[spectre] "Debates & Credits" - A Dutch-Russian Art / Media /Project
Eric Kluitenberg
epk@xs4all.nl
Fri, 30 Aug 2002 22:20:22 +0200
Dear Spectrites
Please find the description including artist bio's and links of the
project series "Debates & Credits" that involves a series of meida
art projects in public spaces in Moscow, Amsterdam and Yekaterinburg.
We hope to launch our (multimedia) journal end of next week where you
can follow the proceedings of the project if none of these cities are
on your route....
best wishes,
Eric
---------------------
"Debates & Credits"
Media Art in the Public Domain
A Dutch-Russian art project-action
http://www.balie.nl/d&c
Amsterdam Sept. 11-22 <-> Moscow Oct. 7-13
Yekaterinburg Sept 26-29 2002
DEBATES & CREDITS is an attempt to find possibilities for artists to
enter into a direct dialogue with mass audiences by intervening with
a series of artist projects in public space; both the physical public
space as well as the public space of the media. The project aims to
mobilise the creative potential of art, which is a priori based on a
critical attitude to reality, to find appropriate tools for artistic
invention that can address problems of life in contemporary society
by means of electronic media.
For "Debates & Credits" 4 artists / collectives from the Russian
Federation and 4 artists / collectives from the Netherlands have been
invited to develop art projects that operate at the intersection of
media and public space. These artists represent a new generation that
is no longer interested in the heritage of the former "underground"
in the east, or the anaemic neo-conceptual art spaces of the west.
The new generation concerns itself much rather with media, with the
dilapidation of the cityscape, streets and facades littered with
aggressive advertisement campaigns, which particularly in the streets
of Moscow have acquired a "special quality of their own". This
generation is no longer satisfied with clinical spaces, isolated art
spaces disconnected from the rest of society. They seek new places
where they can manifest their presence: electronic media - television
and internet -, billboards, advertisement campaigns, posters, public
space and urban architecture, are transformed into new surfaces and
media that can carry their poetic and political messages.
Electronic media permeate virtually every aspect of contemporary
social life. They are so deeply ingrained in the body of society that
they start to act as an organ, the equivalent for the social organism
of the circulatory system for the biological body. But the
information flows transmitted by these media channels do not have to
be the ordinary digestible, tranquillising,. mixture of daily news,
advertising, and entertainment. They can also carry disturbing alien
ingredients...... These may be viruses, or rather injections of vital
antidotes. Contemporary artists are nowadays equipped with a wide
spectrum of tools, starting with new media technologies, and ending
with a much more valuable critical attitude, creative potential, and
a highly developed set of conceptual tools.
The realisation of the artists' projects takes many forms. The
"Debates & Credits" project is going to be an "expropriation of the
expropriated". This reversal is sought for by means of the same PR
and business technologies that attempt to seize public attention and
opinion at large.
Surprisingly, it now seems a natural and even logical development,
how the language of mass propaganda has passed through various stages
of transformation in Russia and the former USSR; from avant-garde
AGITPROP of social action, via the monumental style of communist
proclamations of "the right way to the enlightened future", to the
insane optimism of slogans and faces represented by the fictions of
commercial advertising or election-campaigns. Meanwhile in the
Western frame entertainment politics have long become the standard
model of political discourse (Reagan, Clinton, Berlusconi, Fortuyn).
The question how to make words and images work for the distribution
of ideals, ideologies, products, or politicians, is reduced to a
purely technical problem. A problem that can easily be resolved with
the implementation of smart PR techniques.
Our question to artists and activists is how they can reappropriate
the advanced communication tools of the mainstream P.R.
technologists, and put them to the advantage of genuine human
concerns, use them as a creative outlet...?
What can art offer instead of, or in addition to, political and
advertising assurances?
DEBATES & CREDITS will explore new hybrid tactics, developed often
beyond the context and aesthetics of visual arts. Led by centrifugal
forces, these tactics tend to explode the structure of information
consumption from the inside.
