Duration: spring until December 2023

Video Digest
An Online Video Art Magazine by Videonale and IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute.

With Video Digest, the Videonale Bonn and the IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute Düsseldorf presented an online video art magazine and an associated research and exhibition project at the Moltkerei Werkstatt, Cologne, complemented by the concurrent program series VIDEONALE.scope.

The Video Digest project began with an interest in Video Congress’ video magazine Schauinsland which is located in the archives of the IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute. Video Congress was founded in Kassel in 1982 as a loose association of video artists in the wake of documenta 7. Wishing to work on related themes in a collaborative manner, to establish infrastructures for the young medium of video, and to simultaneously initiate a self-determined system of distribution for their works, the artists in this group worked with VHS tapes, each comprising several video contributions, which could be independently circulated, presented, and shared. The initiators were inspired by the first video art magazine entitled Infermental, which developed just a few years earlier by Gábor and Vera Bódy. Between 1980 and 1991, ten issues of Infermental, featuring international, contemporary video art, were published by changing editors and with different thematic focuses. While Schauinsland was more linked to youth culture and punk and new wave aesthetics and the contributions of the various collectives were at times intertwined, Infermental strengthened the idea of an encyclopedia[1] seeking to portray current video experiments in all their diversity. The third video magazine included in the project is the Amsterdam-based Zapp Magazine with “branches” in New York, Paris, London, and Copenhagen. It operated a decade later than the other two and succeeded in once again redefining the format of the video magazine as an independent space of art, critique, and documentation.

The issues published from 1993 to 1999 did not only present video art, but also featured recordings of openings, lectures, and performances, which in their relaxed DIY aesthetics conveyed a polyphonic picture of the international art scene.

Despite structural and formal differences, these three video magazines share a particular political awareness showing itself both in the themes and the way they self-organized and distributed their work. Video Congress, for example, captioned their first issue with the motto: “Für eine aktive Art Video” (“For an active art video” and the editors of Infermental also adopted a decidedly political tone by addressing the simmering East-West conflict.

Video Digest, initiated by the Videonale and the IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute, took up these impulses and from a present perspective examined the resistive potential of moving images through a series of dialogically presented contemporary works. The newly commissioned videos, performances, and zines by Ji Su Kang-Gatto, Ayesha Hameed, Becket MWN, Rangwane, and Leyla Yenirce (in collaboration with Mazlum Nergiz) make use of diverse languages and strategies of protest and mobilization—but also of resignation—and reflect on a current video landscape shaped by video on demand, smart TVs, YouTube/Youku, TikTok, and Instagram.

Alongside new productions, the Video Digest exhibition presented the fourth issue of Infermental edited by FRIGO (Gérard Couty, Mike Hentz, Christian Vanderborght) with 102 contributions; issue one of Schauinsland entitled Erotik with contributions by Gruppe A & A, Fun & Art and Norbert Meissner; and issue six of Zapp Magazine, produced and curated by Corinne Groot, Jack Jaeger, Arnold Mosselman, and Rob van de Ven. They were set in an exhibition architecture by Lennart Wolff and were joined by a program of screenings and performances.

Curators: Miriam Hausner, Nele Kaczmarek, Tasja Langenbach
Concept:Tasja Langenbach, Linnea Semmerling

All works were on display together with issues of the historical video magazines Infermental, Video Congress and Zapp Magazine in an exhibition at the Moltkerei Cologne from November 25 – December 10, 2023.

The IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute is dedicated to exhibiting, archiving, and distributing time-based media art. Founded in Düsseldorf in 2006, the institute has had its own video art channel, IMAI Play, since 2021. This focuses on a participatory presentation of videos from the IMAI archive and invites users to put together their own video programs, share them and comment on others.

Videonale e. V. is a non-profit association based in Bonn, which was founded in 1984 to offer a first platform in Germany for the then still young international video art – making Videonale Bonn one of the earliest festivals for video art worldwide. Since then, the association has dedicated itself to presenting contemporary video art in all its facets, addressing a regional, national and international audience. Every two years, the association organizes VIDEONALE – Festival for Video and Time-based Arts with an exhibition presentation and an extensive festival program. Since 2010, the VIDEONALE has had an online video archive with over 200 entries.

Duration: October 2022 to December 2023

FULLDEMO.cracy is a realistic live theater game with escape room character.

The multiplayer live setting allows the audience to become actors in the story and experience the achievements and challenges of democratic processes at first hand. The action centers around the fundamental questions: What form of democracy do we want to live in and how can we actively shape it?

STORY

2023: A previously unknown group has occupied several of the parliament buildings of the city. To date, it is not fully clear what their intentions are.
Who are these self-proclaimed “democrats”? Until it has been verified whether the perpetrators are armed and what their goals are, special task forces and counter-terrorism units are on standby. For now, there will be no intervention to prevent an escalation.
Is this an attack on the status quo or a necessary revolution in politics and society? And who are the minds behind this supposedly decentralised movement?

“Welcome, player. We need your help. Consider all your decisions: The future of humanity could depend on you. The clock is ticking from now on.”

