Media Art Fellows – medienwerk.nrw

University of Duisburg-Essen | Aylime Asli Demir: “AMBIGUITY & UNPREDICTABILITY”

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University of Duisburg-Essen | Aylime Asli Demir: “AMBIGUITY & UNPREDICTABILITY”

FELLOW: Aylime Asli Demir

Media Art FellowsResearch

Duration: ongoing

The Institute for Art and Art Sciences at the University of Duisburg-Essen and the atelier automatique invited you to a workshop discussion with media art fellow Aylime Aslı Demir (curator, activist) as well as guests Eva Busch (curator) and Begüm Karagöz (student assistant at the queerfeminist Archiv LIESELLE).

The conversation discussed forms of resistance and the archiving of queer narratives, with a focus on the exchange of experiences and artistic, curatorial practices in the context of archives and (in)visibilities. The talks were moderated by Julia Nitschke and took place at atelier automatique in Bochum.

From December 9 to 12, 2023 and from January 27 to February 3, 2024, the Turkish author, curator, activist and media art fellow Aylime Aslı Demir was a guest at the institute as part of the project Ambiguity and Unpredictability: On Forms of Resistance and the Archiving of Queer Narratives.

Her stay is integrated into the art studies sub-project of the DFG research group Ambiguity and Distinction. Historical-Cultural Dynamics under the direction of Prof. Dr. Gabriele Genge and with the collaboration of Eva Liedtjens, which is focusing on queer perspectives and ambiguous concepts of temporality in contemporary art in Turkey in the current funding phase. Aylime Aslı Demir used the time of her stay in December 2023 and January 2024 for curatorial research on queer practices of archiving and resistance. In addition to the exchange with the research group Ambiguity and Distinction, Aylime Aslı Demir established contact with local initiatives and institutionalized archives to develop new forms of networking with actors of queer (media) artistic and curatorial projects between the Ruhr area and Ankara.

Aylime Aslı Demir is a writer, curator, and activist. Demir studied Public Administration, Political Science and Women’s Studies. Since 2010, she has been working on editorial and curatorial projects dealing with the politics and aesthetics of bringing together diverse knowledge and practices in
exhibitions and publications. From 2013, she is the Academic and Cultural Studies Programme coordinator and the editor-in-chief of Kaos GL the main Gay and Lesbian Cultural Research and Solidarity Association in Turkey. She lectured at Ankara University on Gender and Women’s studies and has been the coordinator of Feminist Forum which gathers together prominent feminists and
LGBTI+ activists around the world in Ankara. Additionally, Demir is a jury member of Women to Women Story Contest organized since 2006 in order to encourage women writers to write about their lesbian–bisexual stories.

Apart from her editor career, Aylime Aslı Demir has been active in the framework of exhibitions, conferences, and community work. Some of her recent activities include curating the group show Betwixt and Between in 2023 at Sanatorium in Istanbul. In 2022 she was a participant at Slavs and Tatars residency that was supported by SAHA. Aylime Aslı Demir curated Unpredictable Times: Queering Politics in Turkey at, MUCEM in Marseille in 2019. She attended the Young Curators Academy at Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin in 2019. Furthermore At least three fingers; still life lessons from a queer feminist activist, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe 2019, Dislocations in Queer Art, Kara Art Studio, Kocaeli, 2019; Read My World Literature Festival, Amsterdam, 2018; Vanishing Mediator, Evliyagil Museum, Ankara, 2018; Colony, Queering the Posthuman, Schwules Museum, Berlin, 2018; Colony, Queering the Posthuman, Abud Efendi Mansion, Istanbul.

Aylime Aslı Demir established international Ankara Queer Art Residency in Ankara in 2019. The program hosts visual artists from Turkey and abroad and provides artists with 8 weeks of both living and working space while supporting and promoting production and research processes. During this time, artists have the opportunity to work with artists, activists, researchers, and curators from Turkey.

EVENTS FOR THE PROJECT
AMBIGUITY & UNPREDICTABILITY

OFFENHALTEN – EIN GESPRÄCH ÜBER KÜNSTLERISCHE RESIDENZFORMATE
30 January 2024, 19.00
WerkStadt, Viktoriastraße 5, 45327 Essen

The Institute for Art and Art Sciences at the University of Duisburg-Essen and PACT Zollverein invited you to an exchange on artistic residency formats. Together with media art fellow and director of the Ankara Queer Art Program Aylime Aslı Demir (Ankara, TR), Thomas Lehmen from Kunsthaus Mitte (Oberhausen, DE) and Hanitra Wagner (Akademie der Künste der Welt Köln, residency programs) they talked about the possibilities and limits of (international) residency programs, their particularities and histories.