-----------------------------------
The curators:
Tania Gorucheva (Moscow)
e-mail: tangor@redline.ru
Eric Kluitenberg (Amsterdam)
e-mail: epk@xs4all.nl
Organisations:
De Balie - Centre for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam
Agency for Social information, Moscow
Sverev Center for Contemporary Arts, Moscow
Macros Center, Moscow
-----------------------------------
Debates & Credits in Yekaterinburg ( 25 - 29 September 2002)
The Debates & Credits project will be represented by a selection of
the participating Dutch artists during the festival "The culture of
the Netherlands Kingdom in Yekaterinburg". The local projects are
organised by the YYekaterinburg Branch of the National Center for
Contemporary Art, and will be executed in the period of 26 - 29
September, 2002.
Yekaterinburg Co-Curator:
Arseni Sergeev
e-mail: agitazia_art@pochtamt.ru
-----------------------------------
Debates & Credits Web-Site and Web Journal:
More information and links can be found at the website of Debates & Credits:
http://www.balie.nl/d&c
A web journal that will document the entire project will be launched
at the same location during the first week of September. The journal
will contain up to date information, reports, images, audio and video
impressions, and other relevant materials about and around the
individual art projects.
-----------------------------------
Support:
Debates & Credits is supported financially by the Amsterdam Fund for
the Arts, the Mondriaan Foundation, the Royal Netherlands Embassy in
Moscow, and by the HGIS Culture Program of the ministries of Foreign
Affairs, and Education, Culture and Science of The Netherlands.
-----------------------------------
Participating Artists and Collectives & Web Pages:
(Please Note: Most of the Russian sites require installation of
Cyrillic fonts for proper legibility!)
Archaeopteryx / .ru
This group of young artists from Izhevsk have already produced a
series of actions where they represented their artistic reflections
on functions of different archetypal images; both of traditional folk
and contemporary mass cultures.
Their project PACKING was presented at the Cultural Capital, 2001
festival. The idea of the Package action was to paint 9-storey
housing blocks (the traditional Russian standardised housing "boxes")
in Izhevsk with protection labels, normally used on transport boxes.
The labels give notice of special requirements during transportation
and usage. The action Package uses the standardised visual language
of commodity circulation to redirect the attention to the residents
these "boxes". The common relation of these labels to the objects
they were meant to protect now seems projected onto the people
themselves, as if urging to protect people: DO NOT WET, DO NOT BREAK,
HANDLE WITH CARE.
This humorous intervention acquires a second layer of meanings when
situated in the Russian context where several explosions in similar
living blocks, ascribed to fundamentalist terrorists, became an
incentive to step up Russian military efforts in Chechnya. For
Debates & Credits Archaeopteryx will repeat their PACKING action in
Moscow. In Amsterdam the possibility of recreating the project in the
high-rise district Amsterdam Southeast is under consideration - a
district under large scale reconstruction and still traumatised by
the crash of a Jumbojet freight airliner10 years ago.
* Home page Archaeopteryx:
http://i-art.udm.ru/eng.htm
* PACKING Project:
http://i-art.udm.ru/packing/index.htm
-----------------------------------
Arno Coenen / .nl
Arno Coenen is a representative of a young generation of Dutch media
artists who works in a wide range of traditional and electronic
media. All his works start from computer-based 3D modelling. Coenen
constructs his images in a 3D digital environment and then exports
the results to different media: a floor mosaic, traditional Dutch
blue & white tiles, stained glass windows, film, video, computer
animation or even interactive installations. His work is always
visually highly spectacular. Coenen is obsessed by the symbolism of
the new heroes of popular culture, computer game heroine Lara Croft,
Thai Boxing World Champion Ramon Dekker, "Gabber" hardcore techno
dancers, Ronald McDonald, US West-Coast trash culture, artificial new
Dutch landscapes with high-tech windmills and cubical houses.
