Participants list
Synopsis and biographies
Remy Louchart
Museums (Lancaster version), 1'07", 2007 The Art Galleries (Lancaster version), 1'06", 2007 Italy (Lancaster version), 1'21", 2007 My Picture (Lancaster version), 50", 2007 Noël Dolla (Lancaster version), 2'16", 2007
LINKS
The things I do are based on real anecdotes which, to me, are flawed_ either because they are incomplete, incoherent or because I disagree with what they tell. Typically, I will find such stories in the history of art because I read that kind of books. This flawed anecdote will tell about some concrete act_ it doesn't work if the action involved is abstract. For instance, it can be that someone has taken some measure of something (as in "The Art Galleries"). But if the story says that someone thought or loved something, I cannot use it because it's impossible to repeat it_ I'm not able to control opinions or sentiments. When I find the 'right' anecdote, it makes me feel like taking action to correct, complete or do better than what happened in the story. That is what gives me the illusion I'm doing a painting which has a purpose. It usually involves repeating the anecdote with a difference. I confront the space where the original story took place_ confronting space; confronting history_ because that way I have the impression I'm doing something real. That's why, most of the time, I give names of places to what I'm doing and this is the reason why, too, the videos shown during KLab9 are subtitled 'Lancaster version'_ it's because I had to translate them for the event held in Lancaster. However, dealing with space doesn't always imply travelling. It depends on the picture that comes to mind when I think of an idea. Should this picture be a painting, I don't need to go. But if I imagine a photograph, I have to be where such a picture is to be taken. But it may also be that the action can only be performed on the spot, so, in this case, a trip is necessary too.
Patrick Fontana, Aelters, Pierre-Yves Fave
Grenze video performance based on Capital by Karl Marx
Grenze opens up a series of reflections around Capital as Karl Marx analysed it, in an attempt to better understand it in its present form. Grenze is a vision of the metamorphoses of the capitalist system. It is a visual translation of "Capital". Faced with the construction of an infernal and destructive mechanism, we respond with our look, our waiting, time.
Grenze (German word - the limit as a border separating two areas, which by definition can be crossed) makes audible fragments of Capital and the Grundisse (1857-1858 manuscripts), through voice-over. These voices are those of interns of the association AERI, which offers internships to people in difficulty in Paris area.
Emeric Aelters composes the various sonic objects and live electronic music for the video. Aelters pursues a solo career in the European electronic music scene. Pierre-Yves Fave and Patrick Fontana have opened up a dialogue between computing and the act of drawing in a search for a graphic coherency in relation to the content of capital.
In Grenze, capital is represented by a cube called cube-capital that is in perpetual transformation. The larva represents commodities, whereas the workers are represented by a triangle, they transform ad grow poorer. The image processing aims to constantly make both the form and the matter of these figures evolve.
PATRICK FONTANA BIO/STATEMENT
I have chosen to work from fragments, and to take samples from philosophical discourses. I commit my thoughts to drawn notes which later evolve into video works, paintings or installations. I have tried to approach the concepts and discourses using my own tools, as a visual artist, director, actor, trying to give them a visual translation. I have experimented with this particular type of research earlier, on the occasion of seminars by Jacques Rancière (“What is philosophy?”, on the aesthetic of the art of Giorgio Agamben), by social scientist Toni Negri (immaterial work, the translation of work into life and of life into work ). I attended these seminars at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris.
Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs
Artmarket at the Schoepfwerk
The Artmarket took place at the Schoepfwerk, which is a city within the city of Vienna, Austria. It is a huge housing complex with 4.950 residents living in 1.650 community owned apartments. The homogeneity of the population regarding age and income, as well as the fact that more than 50% of the residents are people with a migration background, contributes to increasing tendencies of exclusion and social isolation. How to keep communicating and how to create moments of solidarity in such a tense situation? What kind of new model of exchange, as opposed to the usual market principles and the commercial art system would work there? The Artmarket at the Schoepfwerk provides and shows an alternative social concept for transaction.
Rudolfine Lackner
Beatriz Albuquerque
ACTivist
This piece explores activist key words that will function in the audience as a way to remember, transform on the inside the persons that read them and think about it as well after in the outside. With transformational activism, even small actions from the 'inside Out' can make a difference in the long run to create meaningful change in the world. This is explored on a light/shadow sculpt environment fromed by letters/words that live in an example of the real web interaction documentation.