Interested people were invited to the WerkStadt to get into conversation.

The event was held in English.

The publication VORSTELLUNG DER GEFÖRDERTEN PROJEKTE 2021-2023 on the Media Art Fund & Media Art Fellows can be downloaded here.

Credits: Photo © Institut für Kunst und Kunstwissenschaften der Universität Duisburg-Essen

PACT ZOLLVEREIN ESSEN | MARCO DONNARUMMA: “I AM YOUR BODY”

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Screening AM YOUR BODY_von Marco Donnarumma_bei PACT Zollverein in Essen_(C)Dirk Rose_Auswahl

Donnarumma_I-Am-Your-Body_0_Working-group-research-sessions_8_by Dirk Rose

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PACT ZOLLVEREIN ESSEN | MARCO DONNARUMMA: “I AM YOUR BODY”

FELLOW: Marco Donnarumma

Media Art FellowsFunding, Research

Duration: July 2022 to October 2023

What do sounds mean to those who do not hear them? How can something be heard that cannot be heard? What sensory gaps are created by assistive technologies such as prosthetics and artificial intelligence (AI)? The project I AM YOUR BODY by Marco Donnarumma at PACT Zollverein offers a synaesthetic experience into a radically alternative sensorium. By repurposing and reappropriating AI algorithms and prosthetics developed for normative hearing, the performance interweaves sound, movement and light.

Electromechanical transmitters lie on the table, muscle sensors that make the physical – movements, palpitations, the blood flowing through the veins – audible and tangible. Marco Donnarumma develops musical instruments that make body sounds perceptible. To do this, he worked with AI robotics and new interfaces for musical expression. The five-member research group was able to experiment with these instruments as part of the I AM YOUR BODY project. They were people who have been deaf or hard of hearing since birth or who live with a cochlear implant, ranging from 15-year-old teenagers to 57-year-old electromechanics. With this very heterogeneous group, Marco Donnarumma explored the question of what sound means and how sound is perceived by deaf and hard of hearing bodies. The project aimed to expand the understanding of sound beyond the boundaries of normative hearing and to celebrate the interdependence of physical experiences.

Donnarumma himself is hard of hearing; in 2014 he was diagnosed with genetic, bilateral degenerative hearing loss. The participants shared their experiences at digital meetings and in workshops. Here we saw “how important it is for deaf and hard of hearing people to have a physical and mental space to exchange thoughts, concerns and questions about our physical experiences without being disturbed,” notes Marco Donnarumma. They talked about what sound can be – including vibration and light. Light filters were used to visualise – based on the individual hearing curve – what each participant can and cannot hear. The research is the inspiration for Donnarumma’s solo performance, which was premiered at PACT Zollverein in September 2023. An additional program with an exhibition, video installation, lectures and group discussions will complement the performance and make the creative work process understandable. Building on feminist theory and critical disability studies, this project seeks to promote a dialog between movement research, interactive music and human-computer interaction.

Marco Donnarumma (DE / IT) is an artist, performer, stage director and theorist weaving together contemporary performance, new media art and interactive computer music since the early 2000s. He manipulates bodies, creates choreographies, engineers machines and composes sounds, thus combining disciplines, media and technology into an oneiric, sensual, uncompromising aesthetics. He is internationally acknowledged for solo performances, stage productions and installations that defy genres, and where the body becomes a morphing language to speak critically of ritual, power and technology.
More info about Marco Donnarumma

Founded in 2002, PACT Zollverein in Essen is a production house with a special focus on performing arts in relation to science, contemporary theory and social topics. The house initiates and promotes experimental, artistic and transdisciplinary forms of knowledge production. Within an international stage programme, PACT presents co-productions, premieres and guest performances and realizes discursive formats such as symposia and festivals in the platform area. As a residency venue, PACT is a central place of work and activity for international and local artists. Together with six other central institutions in Germany, PACT is a member of the Alliance of International Production Houses.
More info about PACT Zollverein

The publication VORSTELLUNG DER GEFÖRDERTEN PROJEKTE 2021-2023 on the Media Art Fund & Media Art Fellows can be downloaded here.