In Moscow Coenen has become inspired by the heroic wall paintings,
mosaics and lavish decorations in the Moscow subway stations. It has
inspired him to develop an up-date of the heroism of the former
Soviet Union for contemporary Russia. In Holland he updated the
folkloristic Dutch sceneries of traditional windmills and wooden
shoes, with Rotterdam's Gabber youth culture (the hardcore techno
dancers), hyper modern architecture and electricity generating
high-tech windmills, yet skilfully executed in ceramic blue & white
tiles produced at Holland's oldest blue & white tile factory, the
Royal Tichelaar in Makkum.
The iconographic update of the heroes of the new Russians has brought
him on a tour to St. Petersburg with one of Holland's most renown
free-fighters, who challenged Russian free fighters on their native
soil. The images of the free-fight spectacle in St. Petersburg, the
fighters as heroes, the audience, the organisers, their exuberant
following have been extensively documented by Coenen on video and in
photography. With this material he intends to develop a iconographic
cycle of digitally processed and reworked images depicting the
'Heroes of the new Russians' in a series of lightboxes and
video-animations. Ideally this iconographic cycle is to be shown as
the decoration of a metro station in Moscow and Amsterdam South East
(the home base of the Dutch fighter Coenen followed to St.
Petersburg).
* Home Page Arno Coenen:
http://www.solidrocketboosters.com
* Projects overview of Arno Coenen:
http://www.solidrocketboosters.com/new_site/data/projects/projects_overview.htm
-----------------------------------
Oleg Kireev / .ru
Oleg Kireev is an art critic (Moscow-correspondent of "Flash Art")
and a political activist. He was a member of the "Against all
parties" campaign, the "Svoi 2000" movement, and an editor for the
infamous "Radek" magazine. He has been involved in a movement of
young intellectuals, artists and writers who organised various large
scale street actions to engage in social and political debate in
public space.
Momentarily Kireev is curator of a project called "Ghetto", dedicated
to cultural and political analysis. "Ghetto" consists of the site
http://www.getto.rema.ru , the mailgetto mailing list, and
publications such as a collective edition "Against all P's" which was
the first of its kind in Russia.
The internet is looked upon in the Ghetto project as the last
remaining space for free publication and unfettered forms of cultural
expression in the Russian media landscape. The project is focused on
influencing public opinion and has definite political aims, a
counter-action to the Chechen war first of all.
For D&C Kyreev wants to create a public spectacle in one of the
larger squares in the inner city of Moscow. Temporarily the square
will be transformed into a public site of celebration and social
encounter. The square is intended to be repurposed as a large scale
open air discussion forum, a gigantic speaker's corner, a celebration
of public space as a space for encounter and exchange.
In Amsterdam Kyreev will develop a silent street performance that
will transport certain aspects of Russian daily life to the streets
of Amsterdam.
* Ghetto project by Oleg Kyreev:
http://www.getto.rema.ru
-----------------------------------
MACHINE (Mark Klaversteijn & Paul du Bois) / .nl
MACHINE is an office that operates at the exact border of design,
(media-) arts and club culture. Klaversteijn and Dubois formed
previously, together with Leo van Munster, the famous collective DEPT.
DEPT & BEZET.NL
DEPT created extensive typography, graphic design, fashion and object
design that has won numerous prices and is included in important
collections of international museums and new Dutch design
anthologies. They created art installations for famous museums such
as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, combining electronic and
traditional media, and created large scale media-environments for art
performances and large club events. In the project BEZET.NL
("occupied.nl") a series of weekly plastic shopping bags were
produced with a stark black/white/red design commenting on political,
social and current events. These bags were distributed at important
cultural locations throughout the city and started to move through
the city-environment as hybrid signs. The bags were connected to
weekly changing web sites that extended the narrative of the images
and texts on the shopping bags and hybridised the different spatial
logics of the bags, the city space and the media space of the
internet.
Moscow Plans:
About their plans for Moscow they write: "By using a number of places
and surfaces in the streets of Moscow we intend to carry through an
intensive 'campaign' during a short period of time. This 'campaign'
will not address so much a set of political aims, but will rather
communicate with the audience, the people passing-by, on a more
personal level. These messages can deal with fear or cheerfulness,
about humour or beauty in day-to-day events. They can be appeals to
gather, or to consider something unexpected."
