TACTICAL TOPICS – TOPICAL TACTICS

30 SEPTEMBER – 19 OCTOBER, 2012
MEDIA-SCAPE BIENNALE, ZAGREB, CROATIA
TACTICAL TOPICS – TOPICAL TACTICS
Home of HDLU – Mestrovic Pavilion
website of the event

 

 

Artists:
Pablo Alonso | Barbara Caveng | Cécile Colle & Ralf NunHeiko DaxlAna ElizabetIgor Eškinja | Andreas MUK Haider | Sibylle HoesslerPaul MageeDuje Juric | Peter Kees | Iva KovacMartina Menegon & Stefano D’Alessio | Riva RinnIlse Ruppert | Michael Saup | Ignacio Uriarte | Branka Uzur | Mia Zabelka
Video Program:

Heiko Daxl | Sirma Doruk | Thorsten Fleisch | Mihai Grecu | Simone Minniti | Maria Niro | Michael Saup | Candas Sisman
Concept:

Ingeborg Fülepp & Heiko Daxl

Media in Motion – Berlin / Zagreb
(www.mediainmotion.de  / info@mediainmotion.de)
Curators:
Ingeborg Fülepp | Sibylle Hoessler | Iva Kovac, | Isin Onol | Dimitrina Sevova

The abbreviation of “Media-Scape Biennal Zagreb,” MSBZ, is reminiscent of MBZ (Muzički Biennale Zagreb / Music Bienniale Zagreb). This similarity is not accidental but conceptually fits the idea of continuously building bridges between different disciplines of art and knowledge and science as well as between traditions of avant-garde and the latest tendencies in media art.

“All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer sight to almost everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.” (Aristotle)

Taken as a motto of the exhibition, this quote of Aristotle’s written so much before the advent of “new” media technologies, can serve as a key to understanding how the media and technological environment has changed – not only the production of knowledge but also the landscape of art. Even the “traditional” media and the traditional making of art is informed and transformed under their influence.

Let us simply say that there is no more land, there is the mind. The media and technologies transcend the space that we can ordinarily perceive, shift the visual experience from morphological to conceptual. The meaning of knowledge is no longer a function of the gaze alone. The new geography can be conceived of as a mind map, where the nodes in the system of coordinates are tactical topics. Paraphrasing Lawrence Weiner, dealing with the space, staging, whether you want to or not, “like you can say, I am not terribly interested in oxygen but you are breathing it,” we find regarding new technologies and media spaces that whether someone shows direct interest in them is of little importance, because the new experience of space has become like the air we breathe. As a result, the object of art is no longer a question simply of contemplation. The unidirectional perspective of a classical subject/object relation comes to vanish, shifting our perception as aesthetic sensations and artistic medium, communication media and intelligent (technological) systems open up a space for fluxes of abstract structures.

Just like Aristotle in his time understood knowledge as permeating through all our senses and not only through vision and perspective, in a cognitive techno-socio- economic system what is visible and what is invisible are mutually complementary processes. This is a system of soft surfaces, sensitive like skin, which presuppose tactility, going beyond the field of vision or rather flirting with the visible. What emerges on the surface of the skin visualizes seductive desires, while the forming processes remain invisible under the surface. Let us call this phenomenon the aesthetic of hyper-textuality, a circulating semiotic structure to which encoding systems contribute by changing linear progress through textuality as a new metaphor of art. As a result the state of art is reorganized in a new form of social value based on the promise of art again becoming part of everyday life, as the art object dissolves in conceptualization and dematerialization. “The continued evolution of both communications and control technology bodes a new type of aesthetic relationship,” (Jack Burnham) in which art embodies a new mode of knowledge production, unpredictable aesthetic sensations and experience of the invisible.

Under the title “Topical Tactics” the exhibition will put on display works of media art as mixed media techniques with video, computer art, sound installations, photography, media objects, graphics and concerts/performances.

Conceived as a survey exhibition, the Media Scape Biennal presents positions from contemporary artistic production and focuses on the potential of artistic practice to inhabit the invisible liminal zones in the “media world,” making them visible in order to call them into question through interference and disruption. It highlights the processes of transformation and of establishing new or imaginary linkages.

Topical Tactics brings together a wide range of artistic positions from different countries, enabling the exhibition to draw lines of connection and continuation to current approaches to the aesthetics of media art. Works by pioneering figures have paved the way since the sixties and developed a discourse by producing conceptual breakthroughs or analytical deconstruction and reorganization – semantic structures that link them with the artistic positions of the younger generation.” (Text by Heiko Daxl, October 2011)

EXHIBITION:
One of the founders and main curator of Media-Scape Zagreb, Heiko Daxl, is unfortunately no longer with us. He passed away this year in the prime of his life and work. We will continue in the future to follow his idea of Media-Scape and try to be consistent with his aims and directions. Without being able to rely on his great talent and intellectual acumen, Media-Scape will certainly be different, but no less intensive, creative and devoted to showing the best of media art in the future.

This year’s Media-Scape will be a combination of media art works previously conceived by Heiko Daxl and works of artists inspired by them – works that correspond to his ideas as well as to our sorrow of losing him.

(Text: Ingeborg Fülepp, in collaboration with Dimitrina Sevova, September 2012)

photographs by: Sibylle Hoessler

MEDIASCAPE 2012 CATALOGUE:

Media Scape catalogue cover