Photos: © Dirk Rose

Temporary Gallery – centre for contemporary art | Kris Dittel: “UNRULY KINSHIPS”

Gabris, Robert, 100x70cm, pencil on cardboard, Vienna 2022

Juurak, Krõõt_ Bailey, Alex_ FNW_7225 xx www m

Exhibition view_ Pauline Curnier Jardin + The Feel Good Cooperative (The Death of the Pope)

Exhibition view_ Nicole Baginski, Jay Tan, Clementine Edwards

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Edwards, Clementine_ Rice Huisje Rice, gold leaf, silver leaf, copper leaf glue, 2022

Aiwen, Yin_ Relationship Consulate station_ Liquid Dependencies at Framer Framed_ photographed by Samuel White Evans

Aiwen, Yin_ Relationship Consulate station_ Liquid Dependencies at Framer Framed_ photographed by Samuel White Evans_

Temporary Gallery – centre for contemporary art | Kris Dittel: “UNRULY KINSHIPS”

FELLOW: Kris Dittel

Media Art FellowsResearch

Duration: march until dezember 2022

Kris Dittel is a current Medienkunstfellow NRW at the Temporary Gallery – centre for contemporary art in Cologne. During her fellowship she is involved in a research trajectory Unruly Kinships speculating about utopian forms of kinship beyond property relations and the social reproduction of norms. It is about the critique of the nuclear family with an aim to expand the questioning spirit into practices of collective learning, sharing and contemplating other ways of organising life and social reproduction. Topics of interest include family abolitionism, queer kinship, reproductive justice, the role of technology in forming relations, as well as a reflection on raising children. The project aims to collectively contemplate the question of how to build communities that expand beyond the normative family unit, in a world that is set up to regulate social relations via the private socio-economic organisation of the nuclear family. Instead of presenting new models or universalist ideals, the project aims to diverge from the idea of blueprints and hopes to collectively contemplate the question of how to build communities that expand beyond the normative family unit, in a world that is set up to regulate social relations via the private socio-economic organisation of the nuclear family.

The project involves a collaborative research between the fellow, Kris Dittel and the director of the CCA Temporary Gallery, Aneta Rostkowska. Additionally, a study group Unruly Kinships takes place. This series of gatherings aims to think collectively about the way we form relations in and with the world, outside of the nuclear family structure. The online meetings take place monthly. Each session is led by an invited guest, including artists, thinkers, poets, activists and others.

Kris Dittel is a Rotterdam-based curator, editor and occasional writer. Informed by her background in economics and social sciences, her curatorial practice pays attention to the social, political and economic context of her work. Her long-term research projects materialise in a multitude of ways, as exhibitions, performances, publications, talks, public events, and other. Most recent research interests include Unruly Kinships(Temporary Gallery, Cologne 2022); The Voice as Material (Post-Opera at TENT, V2_, Operadagen Rotterdam, 2019); and The Question of Value (The Trouble with Value at Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow and Onomatopee, Eindhoven, 2016–19). With Eloise Sweetman Kris co-hosts I Hope This Message Finds You Well, a podcast about curating.

Her latest publication, co-edited with Clementine Edwards, The Material Kinship Reader considers material beyond extraction and kinship beyond the nuclear family (Onomatopee, 2022). Previous edited volumes include The Trouble with Value: Art and Its Modes of Valuation (Onomatopee, 2020), Marjolijn Dijkman: Radiant Matter (Onomatopee, 2018), The Economy is Spinning (Onomatopee, 2017), and Antonis Pittas: Road to Victory (co-edited with Clare Butcher, Mousse Publishing and Hordaland Kunstsenter, 2017).
More info about Kris Dittel

In this podcast episode Olga Felker talks with Kris Dittel about the project

EVENTS FOR THE PROJECT
UNRULY KINSHIPS

FORMS OF KINSHIP – LIQUID DEPENDENCIES
19 February 2022

Organized by documenta Institut in collaboration with Temporary Gallery. Centre for Contemporary Art.
With Aneta Rostkowska (CCA Temporary Gallery, Cologne), Kris Dittel (independent curator), Aiwen Yin (ReUnion Network / Liquid Dependencies)
Moderation: Mi You
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – LIQUID DEPENDENCIE

FORMS OF KINSHIP – ON FAMILY ABOLITION
A talk by Sophie Lewis
16 March 2022

Family abolition is a charged phrase which often prompts the impulsive answer “But I love my Family!” With Sophie Lewis we will discuss what is meant by family abolitionism, what it has to do with love and collective care, why we should abolish the family, and its utopian vision. Sophie Lewis will also reflect on what does family abolition mean in political contexts where the Indigenous, minoritarian and racialised family is always already pre-abolished.
Documentation FORMS OF KINSHIP – ON FAMILY ABOLITION

FORMS OF KINSHIP – THE MATERIAL KINSHIP READER
Conversation with Kris Dittel, Clementine Edwards and a talk by Joannie Baumgärtner
29 April 2022

What does it mean to acknowledge one’s closeness to, enmeshment in or even kinship with the material world? And what does it mean to question family structures – the way they organise, coerce and make deviant certain lifeforms – and dwell in other possibilities of kin-making? Not just a jolly rethinking of objects or a polyamorous romp through relationships, The Material Kinship Reader reckons with the extractivist histories of materials and the social relations that frame much of contemporary life.