BeamMobile(tm)
Together with Leo van Munster MACHINE intends to create
BeamMobile(tm), a truck fitted with mobile beam-equipment that can
create a temporary 'light graffiti' by beaming onto large buildings,
bridges and other physical structures. BeamMobile(tm) will create a
temporary presence of the message without ever affecting or damaging
the buildings used as an extended projection screen in the public
urban space. It will be developed as a series of mobile street
performances that appear suddenly and unexpectedly in different
locations throughout the city, sometimes in connection with a planed
and announced event and sometimes without prior warning.
* MACHINE web site:
http://www.ourmachine.com
* Former DEPT home page:
http://www.dept.nl/
-----------------------------------
Leonard van Munster (DonLeo.org) / .nl
Leo van Munster is a young artist who works across a range of
different media. He was formerly part of the famous DEPT collective,
together with Mark Klaverstein and Paul Dubois. .
DEPT & BEZET.NL
DEPT created extensive typography, graphic design, fashion and object
design that has won numerous prices and is included in important
collections of international museums and new Dutch design
anthologies. They created art installations for famous museums such
as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, combining electronic and
traditional media, and created large scale media-environments for art
performances and large club events. In the project BEZET.NL
("occupied.nl") a series of weekly plastic shopping bags were
produced with a stark black/white/red design commenting on political,
social and current events. These bags were distributed at important
cultural locations throughout the city and started to move through
the city-environment as hybrid signs. The bags were connected to
weekly changing web sites that extended the narrative of the images
and texts on the shopping bags and hybridised the different spatial
logics of the bags, the city space and the media space of the
internet.
Recent work and plans:
Van Munster produces installations, media works, graphic design, web
works and recently styled an imaginary TV station for the most
innovative Dutch national public broadcast organisation VPRO. For
this imaginary TV channel (called Channel 7) he developed a complete
visual styling, including graphic design, logo, typography, stage set
design, web sites and video leaders. Recent work includes art
projects specifically realised for the Internet, such as RSI, a game
which if played properly till the end will result in a Repetitive
Strain Injury for the player, and the internet peepshow
Solo-para-Adultos. (http://www.solo-para-adultos.com )
He has also taken up a fascination for sensing technologies that can
automatically register movement, the presence of persons and
otherwise are able to scan the environment. He wants to apply these
small scale and essentially low-tech technologies to create
responsive public environments, that will start to interact with the
public primarily on the level of sound. The space in a sense will
start to 'talk' to the people who pass through it and suggest the
presence of an alien intelligence.
For D&C he is developing a further project which involves customised
mirrors with engraved almost hidden phrases, addressing the person
looking into the mirror - "I know where you are". The phrases in turn
are connected to web sites, where the phrase becomes the URL.
BeamMobile(tm)
Together with MACHINE, Leo van Munster intends to create
BeamMobile(tm), a truck fitted with mobile beam-equipment that can
create a temporary 'light graffiti' by beaming onto large buildings,
bridges and other physical structures. BeamMobile(tm) will create a
temporary presence of the message without ever affecting or damaging
the buildings used as an extended projection screen in the public
urban space. It will be developed as a series of mobile street
performances that appear suddenly and unexpectedly in different
locations throughout the city, sometimes in connection with a planed
and announced event and sometimes without prior warning.
* DonLeo Home Page:
http://www.donleo.org
-----------------------------------
Galina Myznikova and Sergei Provorov / .ru
The artists from Nizhny Novgorod work in different genres: video art,
installation, sound poetry, clothes design, TV advertising. In their
work they touch the problem how the communication mechanism functions
per se, first of all its visual aspect, structure and representative
models. Seemingly without any effort the artists switch between
serene poetic video-poetry and fast-cut, tightly designed and highly
stylised advertisement clips. These contradictory modes of visual
production have an almost natural presence in their work.
