Duration: March 2008 - December 2010
This project is supported by MŠ SR, Grant KEGA no. 3/6500/08
Concept and coordination of the project:
doc. Anna Daučíková akad. soch.
Mgr. art. Nóra Ružičková
Preamble
In the year 2007 the new Department of Intermedia and Multimedia (KIM) started off a new study program dedicated to new forms of artistic activities based on digital and other time-based media work as well as the material-based artistic manifestation and post-conceptual art projects.
This hybrid and a broad-scale approach is being carried out in 3 Main Studio Programs (teaching the artistic studio practice) accompanied by auxiliary courses and theoretical subjects already existing in the hub of the Academy’s choice.
In the existing situation it is obvious that the new program at its very initial phase needs to undergo the period of exploration and experimental approval. The faculty, with participation of students have got the possibility to search for new forms, contents and teaching methods within the ongoing process of curriculum development.
About the project
ZONE – The Interdisciplinary Training KIM / AFAD is a three years project that explores the issue of innovative potentials for the new program and carry out first practice and theory based activities directly with the students and faculty at KIM (Department of Intermedia and Multimedia).
Our goal is to explore in a pilot series of workshops the perspectives and future possibilities of implementation of new options in education at KIM. It is meant to be a contribution to a continual innovation of the study program in direction to a broader inter-disciplinarily and present-day accent.
The second strand of the project is carrying out of 4 readers offered for students – art practitioners challenging and supporting their practical instruction
- three bilingual readers containing the interdisciplinary collection of important texts and introductions to the research of Diversity Studies by Hanna Hacker, Visual Studies by Zora Rusinová and New Media by Mária Rišková.
- one reader containing information and documentation of the project and texts written by participating lecturers.
Structure
A.) 6 workshop activities
B.) 4 readers (in form of Xerox copy ev. CD Rom, on-request system)
The workshops are scheduled twice a year: Spring and Autumn Each workshop consists of:
4 days (Monday – Thursday) activities with the students
1 day (Friday) Lecture (evaluation and discussion)
Workshop by Barbara Loreck
YOU SEE WHAT YOU GET
2008, March 3rd to 6th
Lecture by Sabine Prokop
TEXT & READERS
2008, April 16th
She graduated from Theatre- and Film studies, Roman literature and languages in Munich, Paris, Marseille and Berlin. In 2003 she was granted the Diploma from the 4-year dance and movement education at the School for Body-Mind-Centering with Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen in Massachusetts, USA. Visiting professor for Theatre and Performance at the University of the Arts, Berlin and VŠMU, Bratislava since 2001. She developed her latest Performance Project with students from the Katutura Community Art Center in Windhoek, Namibia: Namibian Islands. She lives and works in Berlin.
Sabine Prokop, an expert in feminist media studies with a PhD in communication sciences and Cultural Studies, is a freelance scientist, who is used to working in trans- and interdisciplinary fields. For more than 15 years, she has given lectures at up to now at nine faculties spread over seven universities in Austria. Primarily she has studied arts, textile arts, crafts and pedagogics at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She combines theory and practice in a way feminist sciences claimed throughout decades. Her main implementation of Gender Studies, analysis of everyday gendering and gender and feminist theory, has taken place in a broad variety of projects towards the advancement of women. She is co-founder and chairwoman of VfW (Association of Feminist Scholars). She also works as science coach and as managing director of the Austrian Association of Independent Theatre (2008-2009). Since 1992: publications about film, television, New Media, popular culture, construction and communication of realities and political discourse concerning science and humanities.
Announcement of the workshop by Barbara Loreck
You see what you get
The workshop is about taking material from our most common experience, our every day lives, and about ways of transforming them into a reflection with artistic means, (maybe) an art work.
We experience space through movement. Spaces are defined and redefined through “appropriate” and “inappropriate” movement. There is a huge creative potential of unspectacular situations once a slight shift in framing is made.
The workshop builds on material generated by the participants’ day to day activities and experience. We will shift the frame and accordingly our perception with little, precisely performed elements. Activities like multitasking are great elements to catch the performer’s and the spectator’s attention and interest. Our tools are the body, the camera, sound and space. Result is a video-performance.
Furthermore I propose a look at the historical context of such kind of approach. We will reflect selected performance and video works from the 1970s to the 1990s.
pdf: workshop_report
Announcement of the lecture by Sabine Prokop Text & Readers
In the FIRST part of my lecture I will talk about my subjective interest in my research topics
- the production of texts and the construction of readers plus
- the apparatus theory and questions concerning
- codes and messages.
As preparation it will be quite usefull to read the short english text about 'texts and readers' and its translation into slovak.