The Material Kinship Reader proposes to think kin beyond bloodlines and material beyond extraction. The event will include an introduction by the editors, Kris Dittel and Clementine Edwards, followed by a talk by Joannie Baumgärtner. The talk, based on their text Family Value: Towards a Kinship Beyond the Forms of Capital will outline some ideas on the way the nuclear family structure produces kinship through the capital form.
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – THE MATERIAL KINSHIP READER

FORMS OF KINSHIP — RADICAL DREAMING
Workshop with Georgy Mamedov
15 May 2022

For many people sleep is an escape strategy in stressful situations. We want to fall asleep in the hope that after awakening the stressful condition is gone. Sleeping is a transitory state, a refuge from the pressing and devastating reality. In dreams complex, otherwise unexperienced worlds and feelings never experienced before appear. Dreams have a power to frighten and distress but also to heal and liberate. Dreaming is an utterly personal, even intimate experience, very often too embarrassing to share with others.

Yet, this is what I want to do – to invite friends and strangers into my dream; to let everyone explore and settle in the dreamworld I’ve once visited myself. It is a world in which people have a chance to live eternally, but if and when they decide to die, they turn into human-made objects. What object would you want to become after death? What does death mean anyway? What happens to kinship, love and belonging in a world where the ontological difference between the human and non-human becomes arbitrary? We will collectively dive into these questions and try to come up with some answers, which potentially bring some light and hope to our present gloomy and scary world.
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – RADICAL DREAMING

FORMS OF KINSHIP — THE POWER OF DREAMS
A reading and conversation with Georgy Mamedov
16 May 2022

In dreams mundanity, fantasy, individual fears and collective desires are often tied up in the strangest ways. Can we potentially use the power of these odd juxtapositions for radical (re)imagination of the world we live in? Audre Lorde starts her Notes from a Trip to Russia (1976) with a recollection of an erotic dream during her visit to Moscow. Georgy Mamedov will read this short fragment as an invitation to a conversation about the power of dreams as vehicles of radical imagination. Let’s share dreams and see where it gets us!
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – THE POWER OF DREAMS

FORMS OF KINSHIP – POLYSEXUAL ECONOMY
Reading group with Bini Adamczak
24 August 2022

The love market is premised on competition between lovers, like any other market solely on the construction of scarcity. There are enough lovers for everyone, but not everyone gets one – or ten. The theory of polysexual economy apprehends sexuality as value-form, from the side of the exchange process. It allows a glimpse of the possibility of a sexual economy that, for the first time in history, would not be structured in a corporative-feudal, racist-segregationist way: a universal (world) market, in which all bodies appear as commodities and are exchangeable (what a delay – see 1789). Deregulating the economy though means abolishing its limitations, and not abolishing the economy itself – which is what’s at stake here. What is sought is a mode of socialisation that is neither the (under-consumptive) crisis mode of the single-market, nor that of the twosome, the marriage contract, or the trade agreement for (a stage of) life. Neither a proto-capitalist economy of general competition, nor a socialist controlled economy that administers poverty – one and just one commodity of attractive power for each – for eternity.

Bini Adamczak (Berlin) works as a philosopher and artist who writes on political theory, queer politics, and the past future of revolutions. She invented the term “circlusion” and is the author of Communism for Kids (MIT) and Yesterday’s Tomorrow. On the Loneliness of Communist Specters and the Reconstruction of the Future (MIT). Together with Konstanze Schmitt she created the theatre play Everybody Needs Only You. Love in Times of Capitalism (Berlin 2019).
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – POLYSEXUAL ECONOMY

FORMS OF KINSHIP — ANCESTRAL SPIRITS
Talk with Khanyisile Mbongwa and Li’Tsoanelo Zwane
7 September 2022

During the event curator Khanyisile Mbongwa and researcher/ healer Li’Tsoanelo Zwane will engage in a conversation about ancestral spirits and how they establish various levels of kinship. They will discuss the way they relate to each other as Sangoma‘s (shaman/ indigenous spiritual healer), the way we can shape relations with idlozi – singular and plural ancestral spirits, with whom, one shares their corporeal body (Zwane, 2021) and brotherhood with ubuNgoma (which can be defined as the overarching theoretical and pragmatic frameworks informing the work of Sangomas) (Zwane, 2021). The discussion will also revolve around kinship from the perspective of feminine and masculine energies that are not static roles, but fluid and always changing. Mbongwa will elaborate on how this form of kinship informs her curatorial practice of care and cure.
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – ANCESTRAL SPIRITS