For Debates & Credits the artists develop two public installation
projects. In Moscow they plan to erect a public media monument for
collective memory. In Amsterdam the artists have been invited to
create a 5-screen video installation for the facade of De Balie,
which reflects, indirectly, the 9/11 theme and will be launched
exactly one year after the tragic date of September 11, 2001.
(no URL available)
-----------------------------------
PARK 4D TV / .nl
PARK4DTV is an Amsterdam-based organisation that specialises in one
thing: every night PARK4DTV broadcasts a 60 minute television-art
piece made by one artist. 1 hour 1 thing. Pure sound, pure image.
The works vary from computer-generated abstract work (including pure
noise) to ultra hard-core reality tv. Moving paintings. Bombardments
of electrons. Adult stuff. Kid stuff. Their programs are sometimes
exciting, sometimes boring, but always art.
Apart from their daily broadcast in Amsterdam, they have weekly
programs in Rotterdam, New York (Manhattan only, sorry) and Berlin.
PARK4DTV has collaborated with a number of public & commercial
TV-stations around the world, and our tapes have been shown in
museums, galleries, bars, theatres and basically wherever there's a
tv-set or video-beam around.
In Moscow PARK 4DTV plans to realise a series of nightly PARK 4D TV
programs on Moscow cable television, preferably between 01.00 - 0.200
hours every night. Each program is an authentic art work developed
for television within the PARK 4D TV format: one hour, one thing,
pure sound pure image. For this series PARK 4D TV will select a
number of classic works from the extensive PARK archive. New works
will be produced by Dutch artists on-site as well as by invited
Russian media artists to be screened in this series. The series will
be screened at least for the duration of the Debates & Credits
project, but might be extended beyond it, if there is sufficient
interest by artists and TV organisations.
To attract viewers to the Moscow PARK 4D TV programs, the artists
will develop a promotion campaign, consisting of advertisements in
local weekly and daily cultural press and newspapers, promotion clips
aired on TV channels in Moscow, and promotional actions in the Moscow
city space. PARK will also create a temporary PARK office in Moscow
that will be open to the public during and even beyond office hours.
* PARK 4D TV website:
http://www.park.nl
-----------------------------------
Arseni Sergeev / .ru
Arseni Sergeev from Yekaterinburg, can be regarded as a
representative of an important new generation of artists in Russia,
who operate both inside and outside the traditional art system. His
work was featured quite recently in the exhibition Davaj! during the
Berliner Festspiele of 2002 ( http://www.davaj.de ). Beside his work
as an artist, Sergeev is also connected to the Yekaterinburg branch
of the National Center for Contemporary Art and he is one of the
editors of the art magazine "Komod".
Earlier he executed an art project-action "Agitation for Art" with
the Yekaterinburg center. For the project artists from various parts
of Russia produced works in the form of mass-printed paper posters
"agitating for art" that were distributed throughout the city space
with various types of street actions. The content and range of
artistic manifestations was defined by the "leaflet' genre. From
advertising of contemporary art and artists as useful, attractive,
prestigious "goods and services", to the popularisation and social
advertising of contemporary art as a life-style, a new religious
confession, a party, and contemporary artists as political and
spiritual leaders.
Sergeev is interested in the appearance of collective subconscious
complexes of fear in different discursive forms, starting with
folklore horror stories and ending with their use in popular culture
and political propaganda. He is going to produce an art action based
on ironic exploitation of certain elements and motives found in
popular black stories and sujets. While the content of the project is
inspired by archetypical images of traditional and popular cultures,
its formal realization will be based on the sophisticated use of
contemporary strategies and technologies appropriated from the media
industry. Thus, it will become an art parody on methods of
exploitations of "basic instincts" by mass media.
For Debates & Credits he has proposed to develop a promotional
campaign, drawing on the visual language and aesthetics of comics, to
promote a fake corporation called the "Black hand". This corporation
claims to take on responsibility for all fear on earth.
* Agitazia web-site:
http://www.gif.ru/agitazia