The SECOND part of the lecture will deal with
- footage from ZONA workshop 1 with Barbara Lorek produced by the students. Together we will analyze the
- camera work in the scenes where the protagonists talked about the courbet painting while moving in their "morning patterns"
- identification and
- transformation. The group discussions will focus on single ideas/sentences of the texts chosen by the group members to
- connect theory with practice, i.e. the footage from ZONA workshop 1.
- presentation of the results of the work groups (in English) and the
- final discussion in the plenum.
pdf: lecture_text
The THIRD part will be group work. The participants will be invited to read (my short) texts (translated into slovak) about
Part FOUR of the lecture will bring togehter everything in the
Workshop by Christina della Giustina
ANY IDEA ABOUT SPACES FOR YOUR WORK?
2008, September 22nd to 26th
Lecture by Claudia Reiche and Andrea Sick
SPACE AND I: REFLECTIONS ON/OF SURVEILLANCE AND POLITICAL CONTROL ON THE (GENDERED) SPOT
2008, September 26th
Christina Della Giustina studied Philosophy, Art History, and Linguistics at the University of Zürich, and completed her postgraduate studies in Fine Art and Political Theory at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht.
Next to her artistic practice Christina Della Giustina works as docent digital media at the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design at the HKU in Utrecht.
Christina Della Giustina works in diverse ways with real-time data, rendering dynamics particular to specific environments and as complex as water, weather, sounds, and liquids, publicly accessible and perceivable. In many ways the work focuses on an ongoing research on possible languages as sets of tubes between the gaze, hearing and touch. Using divers digital media in combination with writing, the potential of these works lies in the direct communication with the actual surrounding they are conceived for and intrinsically deal with. Without adding anything to a given environment, fluctuations, dynamics and rhythms inherent to sites reveal themselves. In generating ‘ways of saying’ for the environment the work let’s its surrounding speak, disclosing and addressing the power and intimacy of our presence.
More information: dg-c.org
Claudia Reiche, media theorist, artist, curator. Her work focuses on (cyber) feminist approaches to questions of how man/machine relations are designed with words and images. She has been teaching at the Universities/Art Academies of Hamburg, Braunschweig, Paderborn and worked as a Councelor for the Department of Women's Culture of the City of Hamburg. Member of the thealit Frauen.Kultur.Labor, Bremen and of the first international cyberfeminist alliance 'old boys network' (obn.org). Her current research focuses on feminism, psychoanalysis and medical visualization.
Andrea Sick, cultural- and media scientist, curator. Management and artistic responsibility Frauen.Kultur.Laboratorium thealit since 1993 (co-operation with thealit since 1990). Professor at the University of Arts Bremen for Media- and Cultural Theorie/-History and responsible for the creation and concept of a network between art and science in the New Media Technologies Different calls for lectures at the University of Bremen, department for cultural and art sciences and at the University of the Arts Bremen, Digital Media, Arts and Design. Ph.D. thesis on interactions between knowledge and cartography (at the University in Hamburg (2001). Focus of work and research: relations between technological media and cultural production, research on transitions between biological and information-technological discourses, interfaces of scientific and cultural activities, genderstudies.
More information: thealit.de
Announcement of the workshop by Christina della Giustina and of the lecture by Claudia Reiche and Andrea Sick
The workshop “Any idea about spaces for your work?” and the experimental lecture “Space and I: Reflections on/of Surveillance and political control on the (gendered) spot” posit in different ways the question of today’s changing, maybe missing spaces: of art, of distance, of difference, be it in the city or in neuroscience and geopolitics.
Christina della Giustina
Any idea about spaces for your work?
We might all have quite different associations when imagining spaces for art. If considering art as an activity for and with a public (however small or big that public actually might be), for this workshop I would like to propose a specific notion of ’spaces for art’, that is: spaces ‘public’ for art. Where are public spaces for your work in Bratislava? Can we spot some? Can we invent new ones? Can we use them? I would like this workshop to be a think-tank as much as a hands-on exercise in artistic practice that involves the relationship between the work and its place into its own making.
pdf: workshop_report
Claudia Reiche/Andrea Sick
Space and I: Reflections on/of Surveillance and political control on the (gendered) spot
Surveillance and political control take place ‘on the spot’- be it in geopolitical ‘space’ or within the ‘I’, concerning self-management and gendered identity strategies. A strange contradiction concerning the mere existence as well of ‘Space’ as of ‘I’, today seems to be working within both notions:
1. ‘Space’ is disappearing, especially with the use of technologies for measuring and surveillance, as distances are bridged by tele-technologies of communication and transportation. But physically existing space is closed off, controlled, governed and limited by a closed border policy.