FORMS OF KINSHIP – DADDY RESIDENCY
Talk with Nahee Kim and Jiyoung Kim
31 October 2022

The event will be a conversation between artist Nahee Kim and researcher Jiyoung Kim with a special focus on the artist’s project Daddy Residency. Daddy Residency is a project about Nahee Kim’s family planning with their unborn baby and multiple biologically unrelated daddies. The project is Kim’s attempt to contemplate how much our norms and desires about family are programmed as ‘natural’ and how Kim, as an individual in the hetero-patriarchal society, can override those. In 2019, in the project’s initial phase, Kim publicised their plan to have a baby via IVF and raise the baby with multiple temporary daddies, chosen through an open-call. The applicants’ gender does not matter, they would be compensated for their child-rearing labour.
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – DADDY RESIDENCY

FORMS OF KINSHIP – NEUROQUEER INTIMACIES
Event with Francisco Trento
8 December 2022

During the event, Francisco Trento will present two work-in-progress projects on the topic of non-neurotypical intimate relationships, ones that deviate from the standpoint of neurotypical privilege. Francisco will introduce their research on the stigmatisation of neurodiversity within online dating platforms and share excerpts from an article soon to be published in Culture Unbound journal. During the second part of the event, they will present a zine prototype, T*nder-bender (developed at the UrbanApa Home Residency). The zine discusses experiences of stigmatisation in the online dating scene as a neurodivergent person. While this is a project strongly connected to complaining, it emphasises neuroqueer JOY. This is why the prototype also includes fictional playful dating app profiles showing a joyful approach to more-than-human and neuroqueer approaches to intimacy; profiles that value neurodivergent traits such as stimming, stuttering, being hypersensitive and overwhelmed by textures, sounds and crowded environments. The zine features counter-ableist dating app profiles from the perspective of non-human subjects, such as rocks, trees and toys looking for intimate connection. The zine’s conceptual allies are, among many, Remi Yergeau’s book Authoring Autism: On Neurological Queerness and Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family.
More info about FORMS OF KINSHIP – NEUROQUEER INTIMACIES

FORMS OF KINSHIP – ON THE (FEMINIST) CONTRADICTIONS OF PARENTING
Event with Karina Kottová and Barbora Ciprová
13 December 2022

Hold on to – Let go
Parenting in times of today’s multiple global crises raises many question marks. What can we look up to and which models can we follow or establish in order to raise children with a future, capable of co-creating more sustainable and caring conditions for life, education, relationships, work and fulfilment?

The online talk and screening will offer a glimpse into texts and research materials on diverse modalities of parenting and relations with children that were used in preparation of an international exhibition project titled Beyond Nuclear Family, presented by Jindřich Chalupecký Society curatorial collective in Prague, Berlin and New York. During the talk and the following discussion, two curators will explore some of the often contradictory stands and propositions on parenting and parent-children’s perspectives stemming from feminist theory and fiction, psychological and anthropological literature. They will discuss topics such as (in)secure attachment, (de)privatisation of care or “tribalization” of parenting styles. The talk will include excerpts of moving image works that were part of the Beyond Nuclear Family exhibition.

Karina Kottová is a curator and theoretician of contemporary art based in Prague, Czech Republic. She is currently director of the Jindřich Chalupecký Society. Among projects she established and co-established are INI Project, an independent process-oriented project space, the Věra Jirousová Award for art critics, or UMA Audioguide. She is interested in the psychological and emotional impact of current socio-political challenges as well as in feminist theory and the subversive potential of the so-called “feminine” qualities, such as empathy, irrationality or intuition. Since 2010 she has curated over 60 exhibitions, projects and festivals, both in the Czech Republic and internationally – in independent art centers and museums in New York, Washington D.C., Berlin, Helsinki, Diepenheim (NL) or Gdansk (PL). She has worked on large-scale projects and new artwork commissions with prominent artists from diverse backgrounds. In 2019 Display published her monograph Institution and the Viewer.

Barbora Ciprová is a curator and musician based in Prague. She graduated from the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University in Prague and the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno in the studio of Environment. Apart from her independent curatorial projects mainly in regional galleries, she has been working at the Jindřich Chalupecký Society, first as a production manager, then as part of the curatorial collective and as deputy director. In her practice she focuses on the influence of the physical or cultural environment on the inner “space” of a person, whether in the context of art, anthropology or psychology.

Beyond Nuclear Family represents the third chapter in the Jindřich Chalupecký Society’s long-term project Islands: Possibilities of Togetherness. It is also part of the international platform Islands of Kinship: A Collective Manual for Sustainable and Inclusive Art Institutions, co-funded by the European Union.

