Music,” and performative elements in which Karilampi takes on different 
roles and characters on the mic, with the assistance of a smoke machine.
  21 March 2015 10am-7.30pm
10.00-11.15am
Panel 1: Medium
With:
◆ Maeve Connolly, writer, lecturer in the Faculty of Film, Art and 
Creative Technologies at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and 
Technology, Dublin
◆ Katrina Sluis, artist, writer, curator Digital Programmes 
Photographers' Gallery London
◆ Ben Vickers, curator of Digital Serpentine Galleries, London
Moderated by:
◆ Toke Lykkeberg, curator, Copenhagen
The first panel will focus on the concept of the medium. Digital 
techniques and tools have transformed raditional disciplines and blurred 
their external boundaries, while new and emerging forms of artistic 
roduction reflect the increasing ubiquity of the digital. This panel 
invites a discussion of the medium as an analytical entity, revisiting 
the concept of medium specificity. Does it still make sense to think in 
formal, media-related categories or have we moved beyond the medium as a 
recognisable and classifiable entity in the age of pervasive computing?

11.45am-1pm
Panel 2: Structures and Textures
With:
◆ Diedrich Diederichsen, critic, journalist, author, Berlin
◆ Kerstin Stakemeier, researcher, critic, Munich
◆ Christopher Kulendran Thomas, artist, London/Berlin
Moderated by:
◆ Victoria Camblin, editor/artistic director of Art Papers, Atlanta
◆ Carson Chan, writer and curator, Princeton University, New Jersey
Computational processes can be traced everywhere and are intrinsically 
interwoven in the fabric of our lives. This hybrid reality increasingly 
affects the materiality of artistic production in a variety of fields 
and disciplines. This panel will examine how online culture has affected 
our understanding of materials and question how contemporary art is 
shaped by the infrastructures that subtend the digital realm. 
Considering how the art world's traditional spaces, such as the gallery 
or the museum, relate to the internet as a repository and space for the 
reception of art, the discussion will explore how spectatorship is 
constituted now that we have become used to online viewing habits. How 
do artists’ practices extend and relate to online spaces, and how has 
the production and dissemination of artworks changed?

2-3.15pm
Panel 3: Society
With:
◆ Stephan Dillemuth, artist, Munich
◆ Constant Dullaart, artist, Berlin
Co-moderated by:
◆ Kristoffer Gansing, artistic director Transmediale, Berlin
◆ Hito Steyerl, artist, filmmaker, writer, Berlin
When considering the history of online culture, one sees a significant 
shift in how networked environments have been perceived as common 
spaces. The 1990s ideal of cyberspace, where knowledge and resources 
were shared freely, has largely given way to a webspace that is 
commercial and enclosed. Vast parts of the contemporary internet are 
presently owned by a few private mega-companies, which capitalise on the 
content and data generated by the users of their platforms. The internet 
has turned into a network via which everything is profiled and monitored 
for commercial and state interests beyond users’ control. This panel 
focuses on artistic strategies of resistance in response to present 
mechanisms of control.

3.45-5pm
Panel 4: Life
With:
◆ Jesse Darling, artist, London
◆ Cécile B. Evans, artist, Berlin/London
◆ Cornelia Sollfrank, artist, Dundee
Moderated by:
◆ Elvia Wilk, writer, editor, Berlin
The last panel will zoom in on the individual subject, discussing 
notions such as affect, emotion, and solidarity online. Artists are 
invited to talk about their work relating to the question of how 
identities are established and configured through the various digital 
and material environments constituting our realities. If bodies don’t 
end at the skin but instead extend to and reconfigure themselves with 
the material environments they engage with, what kind of implications do 
digital technologies have for conceptions of representation, embodiment, 
and gender? If the various platforms we engage with influence our 
structures of feeling, how do they shape the way affective ties are 
created and mediated?

5.30-6.15pm
"What Was Pre-Post-Internet? Why Net Art and Cybernetics Are Forgotten"
Keynote Lecture
◆ Melissa Gronlund, writer, critic, co-editor of Afterall journal, 
London/Abu Dhabi
In her presentation Melissa Gronlund will contest the notion that the 
present postinternet moment occupies a uniquely ahistorical position 
based on the enormity of the internet's effects on daily life. The 
histories of net art, cybernetics, and other new media forms, which 
would appear to be the obvious forerunners to today's internet-based 
art, are not typically cited by artists as relevant, nor do their 
concerns and methodologies seem to have taken off. This presentation 
will offer some hypotheses as to why this might be the case, including a 
shift away from modernism and towards depiction and literary realism. 
Other contextual factors, such as the role of contemporary internet art 
in the art world and market, will be addressed.

6.15-7.30pm
Closing Panel Discussion/Q&A
With:
Melissa Gronlund
David Joselit
Paul Kneale
Hito Steyerl
Moderated by: ◆ Maria Lind + Melanie Bühler