Sarah Thomas
After The Rains Came: Seven short stories about objects and lifeworlds
FILM SYNOPSIS
The Samburu of Northern Kenya are a semi-nomadic pastoralist people with a vibrant oral tradition, and a form of memory making that is strongly associated with objects, bodily adornment, storytelling and song. This film, structured through stages in a life cycle, explores the tension between the fleeting nature of memories, and the materiality and permanence of the objects that embody and inspire them. Pertinently, in this time of dramatic climate change, it also demonstrates the importance of rain as the loom upon which their socio-cultural fabric is woven.
This film is divided into vignettes to reflect an aspect of Samburu cosmology in its editing style: While each vignette explores a different stage in the life cycle of the natural and human world, each pause between vignettes reflects the Samburu belief that only something made by the hand of Nkai (God) can be continuous and perfect, and as such Samburu ritual and cultural acts are marked by pauses between actions.
BIOGRAPHY
Sarah Thomas spent half of her life growing up in Kenya, which fostered an interest in people and cultures, and different ways of seeing, from a young age. After traveling through Asia Sarah went on to complete a degree in Anthropology at the University of Durham, UK. It was these studies and journeys which cultivated an interest in photography and later Visual Anthropology, which she subsequently pursued at the University of Manchester. Sarah is making her international debut on the Visual Anthropology and Documentary Film scene with her first film, “After The Rains Came: Seven short stories about objects and lifeworlds” (2006). She is currently working on a project with Tate Britain exploring visual culture and diasporic identity among migrant families in South London.
FILMOGRAPHY
October 2005 Bombay Dreams – An interview with a Manchester based immigrant from Bombay, who used to produce and edit a film and literary magazine in India in the 1960s. (student film for course purposes only)
November 2005 Night Male – An event film documenting in observational style a folk music session that takes place monthly on a train between Manchester and the Peak District. (student film for course purposes only)
January 2006 The Boy Between - A film documenting the strains on a recently married couple who, previously in unhappy marriages, had met on the internet, had an affair and fallen pregnant, giving birth to a son with Down's Syndrome only a year after meeting. (student film for course purposes only)
October 2006 After The Rains Came: Seven short stories about objects and lifeworlds – A film exploring the nature of time and remembering, and its embodiment in objects, storytelling and song among the Samburu of Northern Kenya.(First film for international release)
IN PRODUCTION
Hannah Frank: A Glasgow Jewish Artist – a biographical film with 98 year old Jewish artist, Hannah Frank, who has been dubbed as the last living link to the Art Nouveau movement. She grew up at a pivotal time for the Jewish diaspora in Glasgow, and this film seeks to explore her influences and inspriration, as well as issues of gender and religion, using as a starting point the detailed diaries she kept in her youth.
Beatriz Albuquerque
Work For Free
In this piece the performer will WORK for FREE, creating any type of art-work (virtual) using a digital medium, but the public has to signed a contract with the performer. An interchange of questions and answers will be open to the public with the virtual performer, plus proposals by the public will be gathered and contracts signed.
Virtual interaction, active participation, creation of an art object desired and needed by the public without monetarily exchange. If the viewer accepts, it is a gift given in the dialogue a co-dependence between the performer and the active viewer, a way of living in which the art market and economical interest is retired in this equation.
BIO
Beatriz Albuquerque was born in 1978. She finished her Bachelor of Arts in Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto in 2003 and her Master of Fine Arts in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. She joined the Independent Performance Group founded by Marina Abramovic in 2004. Also in the same year she won two prizes of distinction for photography from the Centro Cultural e de Congressos de Aveiro and from the Concurso Nacional de Fotografia da Póvoa de Varzim. In 2005 she won the Distinction Prize from the Ambient Series in the PAC/edge Performance Festival in Chicago.
Brendan Byrne
Some reasons to visit Lukacs
In this presentation we will take every action necessary to consider Georg Lukacs entirely out of context. Georg Lukacs is, perhaps, the least fashionable theorist of the 21st Century. This is unsurprising if we consider his unpopularity in the 20th Century. Lukacs was an Hungarian theorist who produced a vast quantity of work about visual arts and literature as well as relationships to the social. He was originally very unpopular with state capitalists in the USSR and has somehow managed to transmute this unpopularity to the late Western capitalists of this period through his association with communism/state capitalism.
A vocal supporter of realism in art, although scathing in attacks on the fabulous oil paintings of committee meetings made available by socialist realism, Lukacs argued that socialist realism could be rehabilitated through critical realism.
