[spectre] Berlin exh. -tainment, media games of the consciousness industry

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Date: Mon,  6 Dec 2004 22:39:53 +0100
From: ggolder at free.fr


Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst
Oranienstrasse 25, D-10999 Berlin
Tel. ++49/(0)30/616513-0
http://www.ngbk.de

Press Release

- tainment
media games of the "consciousness - industry"
11.12.2004 – 06.02.2005

OPENING  December 10, 2004 7 p.m.

An Exhibition by RealismusStudio of NGBK, Neuen Gesellschaft für
Bildende Kunst, Berlin

Concept and Realisation: Dr. Hiltrud Ebert, Anke Hoffmann, Christin
Lahr, Frank Wagner, Ute Ziegler

Opening times: daily 12 midday - 6.30 p.m.,
closed: 24., 25., 31. Dec. 04 and 1st Jan. 05

Artist Lists:
Friederike Anders, Guy Ben-Ner, Claudius Böhm/Volker Möllenhoff/Heiko
Sievers, Geissler & Sann, Gabriela Golder, Jon Haddock, Eno Henze und
Andreas Lorenschat, Christian Jankowski, Anja Kempe, Korpys/Löffler,
Marc Lee, Johannes Maier, Bjørn Melhus, Monika Oechsler, Christian
Pundschus/Philip Grözinger, RothStauffenberg, Björn Schülke, John Wood
und Paul Harrison

The exhibition aims to be a critical reflection of the controversially
discussed consequences of technical and digital manipulated images,
focusing on new media genres such as Edutainment, Infotainment and the
more recent Militainment, exploring the displacement of our own reality
through its media representation.
The new images and forms produced by the „–tainment“-industry are
emptied of their original meaning by being deprived of their original
references and images, becoming always more similar to what Roland
Barthes has described as „hollow myths”.
Entirely dependant on the context and reception for which they are
produced, they assume new meanings and signicants.
These meanings are easily detectable. Their contextualization addresses
conscious and subconscious primal experiences and clichéd
understandings
that are activated by mythically loaded images.
The predominant use of the ever-changing media “game”, with its
“-tainment” presentation format that constructs and organizes the
differentiated material according to the diverse addressees, creates a
new backdrop, a “screen” on which everything can be mediated.
Even though the theoretical analysis of phenomena such as the
overproduction and acceleration of images with their hybrid
artificiality and fake ness, is fairly recent and very well known, we
allow ourselves, in a post-modern fashion, to quote and remember an
appropriate term by Enzensberger, who spoke already in 1962 of a
“consciousness-factory”, without imagining at the time how its products
would actually develop.

With this show we are interested in exploring how images function as
free fluctuating symbols combined with clichéd forms; How
recognizability and information-value are regulated according to the
audience; How these audience-geared processed forms create an
industrially induced state of consciousness that only allows “light”
versions of events and emotions, and finally how the receptiveness for
opinions, news and perceptions is kept in small portions, in order not
to overwhelm the viewer.
Zapping has become the reading method of our time, pasting together the
diverse bits and pieces of information directly in our minds.
A constant production of new images is necessary to continuously renew
the audience’s interest. While these images are edited, weighed out,
polished, censored and, more recently, “embedded”, the ever faster pace
of television requires an always quicker production of images, so that,
for example as Sloterdijk once said during his correspondence from the
war in Irak, “this war is too slow” to satisfy the needs of television.
Even exhibitions in museums and in other institutions are forced to
become more and more spectacular, constantly trying out “new” ways in
order to keep up with the audiences and critics and win their interest.
How do artists react to this media-dominated field of transmission?
Do they accept these demands and assignments or do they take critical
steps to affirm a reflective position?