The Temporary Gallery – centre for contemporary art is a non-profit institution for contemporary art in Cologne. Founded in 2009 as an art association, it was directed by art historian and curator Regina Barunke from 2012-2018. In January 2019, Aneta Rostkowska took over as director of the gallery. In solo and group exhibitions, the Temporary Gallery presents young or rediscovered, often international positions. Since 2014, the Temporary Gallery has been institutionally supported by the City of Cologne as a centre for contemporary art.
More info about Temporary Gallery – centre for contemporary art

Images: @ Konrad Klapheck. The Superman (Der Supermann), 1962. Ludwig Museum I © Christopher Leaman. Sophie Lewis, 2019 I ©Pan Yannan I Image: Bini Adamczak © Chris Grodotzki

Fringe ensemble | Fehime Seven: “SHARING SPACE”

MAP TO UTOPIA

Fringe ensemble | Fehime Seven: “SHARING SPACE”

FELLOW: Fehime Seven

Media Art FellowsPerformance

Duration: ongoing

How can we expand the space of a theatre performance? Which techniques expand the theatre space and which elements help to consolidate the live experience and the theatrical space despite the expansion? What possibilities of interaction do digital solutions offer us?

The project wants to rethink the framework of a performance, expand it and combine it with original formats. The aim is to create a situation in which a hybrid audience experiences itself as a community. SHARING SPACE wants to explore how the new understanding of encounter and proximity affects the theatre space.

The research will follow on from the collaboration between Fehime Seven and the fringe ensemble in the Map to Utopia project. The project, a German-Turkish collaboration, developed an interactive performance design from 2019 to 2020, which Corona conditionally developed first as a hybrid then as a purely digital format. The situation of working towards a production gave them the chance to experience the framework conditions and content-related technical possibilities in detail and to collect feedback from the audience.

The fellowship allows on the one hand to step back and review subjective experiences, to open the eyes for new formats, and on the other hand to continue a successful collaboration.

Fehime Seven is a computer scientist and playwright from Istanbul, Turkey. She has shot documentaries and short movies in different locations in Europe. She has graduated from the master’s program at the IT University of Copenhagen in the Game Technology department. Alongside her study, she worked at Makropol as an XR developer. Also, she was the teaching assistant for the “Programming for Designers” course for one semester. She has been working on her new gamified award-winning theatre project “Map To Utopia” in collaboration with fringe-ensemble and Platform Theatre since 2019. She continues to work as a freelance developer on multiple game and transmedia projects.

Olga Felker met Fehime Seven and the team of the fringe ensemble to learn more about their research on interactive performance design

Please note: After the intro, the language of the Podcast switches to English!

EVENTS FOR THE PROJECT MAP TO UTOPIA

PERFORMANCE DATES
The performances took place in a hybrid form, at the Theater im Ballsaal in Bonn as well as digitally.

in german language
Fri, 30 September 2022
Sat, 01 October 2022

Performance in English
Fri, 07 October 2022
Sat, 08 October 2022
Tickets and further information

Sat, 08. October, 10 – 18 p.m.
one-day conference in English
at the Theater im Ballsaal and online
Tickets and further information

The fringe ensemble in Bonn was founded by Frank Heuel in 1999. Under his direction, over 80 productions, projects and project series have been created to date. The fringe ensemble works with a free and open ensemble of freelance, professional actors and actresses – supplemented by musicians, video artists and authors selected depending on the production.
More info about the fringe ensemble

Image: © fringe ensemble | © Fehime Seven | © Tanja Evers

Stiftung Zollverein | Julia Kaganskiy & Juliette Bibasse: “A Model World”

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Stiftung Zollverein | Julia Kaganskiy & Juliette Bibasse: “A Model World”

FELLOWS: Julia Kaganskiy & Juliette Bibasse

Media Art FellowsResearch

Duration: Spring 2021 and ongoing

A Model World is a research project investigating emerging techniques for climate modification, commonly known as geoengineering, explored through the lens of visual culture. It was initiated by curators Julia Kaganskiy and Juliette Bibasse in the Spring of 2021 and is currently ongoing.

As art historian T.J. Demos points out, the notion that we are living in the age of the Anthropocene “appears to imply the necessity of geoengineering.” It is therefore worth considering how this came to be, and how specific forms of representation, knowledge production, power, and desire have made the concept of engineering climate not only thinkable, but something that seems within reach (for a privileged few).