The presentation will take as it’s core, however, the idea of reification, or the commodification of the individual in capitalism. Hopefully we will be able to have a row about the usefulness of the idea today and whether it might be modified to take on post modern critiques. In order to do this it might be useful to critique contemporary models of the commodity and if anyone feels like it, to consider the usefulness of the idea of ‘commodity form’.
Without Lukacs there is no Debord.
Without Debord there is no Baudrillard
Without Baudrillard where is post modernism?
Death to Lukacs
BIO
Brendan is practising artist and academic at University College Falmouth. His current artwork combines his own individual practice, research and numerous collaborative projects with an international profile. Thematically he produces work which questions relationships between technology and identity in Capitalism. For more information about Brendan’s work visit [3] and [4]
Miss Information
Guerrilla Installation
The cornerstone of the theory upon which the Guerilla Installation is based, is speed and constant flux in modern life, and the consequences of this for humans and their environment. The cult of speed, is emblematic of the Industrial Revolution, as well as the flux of information that marks our era, have driven modern man into a state of ecstasy: dissociated him from his environment and in a process of constant “development”. Trapped in this state of ecstasy, modern man is unable to take the proper distance from this process in order to form a critical opinion about it. The most clarifying example of the dissociation with his environment is the relationship of modern man with the urban public spaces. The emergence of what P. Virilio calls the “static audiovisual vehicle” transforms people into passive receivers, practically immobile, caged into their private spaces. Therefore, public spaces end up deserted from any emotional investment, and all transportation in the city becomes wasted time.
As a result of these thoughts, I’m asking myself the question of how can art, in the form of the Guerilla Installation, create ruptures within the urban normality, sabotage its flux? To do so, it must primarily operate outside any art institution in order to avoid being perceived as a work of art. It thus generates the distance always present between art and spectators, as well as the distance between art and life itself. In transforming the ambiance of the city we create the distance that allows people to judge their environment and question its normality and the “…constant modifications of every day life”, as the Situationnistes said.
Magda Tyzlik-Carver
New Models of Curtaing?: Possibility of non-curating in the network society
The information society is based on the network grid/pattern. The modern organisational forms based on hierarchical structures such as government or academia, are replaced with the new formations (Rositer 2005). Ned Rossiter recognises the organised network as one of those new formats, which is a hybrid of institutional (hierarchical and centralised), and tactical (distributed and horizontal). KLab could be considered an example of organised network in the context of education.
Invisible networks are another networking paradigm which can be recognised in works of such artist as glorious ninth (an artist collaborative), Kate Rich (artist and trader based in Bristol experimenting with social networks) or Critical Art Ensemble.
Those new formations, based on self-organisation, self-government and self-motivation (particularly important in the context of an invisible network) suggest new possibilities. As Lovink claims networks “disintegrate traditional forms of representation” and “deconstruct society” (Lovink, 2005:22). With this assumption I would like to address the question of curating that is what models of curating can be distinguished in the context of organised networks and invisible networks; and if we are approaching the possibility of non-curating in the network society. I will consider those questions in the context of Ranciere’s theory of partition of the sensible where the importance of the restoration of the link between art, politics and ethics is stressed.
BIO
Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver’s research explores the subjects such as collaboration, the common, community and networks and new models of curating. She is interested in those subjects in the context of network theory, which is being developed by Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter and also Alexander Galloway’s theory of protocols. She is influenced by theories of Jacque Rancière and especially excited by his ideas discussing the connections between aesthetics, politics and ethics and possibilities which arise when applying the theory of partition of the sensible in the context of network cultures. Magda works as a research assistant in iRes (Research in Interactive Art & Design) at University College Falmouth and this year she graduated from MA course in 20th Century Art & Design: Histories and Theories course at University College Falmouth with a thesis titled Subtle Resistance. Aesthetics of Collaboration in the Network Society.
David Goldenberg
How much autonomy do you need?
This is proposed as a collective debate examining the continuing role of the concept of “autonomy” in a Euro-centric tradition against the backdrop of Globalization and virtual reality. Does the concept of autonomy defend an outdated notion of freedom, or is it just another term for colonisation, Western expansionism and Globalisation. Is the term of autonomy still useful in understanding the role of Politics, Gallery and on-line practices, or is it a meaningless and empty term, and if it is, do we need to locate other terms and positions?