BACKGROUND Crude conspiracy theories and a global shift to the political right are holding each other’s feet to the fire. “Volksstürme” on parliaments of democratically organized constitutional states are a frightening “fad” not only in Brazil, the USA and Germany. Trafique react to these threatening scenarios with an artistic echo room that is designed on an interdisciplinary basis: The production FULLDEMO.cracy is being created by a team of artists, media designers and programmers in order to extend the performative design space with the latest digital and narrative methods.

FORM The players are divided into two teams that play with and against each other in separate locations. They are accompanied by two actors who contribute storytelling elements on the one hand and can control the course of the game as game masters on the other.
A local server gives the players access to the web interface created especially for the play, which becomes a central location for the live game theater. Light / sound and various interactive elements in the room (e.g. buttons and motors) react directly to the gameplay and thus to the actions of the players.

The premiere took place on December 6, 2023.

Studio Trafique – Institute for the design of theatrical visions of the future is a theater founded in Cologne in 2021 that focuses on contemporary aesthetics. The focus is on developing new forms of theater by combining familiar theatrical aesthetics with film and digital technologies. Studio Trafique is run by Ensemble Trafique with the artistic management team consisting of Anna Marienfeld and Björn Gabriel.
Studio Trafique was awarded the Kölner Kulturpreis für Junge Initiativen in 2022 for its initiative in the digitalisation of the performing arts. Over the past ten years, they have created a diverse program of various productions and have continuously developed further – always in search of appropriate manifestations for their contemporary content. In doing so, they overcome superficial genre boundaries.

Using digital and filmic elements, they extend the conventional representation and impact spaces of performing arts. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Trafique has developed the pioneering format of hybrid live-film theater, in which live character is always the main element: with live direction, live video editing and live sound engineering, every medium always refers to the theatrical situation and creates new experiences for the audience.

WEHR51 (under the artistic direction of Andrea Bleikamp and Rosi Ulrich) focuses on the realization of its own concepts and theater texts, which are dedicated to current and socio-politically relevant topics. This is linked to the search for new dramaturgical approaches that lead to unusual performance venues and include immersive art forms. In the artistic debate, the content determines the form. The initial idea and theme define the dramaturgical approach, in which the tools of acting, dance, music, video and others are equally combined and expanded. The result is a diverse program of ‘hybrid’ productions.
WEHR51 sees the audience as part of the production. The aim is not to force the audience to participate or to lecture them, but rather to sensually warm people up, to question the themes and to rethink them.

The project is also funded by the Cultural Office of the City of Cologne, the NRW Kultursekretariat Wuppertal and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW.

Founded in 1901 in the southern part of Cologne, the museum was reopened in 2010 as the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum – Kulturen der Welt in a new building in the city center. Around 70,000 items from daily life and rituals and around 100,000 historical photographs from Oceania, Asia, Africa and the Americas are kept there. Based on this primarily historical collection, various perspectives on the shared cultural heritage are opened up, with diverse past, present and future levels of meaning.

The Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM) was founded in 1989 and opened in Cologne in 1990. Today, the KHM is a major part of the German art and film school landscape. It represents a project-oriented approach and specifically promotes the interdisciplinary examination of various artistic fields (including photography, fiction, documentary and experimental film, video and light art, camera and image design, experimental computer science, theory, aesthetics and the history of machines, the arts and media).

Duration: June 2023 to June 2024

Post-digital culture meets science fiction: the art project You better don’t know questions and stages the relationship between the environment, humans and the sense of reality and develops speculative narratives for paranormal and extraterrestrial experiences.

You better don’t know creates a fascinating surreal encounter with extraterrestrial life. The artists take up the UFO myth to invite us to play and experiment with orders of reality. The participants stand in the center of the action: In a hypnotic state between dreaming and being awake, they leave their familiar everyday surroundings to enter a post-apocalyptic world full of challenges. In exchange with beings from entirely alien worlds, they become active co-creators of a possible future.

Since my first paranormal, extraterrestrial experience at the age of eight in the form of a light phenomenon in the sky that cannot be clearly defined, I have always wondered whether this encounter was real or merely an illusion of light that appeared due to excessive consumption of sci-fi films.
I WANT TO BELIEVE My faith in humanity is based on our post-digital society finding a solution for dealing with intolerance and rejection of the foreign / alien. (Vesela Stanoeva))

The artistic project You better don’t know promotes the collaboration of various institutions and artists from a wide range of artistic disciplines (including media art, creative coding, sound design, dance, lighting design, scenography, costume design, 3D design) in order to jointly address the topic of the post-digital society against the backdrop of social and political change. The results of the cooperation project were presented at the NEW NOW Festival for Digital Arts in Essen in 2023. At least two further performances are also planned at Dortmund’s Theater im Depot.

Die Ruhrgebieterinnen is a collective of female artists founded in 2021 by Vesela Stanoeva and Elisabeth Drache and specialises in digital performance. They explore new forms of encounters and differences as well as the potential of diversity in various performative and installative projects.

MIREVI is the “Mixed Reality and Visualization” working group at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. In an external laboratory near Düsseldorf’s main railway station, a team of scientists, technicians and designers work together with artists on innovative human-technology interfaces that appeal to the whole body.