Some would say that humans have been modifying the climate unintentionally all along, so we may as well take control of the wheel. Those who subscribe to this position tend to regard the Earth’s climate systems as somehow easier to regulate than the human activities that disrupted them. Yet many scientists warn that we simply don’t understand environmental systems well enough to confidently introduce techno-fixes, noting that the potential risks may be too great to responsibly attempt something like geoengineering. Others worry that geoengineering poses a “moral hazard” by reducing the political and social imperative to curb fossil fuel emissions today. Despite these concerns, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been factoring climate interventions like large-scale Carbon Dioxide Removal into its modeling projections since 2018, noting that keeping planetary warming below 1.5°C can no longer be achieved by lowering emissions alone. Even Solar Geoengineering, the more radical and risky approach, is being touted by some as “inevitable.”

Our research interest in the topic was inspired, in part, by several recent popular science books like Holly Jean Buck’s After Geoengineering, Oliver Morton’s The Planet Remade, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky, as well as the observation that artists are slowly beginning to venture into this space, exploring the history of human-designed climate interventions, problematizing techno-solutionist approaches to environmental management, investigating the implied material reconstitution of the atmosphere, and raising ethical questions about who these interventions ultimately benefit.

Thanks to our research fellowship from medienwerk.nrw, we embarked on a month-long residency at Zeche Zollverein in Essen, hosted as part of the NEW NOW festival’s inaugural artist residency program. North-Rhine Westphalia, both because of its mining past and its focus on industrial innovation, seemed like rich terrain in which to situate this research into present-day technological solutions to climate change. The fellowship and residency period gave us an opportunity to delve deeper into the science of geoengineering and the critical discourses surrounding it, as well as to conduct interviews with scientists, researchers, artists, and curators whose work intersects with this subject area.

Today, geoengineering is still mostly hypothetical, but as environmental sociologist Holly Jean Buck notes, “it’s a topic that’s unlikely to disappear until either mitigation is pursued in earnest or the concept of geoengineering is replaced by something better; as long as climate change worsens, the specter is always there.”

The outcomes of our residency and our research to date can be found on the project website: www.a-model-world.net/

The non-profit Zollverein Foundation was established in 1998 by the City of Essen and the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, with the Rhineland Regional Association as a co-founder. In addition to promoting culture and the preservation of historical monuments, the foundation’s main task is to preserve and safeguard the existing buildings and facilities of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Zollverein Coal Mine and Coking Plant and to develop them for future use.
More info about the Zollverein Foundation

More information about the project A Model World?
Listen to Olga Felker’s conversation with Julia
Kaganskiy and Juliette Bibasse in the podcast
behind the scenes – behind the screnes.

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Image: www.a-model-world.net

Burg Hülshoff – Center for Literature | Andreas Bülhoff: “TAB TALKS”

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Burg Hülshoff – Center for Literature | Andreas Bülhoff: “TAB TALKS”

FELLOW: Andreas Bülhoff

Media Art FellowsResearch, Workshop

Duration: December 2021 until June 2022

From December 2021 to June 2022, Andreas Bülhoff, author, scholar and media artist from Berlin, will work as a media art fellow at Burg Hülshoff – Center for Literature (CfL). Bülhoff’s academic and artistic research focuses on the influence of digitalisation on practices of text production and reception such as writing, publishing and reading. During the fellowship, Andreas Bülhoff will develop Tab Talk, a digital event format between studio visit and workshop talk. Working hypothesis: Today, literary work essentially takes place on the computer. The Tab Talk makes the invisible visible via the “share screen” function and grants unique access to the digital writing environments of authors: Never before has it been possible to see processes of creative work so closely and immersively on one’s own screen and to talk about them with the respective invited authors. The Tab Talks series will start in May 2022.

Andreas Bülhoff is an author and literary scholar living in Berlin.
He completed his PhD on interface concepts of digital and post-digital text art at the Kolleg für Gegenwartsliteraturforschung Schreibszene Frankfurt. In 2018 and 2019, he published a weekly zine on these topics. It deals with text and text technologies and their specific materialities and practices in the post-digital. Possible outputs are zines, bookworks, sound poetry or literary texts. Possible means are artistic research, interface or techno-logy criticism and publishing as artistic practice.
Find out more about Andreas Bülhoff

In this podcast Olga Felker talks with Andres Bülhoff about the project

EVENTS FOR THE PROJECT TAB TALKS

In the Tab Talks series, authors guide us through their digital writing environments in a mixture of studio visit and workshop discussion.

Tab Talks #1 with Kathrin Passing
For Tab Talks #1, author and programmer Kathrin Passig shares her screen. In the stream, she talks about the influence of digital tools on her writing.