BIO
David Goldenberg has been active as an artist on the international scene since the early 1990’s. Exhibitions include among others: Century City, Tate Modern, London, UK; Open congress, Tate Britain, London, Uk; Superstore, Laurie Genilliard, London, UK; Charlie’s Place, Annely Juda, London, UK; Miniatures, Milch & the agency, London, UK; Curating post-institutions, ICA, London, UK; Jump into deep water, Shedhalle, Zurich, Switzerland; 6th Sharjah International Biennial, Sharjah, UAE; Out of space, Kolnischer kunstverein, Koln, Germany; Host, Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland. Fordham at Netwerk, Aalst, Belguim; Les Marveilles du Monde, Museum of Fine art, Dunkurque, France; STRUKTUR, artist:network, New York, NY, USA; Copy-fight, Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona, Spain; Anthology of art, Kunst und Austelungshalle der Bundersrepublik Deutscland, Bonn, Germany; CDZ, Reingunggesellschaft Halle fuer kunst Reichenbachstr 2, Luenenburg, Germany; Soft logics, Kuenstlehaus, Stuttgart, Germany; Flexplek, Begone grond, Utrecht, The Nederlands.
Work can be found in the following publications: Post Autonomy, Gutleut Verlag; New media in late 20th Century, Thames & Hudson; Installation art, Thames & Hudson; 100 reviews backwards, Pub Alberta press; Netwerk annual; 6th Sharjah International Biennial; Art Anthology, Du Mont Literatur und kunst verlag, Cologne; Team Compendium, Pub Kellner; Whose afraid of red, white and blue; Pub Article Press; White Window: shared work, Pub KIAD.
Stefan Merten
Free Software and art - similarities and differences
Since 1999 the Oekonux project created the building blocks to understand Free Software and its success. A central part of the theory is that in Free Software we see a *germ form* of a *new way of production* which is able to *overcome capitalism*.
In Project Oekonux different people with different opinions and different methods study the economic and political forms of Free Software. An important question is, whether the principles of the development of Free Software may be the foundation of a new economy which may be the base for a new society.
The main goal of the workshop is to explore similarities and differences between thoughts developed in Oekonux and the realm of art. The intention is to *improve understanding* of phenomenons like *Free Software* on the one hand and *art* on the other hand and to develop ideas for *concrete action*.
We'll start by focusing on those aspects which seem most interesting for art:
- Selbstentfaltung (creativity, self-realization)
- Authorship in Free Software
Based on the presentation the rest of the workshop will be dedicated to a general debate.
The workshop is prepared by Stefan Merten together with Gregers Petersen and Raoul Victor all participating in the Oekonux project. Links: * Oekonux project: [6], * Introduction to Oekonux: [7] * Oekonux texts: [8]
Martin Pederson and Nina Moehler
Collective Ownership: In History and Today
Stephen Grew & Antti Saario
Improvised music with keyboards
Two international musicians pianist/elctronics Stephen Grew and Antti Saario electronic manipulations and sonic carver. Each based in the good old city of Lancaster, home to millions of great musicians! Grew & Saario will conjure electronically generated sound shapes to create a world where glass cannot escape, tonality hangs bare faced on the precipice of marjoram, each spontaneously improvising, grew playing Swedish Nord keyboard/fx, Antti using sampler and laptop/programmes.
Magenta Interior
Bikini Kill VJ set
Bikini Kill is the name of this set and the name is a homage to the punk girls band with the same name. As a VJ set, Bikini Kill is a mix of collected objects which are represented in film and that are played during the performance. These objects are part of the performer personal history, collected during travelings and in more random and common situations as a visit to a shop or an allusion to a dream. The material is performed using DVD payers, computers, cameras and rotating devices. There i also involved a play with the concept of realtime. Part of the footage are recordings from previous performances. As the material is played at several venues, the amount of footage increases and changes, turning each performance into a new experience for everyone (including the performer).
BIO
Magenta Interior uses all possible colours of the chromatic palette, all genders between feminine and masculine and emotions of her heart in the stories she tells. These stories are most of the time texts, but lately they are also visuals. Magenta is inspired by popular and secular ways of passing knowledge, through story telling. She writes stories that are neither prose nor poetry, but spoken words written with rimes. The visual performances are improvised and the result is surprising for the audience as much as it is for the performer. To know more about her work: [9]
Jacqueline Forzelius
It is an escapist world but one can not make the escape
What is escapism in an alienated world? It seems that we in western society today have a thousands possible ways to direct our escapists needs; TV, drugs, partying, sex, film, reading, games and the overwhelming information slow, for example. Escapism has a nature of avoidance but how can one avoid when the act of avoiding already seem to be directed? I’m trying to deal with mapping the area for departure.
