Artist Talk with Holly Herndon | #TdM2020

2015_mw_ESYT_Holly_Herndon_Foto_Marc_Hinz_web
Holly Herndon15
2015_mw_ESYT_Holly_Herndon_10_Foto_Marc_Hinz_web
2015_mw_ESYT_Panel_03_Foto_Marc_Hinz_web

Artist Talk with Holly Herndon | #TdM2020

online
MOn, 28.09.2020

Office medienwerk.nrwArtist Talk

For the first time the office medienwerk.nrw took part in the event “Tag der Medienkompetenz”. As a video contribution for the digital exhibition of the TdM2020, an artist talk between Fabian Saavedra-Lara (head of the office medienwerk.nrw) and the US-American media artist Holly Herndon was shown.

Under the motto A Better Tomorrow! – Visions for a digitalised society, the eighth Tag der Medienkompetenz took place on September 28th 2020 in the NRW-stateparliament. Together with citizens, players in media literacy education and representatives of NRW state politics, discussions were held on how the digital transformation can be shaped politically and what contribution each individual can make to a humane society. Due to the corona pandemic, the TdM2020 took place virtually and digitally. In the livestream, discussions and thematic forums encouraged participants to delve deeper into individual aspects of digital competence. At the “Town Hall Meeting”, the state’s politicians answered questions from the digital public live. And the central exhibition was also moved from the state parliament to the internet. Here, institutions from NRW showed their own visions for a digital future.
More info about “Tag der Medienkompetenz”

Under the title Every Step You Take – Art and Society in the Data Age, the second medienwerk.nrw conference took place on 12-15 November 2015, dealing with the debates surrounding Big Data, surveillance and data protection. In the locations of the Dortmunder U and the Schauspiel Dortmund, international positions from media art & digital culture met to question utopias and dystopias of our digital, networked media reality. In addition to an exhibition, numerous lectures, panel discussions, artist talks and film screenings, the programme also included a concert by US artist Holly Herndon.

In the Artist Talk with Fabian Saavedra-Lara, head of the office medienwerk.nrw, the avantgarde musician talks about the love affair with her laptop and about THE SOUND OF DATA. Her music includes electronic sound collages with samples from everyday digital life as well as glitches, disturbances, errors in the system and expressions of media hyperactivity. The concert was accompanied by vocals by Colin Self and visuals by Mat Dryhurst.
More info about THE SOUND OF DATA

Holly Herndon works between media art and electronic music. Her album “Platform” was released in 2015 and received international critical acclaim. It deals with the emotional relationship between man and machine. Alternative ideals of progress become palpable here: How could future technologies be used if they were open, accessible and free of economic or political interests? In the process Herndon always reflects on the constitution of those media she uses for her music production – in her songs software and laptops are portrayed as fragile actors that can transform from familiar devices of everyday use, creativity and social communication into apparatuses of surveillance and control at any time.

DIGITAL FOLKLORE

Pauline

DIGITAL FOLKLORE

HMKV Hartware MedienKunstverein
FR, 16.10.2015, 6PM

Office medienwerk.nrwArtist Talk


On 16 October, a discussion event organized by medienwerk.nrw took place as part of the exhibition Digital Folklore by Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV). Designer Manuel Bürger (Berlin) was invited as a guest speaker.

In his creative work Manuel Bürger deals with participatory design-practices on the net. For example, he designed the publication Digital Folklore, on which the exhibition is based, and was also working on design for the media art festival transmediale (Berlin). The short presentation and discussion focused on the current interests in the field of digital culture and on the amateur cultures of the early 1990s internet: What has changed since then, what has been lost? Apparently, the web-services and -tools of the time offered more scope for individual design and thus enabled a wider range of aesthetics as well as a lively user-culture, which has disappeared in recent years in favor of uniform templates as the web has become increasingly commercialized. The discussion with Dr. Inke Arns (HMKV) and Fabian Saavedra-Lara (Büro medienwerk.nrw) deals with the old ideals of DIY-culture on the Net; and furthermore: what could we as today’s users learn from it in retrospect, and how the Net-aesthetics of that time, which from today’s perspective seem “retro”, influenced today’s design-practices as well as artistic practices (“post-internet”).

With: Manuel Bürger (Berlin), Moderation: Dr. Inke Arns (HMKV), Fabian Saavedra-Lara (Office medienwerk.nrw)


Manuel Bürger (Berlin) or The Laboratory of Manuel Bürger deals with amateurish and virtuoso design forces, works between nonsense and cultural theory and looks after clients from various areas of the communication-landscape, such as the transmediale festival in Berlin. Bürger is part of several collectives like Mimetic Club, Bench Boys, Figure 8, teaches at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart and successfully runs the Naives & Visionaries publishing house. He is also in charge of the regularly published research magazine CVSN of the Critical Vision course at the University of Cincinnatti, USA, and the annual research publication of Aarhus University, Denmark. Recent publications and essays deal with the mimetic potential of design and house music: “Slippery Design – forever beta” and “Duck House Theory – Robert Venturi’s Darkroom Fantasies” respectively.
More info about „The Laboratory of Manuel Bürger“


The office medienwerk.nrw was funded by the Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sports of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. Office hosted by: Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.