PDF PRINT

Tab Talks #2 with Mara Genschel
For Tab Talks #2, author and performer Mara Genschel shares her screen. She is known for her permanent subversion of literary conventions and her site-specific text realizations. But even the most unconventional poetry has to go through the text editor at some point. What this means for her production of her “applied conceptualisms” she reveals in conversation with Andreas Bülhoff.

PDF PRINT

Tab Talks #3 with Clemens Setz
For Tab Talks #3, author Clemens Setz shares his screen. Setz channels digital cultures like hardly anyone else and shapes them into literature in books. In conversation with our in-house artist Andreas Bülhoff, he shows exactly how this happens.

PDF PRINT

Tab Talks #4 with Elisa Aseva
For Tab Talks #4, author Elisa Aseva shares her screen. Aseva writes primarily on smartphones and is one of the most virtuosic literary voices on social media. She talks about Facebook as a writing environment, limitations and motivations of writing apps, and smartphone thumbs with house artist Andreas Bülhoff.

Tab Talks #5 with Heike Geißler
Tab Talks #5 will be broadcast live from the Leipziger Buchmesse on 27 April 23 at 17:00 and will take place for the first time as an online-offline hybrid. For this, author Heike Geißler shares her screen. In her texts, Geißler reflects both analytically and poetically on writerly working conditions and designs literary texts as vehicles for socio-political utopias. With house artist Andreas Bülhoff she talks about how this relates to the default settings of the word processing programs on her computer and what needs to change from a poetic point of view. For participation on site you need a ticket for the Leipziger Buchmesse. For participation via Zoom you can book a ticket for free. The livestream on the Digital Castle is free of charge.

Collaborative Writing Workflows #1 with Allison Parrish
How do writerly work processes take place on the computer and what influence do computer programmes have on the writing process? In a workshop by author and programmer Allison Parrish, we will write and program the possibilities of collective text production with and despite computer programs. The results can be presented in a zine.

Collaborative Writing Workflows #2 with Brendan Howell
In a workshop by programmer and media artist Brendan Howell, we will discipline our text production. We will log into his typewriter The Maggot. We follow the writing tasks and -times, which are determined by the machine and from which she edits in an autonomous way the collectively written text. The results can be presented in a zine.

Since 2018, the Center for Literature has been developing projects between event, exhibition and dialogue as a place of artistic-practical research. The CfL transfers aesthetics and production methods of other arts (such as film or performing arts) to the field of text creation and mediation.
More info about the CfL

Images: Leon Kirchlechner

IMAI Foundation | Wouter de Romph: “The Cassette Underground – Archiving Cultures of Alternative Distribution in North Rhine-Westphalia”

cassette

IMAI Foundation | Wouter de Romph: “The Cassette Underground – Archiving Cultures of Alternative Distribution in North Rhine-Westphalia”

FELLOW: Wouter de Romph

Media Art FellowsResearch

Duration: 15.12.2021 – 30.06.2022

From the 1970s to the 1990s, the music cassette made a significant contribution to the lasting democratization of the music industry and the proliferation of marginal genres and styles on informal markets. The Cassette Underground approaches the cassette cultures of North Rhine-Westphalia through archival practices: the punk, new wave, and industrial cassettes of the distributor 235 at the Düsseldorf IMAI, the cassette collections of Turkish guest workers at DOMiD in Cologne, the zines, flyers, and stickers at Afas in Duisburg, and the critical tape-digging program of the Interkultur Ruhr initiative in Essen. With their different collection strategies, indexing methods, and research interests, these institutions do not only facilitate research into the mechanisms of production and distribution, but also allow for a reflection on archiving and presentation strategies for marginal and fragile audiovisual media.

The Inter Media Art Institute is dedicated to exhibiting, archiving, and distributing time-based media art.
More info about Foundation IMAI

Wouter de Romph is a musicologist who approaches the field from both a theoretical and practical point of view. After having studied Arts & Culture Studies and Philosophy (BA) in Rotterdam, he completed his studies in Applied Musicology (MA) in Utrecht, with a thesis on the D.I.Y. cassette networks of the 1980’s. Since, he has been involved in the music industry through his work for recordlabel, store and distributor Clone Records as well as through his role as DJ and radiomaker.

For this Podcast episode Olga Felker met Wouter de Romph and Linnea Semmerling to learn more about the project The Cassette Underground

EVENTS FOR THE PROJECT
THE CASSETTE UNDERGROUND

03 July 2022, 20:00 – 04 July 2022, 02:30
SDV Goes Osdorp
A Cassette Night at the Salon des Amateurs
More info about the event

Image.: Detail from 235 catalogue, 1983, Archive Stiftung IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute, © Ulrich Leistner, Axel Wirths, 2022