Bio Jacqueline Forzelius is an artist who at the moment lives and work in Rotterdam, attending the Master of Fine Arts at Piet Zwart Institute. Her work usually involves imitating reflection, acting and performance.
Colourschool / Kristina Lee Podesva
A Pedagogical Turn: A Discussion on Education as Art
Within the context of neoliberalism the priorities and functions of academic institutions have increasingly come under pressure to reorganize themselves in the form of corporations. Within the last five years, a number of artists' projects involving school or educational forms have taken shape, perhaps as a reflection of this general trend.
For Knowledgelab9 I will explore the simple proposition that education as a form of art making constitutes a relatively new medium through the following questions:
How has the medium of education been historically situated?
What movements and practices have conditioned its appearance?
What does its circulation tell us about the academy—and art making—in the present?
And finally, does the emergence of this medium represent a fad, or is it a manifestation of a larger and more sustained “pedagogical turn” in contemporary art?
In engaging with this discussion, I will introduce a number of contemporary artists' projects that use school and educational forms including the Copenhagen Free University, the Mountain School of Arts, the School of PanAmerican Unrest, Playshop, the unitednationsplaza, and colourschool, my own project.
BIO
Kristina Lee Podesva is an artist based in Vancouver, Canada, where she founded colourschool in her studio at the University of British Columbia. She is also an editor at The Fillip Review and cofounder of Cornershop Projects, an alternative art site that aims to explore the critical nuances of traditional and nontraditional economic models.
ABOUT COLOURSCHOOL
colourschool is a free school within a school dedicated to the speculative study of five colours: white, black, red, yellow, and brown. The initial project, which opened in my studio at the University of British Columbia in November 2006, attempts to develop a critical colour consciousness through a variety of collaborative activities including roundtable discussions, film screenings, artists’ talks, listening labs, lectures, residencies, performances, slideshows, and social events. Although colourschool’s palette ostensibly addresses racial and ethnic identity, the project itself examines what we have come to know about these colours, how they are culturally coded, and how we might re-imagine and re-signify them. In another sense, colourschool challenges traditional mediums of artistic production such as sculpture, painting, photography, performance, video, and installation by mixing them together in a multidisciplinary social sculpture. An ongoing and unresolved process more than a product, colourschool is an open work, a multi-form, collective, durational, parasitical, and often tongue-in-cheek series of discrete and linked situations that coalesce into a sustained focus on the meaning of colour, identity, pedagogy, knowledge production, and ultimately art.
colourschool will reopen in November 2007 at the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design for another year.
RELATED LINKS:
http://www.colourschool.org/
http://whitehotmagazine.com/whitehot_articles.cfm?id=756
http://www.fillip.ca/content/a-pedagogical-turn
Participants by STREAM
MAIN EVENT: SATURDAY AND SUNDAY
STREAM 1
WorkshopFree Software and art - similarities and differences Stefan Merten/Oekonux (DE)
STREAM2
Paper: Guerrilla Installation > Miss Information (FR)
Workshop: It is an escapist world but one can not make the escape > Jacqueline Forzelius
STREAM 3
Performance: Performance Work For Free > Beatriz Albuquerque/Campos Baptista (PT)
Paper: A Pedagogical Turn: A Discussion on Education as Art > Colourschool / Kristina (CA)
Forum: Collective Ownership: In History and Today > Nina Moehler and Martin Pederson
STREAM 4
Paper and discussion: New Models of Curtaing?: Possibility of non-curating in the network society > Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver (UK)
Workshop: How much autonomy do you need? > David Goldenberg (UK)
FRIDAY NIGHT
Videos Museums (Lancaster version), 1'07", 2007.
The Art Galleries (Lancaster version), 1'06", 2007.
Italy (Lancaster version), 1'21", 2007.
My Picture (Lancaster version), 50", 2007.
Noël Dolla (Lancaster version), 2'16", 2007 > Remy Louchart
Video performance: Grenze > Patrick Fontana
VideoACTivist > Beatriz Albuquerque
Video: "After the Rains Came" > Sarah Thomas
Video - Artmarket at the Schoepfwerk Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs (A)