2. Neurosciences proclaim the end of illusionary human freedom, especially of decision-making. The ‘I’ is disappearing, as the difference between subject and brain are bridged and the ‘I’ is said to consist of formerly external factors, like the architecture of the brain. But within these experimental and conceptual scientific settings the ‘I’ is closed off, controlled, governed and limited by a strict policy of closed borders between so called ‘fictions’ and ‘facts’.
We will discuss this contradictory split within ‘space’ and ‘I’ and suggest ways of conceptualizing this split with critical reference on sexual difference.
The lecture will be presented in form of a dialogue.
pdf: lecture_text
Lecture by Hanna Hacker
IMAGES OF FEASIBILITY AND/OR DESIRE: REPRESENTING NEW MEDIA IN INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT RELATIONS
2008, November 27th
Hanna Hacker is also editor and author of the ZONE reader: Štúdiá o diverzite - teoretické prístupy k odlišnosti. Diversity Studies – Theorizing Difference, 2008; available in the library of AFAD.
Announcement of the lecture by Hanna Hacker
Images of Feasibility and/or Desire: Representing New Media in International Development Relations
The backdrop of my lecture is a wider study that I carried out about discourses on new information and communication technologies, in particular regarding the contested field of development cooperation. In this study, I was interested in the part of social and symbolic “minorities” and their own communal practices concerning new media. Visual politics play an important role in this context. When it comes to representing new media and development, photographs, cartoons, video documentations, but also diagrams and mappings join the textual topoi of the stereotypical “development speak” and sharpen them: the feasibility of (Westernized) technological progress, the overall pedagogical attitude, the exotization of the “other” who is to be developed, the strategic orientation towards “women” and “youth”, and so on.
Sometimes, the pictures make obvious what lies under the matter-of-fact rationality in representations of international inequality and developmental endeavor: at stake is also desire, fear, excess, and last but not least the hope to overcome limitations through transcultural (political and artistic) cooperation.
The lecture will present selected examples of visual politics in discourses on new media and transcultural exchange. In theoretical terms, my interpretation will relate to postcolonial theory and (queer/feminist) intersectional analysis.
Workshop by Rita Bakacs
OBSERVING THE REAL – A CRASHCOURSE IN DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING
2009, April 20th to 24th
Lecture by Erzsébet Barát
QUEERING THE GAZE: THE POLITICS OF THE FEATURE/DOCUMENTARY DISTINCTION
2009, April 24th
Erzsébet Barát lectures in Linguistics and Gender Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary and Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. She earned her PhD at Lancaster University, England. Her research interests include the theorization of identity construction of sexualized and gendered subjects, mostly in contemporary Hungarian media and the limits of feminist academic knowledge production.
Announcement of the workshop by Rita Bakacs
Observing the real – a crashcourse in documentary filmmaking
In this 4-Day workshop we will discuss questions of the “real“ and its constructions in documentary filmmaking. Students will work in groups to make short documentaries about a pre-defined subject (to be decided on in the workshop). Each group will come up with and use their individual documentary-approach but the subject will be the same for everyone.
Moreover, we will watch a wide range of different documentaries and think about ways in which they might have been constructed and why. At the end of the week all of the work produced within the workshop will be screened before and incorporated into a lecture by Zsazsa Barát.
pdf: workshop_report
Announcement of the lecture by Erzsébet Barát
Queering the gaze: The politics of the feature/documentary distinction
The talk will be concerned with examining the functions of 'the gaze' in visual representation, in particular in relation to the feature film / documentary distinction from the perspective of sexuality. It will explore the difference the introduction of the concept of ‘the gaze’ (sometimes called ‘the look’) has made in the past thirty years of popular cultural studies, ranging from its original use in (feminist) film theory in the 1970s to its contemporary, more broadly used meanings by (feminist and queer) cultural theorists. Thematically, the talk is organised into two parts. The first part focuses on the basic theoretical paradigms of the gaze as developed in feminist film theory. We begin with the first major (psychoanalytical) model in film theory, the so-called “spectatorship theory” introduced by Laura Mulvey’s influential essay(s) and in the critical responses to it. The second part will deal with how issues of ethnicity and sexuality enter the debate and foregrounds the importance of going beyond the semiotic boundary of the artwork in order to ‘see’ the relevance of the sexual politics of the socio-cultural context of the production/consumption of the work. It is in the latter context where queer theory has influenced both theory and film practice since the 1990s, most specifically through the introduction of the concepts of performativity, affect and space.
