I put the model of last year’s project Bright Russian on my desk today. It works, I can really see the sky from here now – I just wish it was a full-scale window. Maybe it will keep me from hibernating a bit as winter is setting in.
While flipping through a copy of Blogga, a German mobile imaging culture-magazine published by Nokia, i stumbled across an article about our work Fixr. Neat!
This magazine, while actually being a promotional thing for cameraphones, features only user-generated photography and has been around for quite some time. Pretty much pioneering the notion of reader-reporters as put forward by giant tabloid-paper BILD – printed media trying to hook into the schemes of the web.
Cheers to my friends from PLATOON who happened to be at Pecha Kucha and wrote a very friendly post about Blinks & Buttons on their blog.
When I was visiting my friend Cornelia in Stockholm some years ago, she told me that Le Corbusier had called Slussen, a mixture between locks and a freeway ramp, “The only truly modern thing”. Of course he was refering to the concrete architecture and the urbanist’s attitude behind it, but in two conversations yesterday I came to ask myself what I consider modern today, in the vernacular sense.
It used to be music probably. For me it’s not anymore, for large parts of culture have since, say 15 years, subscribed to citing and sampling from what’s been there before. All the “The”-bands (even though I love some of them) sound like something that has been there way before, rendering themselves completely undateable. I can hardly imagine the feeling that our parents must have had when Rock’n'Roll came to western Europe. Maybe I’m idealizing things here but in retrospective it looks as if this cultural event has had a huge impact on many things. Right now I don’t feel (and this is all about my feeling, no scientific data here) as if something like that could happen. Cultural production for it’s most part has become somewhat of a grey goo with a multitude of subcultures where everyone can pick their favorites but the overall impact of the whole system seems to be rather limited. Is that the price we have to pay for post-modern pluralism?
Even worse with fine arts: despite the incredibly naive attitude of some artists that art would be the only thing capable of true change, the whole system works mainly for itself and about itself. So what’s capable of having and impact anymore? Maybe it really takes large orchestrated events like September 11th that from the beginning take into account the media and how they work. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen caused himself a lot of trouble calling the events the “greatest art piece of all time”, but he was quite right since he was just refering to its ability to induce change.
I’m really curious about whether there will come the point where people will want to radically break out of the schemes of current cultural production. Will there will be a bang and suddenly someone comes up with a completely different kind of artistic expression which will be not only be commercially successful but at the same time hard to grasp by the machinery which will want to smoothen it and make it part of their portfolio.
Or will this bang come from a totally different direction? Is science today far more important than culture? Hard to say, but the life sciences and technology that interferes with how we work might indeed at some point have a much greater impact than we could ever imagine. As for today I could point out only one truly modern thing which keeps reinventing itself and constantly escaping the corporate predictions while retaining huge potential for change: still the Internet.
I presented my thesis project Between Blinks & Buttons on Thursday which went very well. I’m trying to hack together a small documentation before I will be on the road for two weeks.
Thanks everyone who helped me with this in any way.
(YAAAAAAY!)
Following Régine’s advice, i’ve got myself a second life on Flickr to link to from we-make-money-not-art.
I’m currently in Cologne where Captured In Tones is being shown at the Museum Ludwig as part of the Kunstfilm Biennal-competition. The screening will be this Monday at 15h.
Had the chance to perform with Funkstörung in Prato near Florence in Italy. Very nice, great music, three screens, happy people. But left me somehow with the realization of how much more powerful music is and what big of an effort you must undertake to make the physical sensation of projected images somewhat equal. Gave me some doubts, but new ideas as well. Might be trying some more things involving still images or maybe just light? i can’t take the graphic-design-in-motion anymore.