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Dismalware and Beyond
“The good thing about digital art is that you can always turn it off.” Such was the (witty and promising) start of Johannes Grenzfurthner’s lecture at Dismalware, an event featuring presentations by Jeff Mann and Baruch Gottlieb amongst others, organised by Monochrom and Telekommunisten in C-Base. It is an interesting and peculiar Berlin venue on the Spree canal, especially good for experimenting hackers, playing video games, drinking Czech beer and awaiting a visit from extraterrestrials. I’m hoping they drop by, too.
I’ve started from a parallel event to discuss Transmediale, which is quite a a bit bigger, invading Berlin between the end of January and the beginning of February. I have always attended smaller parallel events (if they sound inspiring) and to somewhat lose the plot of the baroque official program of big festivals. That’s probably why I went to the official Transmediale location only on the very last day, and checked out some of the very last performances (here and here) and screenings (both good!) But that’s just me spending too much time in my studio, from where I could listen to a stream to some of the Transmediale lectures (Bifo and Dmitry Kleiner).
You can turn off digital art, yes, but in the end, you can do so with any art. You can hide or destroy a painting you don’t like, or, to tread more lightly, you might simply avoid the venues which are likely to show it. The 90s are long gone and pointing out that a work is digital or that an installation is interactive is moot, like someone who continues to dwell on the question of whether photography is art not, or whether one should prefer figurative to abstract painting.
I don’t believe in strict categorisation of cultural production; it can be misleading and inadequate. Not that I don’t enjoy or draw inspiration by a great deal of what occurs under the umbrella of “New Media Art.” The graphic layout of Transmediale’s flier and website is nice in a way; it makes me feel like I am still eighteen. Too bad I’m actually thirty-one. Getting older can also feel good though, if you accept the challenge.
So I admit I would have liked to see more pure experimentation, more science, more research. Less Facebook. In general fewer “pranks” with angry emails from big companies printed and tacked on the wall. Nor detailed captions explaining that the project is ironic, fake, or symbolic (thanks). Yes Men and 0100101110101101.org, for starters, already covered those bases. Their stuff was (and remains) inspiring fodder for art students bored with Academy classes and the blah-blah cacophony of the art system. But, something fresh is needed! I know, it’s not easy. It takes ever larger budgets, efforts, energy and time. The show Liquid State Machine (again a parallel event in the frame of Das Weekend) was doing something more in this direction, with a quite simple (although very rich and diverse) equipment and few solid brains at work. Let’s keep looking…
Alice Cannava is a friend of the Blogazine and one of the masterminds behind Occulto Magazine.