As part of the talk, at the end of the theoretical discussion, I shall apply the theoretical concerns and concepts to the students’ actual work of art made during the workshop to help them develop a self-reflexivity and learn on the one hand how to explore the ways in which (once they are positioned as) viewers/spectators look at images of people and places in the visual medium of the so-called documentary. On the other hand, to find ways of analysing the gaze of those depicted in the visual text as well as in and through their interaction and then pull the two aspect of the artistic creativity together and argue for the importance of the relative distinction of the genre of feature and documentary films. The ultimate aim here is to alert students to existing media materials and theoretical frameworks which may assist them in their own investigations of the voyeuristic nature of ’the gaze’, and see how it could be changed in subversive directions, such as the gaze of the lesbian diva or that of the transgender person. For this final point we shall draw on the comparison of the feature “Boys Don’t Cry” and the documentary “The Brendon Tina Story” that the student will have seen during the workshop.
pdf: lecture_text
Workshop by Anthony Auerbach and Rosa Reitsamer
CROSSED PURPOSES
2009, September 28th to October 2nd
Lecture by Mária Rišková
2009, October 2nd
Anthony Auerbach is an artist and theorist out of London. PhD: University College London, 2004. Researcher: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2007–08. Recent exhibitions: ‘Autopsy’ in Photo-cartographies (g727, Los Angeles), ‘Tailoring Alterations’ in Reconstruction (Biennial of Young Artists, Bucharest), Empire State Pavilion (Queens Museum of Art, New York), Video as Urban Condition (Lentos Museum of Modern Art, Linz). Recent publications and academic papers: ‘The Theoretical Eye’, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Monadology’, ‘A Box in the Theatre of the World: Television, Interior and Urban Experience’, ‘Imagine no Metaphors: the Dialectical Image of Walter Benjamin’, ‘Contesting Identity and the Meta-praxis of Drawing’.
More information: vargas.org.uk/aa
Rosa Reitsamer is a sociologist, writer and DJ. She has been working and researching in areas related to the representation of women in visual arts, popular culture and music, and is also the editor of the queer magazine Female Sequences. In 2002, in conjunction with Anthony Auerbach, Rosa Reitsamer organised Mons Veneris: Female Geographies at the Austrian Cultural Forum London. This group event dealt with works on sexuality by women artists from the so-called post-communist countries and the West. In 2004 she conceived and realised the symposium entitled Geteilte Territorien. Umkämpfte Gemeinsamkeiten with Jo Schmeiser. It addressed the limits and chances of co-operation between individuals and groups who have different - i.e. dominant or marginalized - positions in society. Reitsamer is currently working on a program about the Viennese gallery artmosphere with Michaela Muhr and Manuela Schreibmayer; she is also working on the exhibition Born to be White: Rassismus und Antisemitismus in der weißen Mehrheitsgesellschaft with Jo Schmeiser.
Mária Rišková Born 1974. Art historian and curator. From 2001 to 2003 worked as a curator, program coordinator and manager of the gallery and club Buryzone. In 2003 co-started the BURUNDI media lab, after its decay co-founded 13m3 association in 2005. Lives in Bratislava.
Announcement of the workshop by Anthony Auerbach and Rosa Reitsamer
Crossed Purposes
Speaking at crossed purposes is usually a mistake. In this case, it is the format for a chat show with Rosa Reitsamer and Anthony Auerbach as both hosts and guests. Between them, these two span feminism, art practice, sociology, cultural theory, DJ-ing, and media-curating among other things. The purpose of the show is to provide a venue for a cross-disciplinary conversation. AFAD students will be the producers: responsible for staging, lighting, recording and broadcasting the show, lining up special guests (to be announced), researching and programming reports, musical interludes, competitions etc., recruiting and training the audience, organising advertising, product placement etc.
pdf: workshop_report
Announcement of the lecture by Mária Rišková
Chat Show Variations
[Chat show – British / Talk show – American]
The lecture is exploring rising of TV chat (talk) shows popularity from 60ies to present days when they belong to the stabile elements of the classical television structure in Euro-American broadcasting culture. We will follow development of formats, popular hosts and their viewpoints and we’ll try to analyze constitutional features of chat shows.
Nowadays the classical form of the show still survives and keeps its attractiveness; however we can see increasing number of projects that modify traditional model of the show. They exchange the role of the host and the guest; public discussion is performed on Internet; they reach higher educational level beyond the pure entertainment.
Whatever are the motifs of various chat show initiators they all have the same aim – to keep the audience focused and alive.
In the second part of this lecture we will watch and discuss video-outputs of the workshop by Anthony Auerbach and Rosa Reitsamer that was structured as an alternative chat show produced and directed by participating students of KIM.
