| first impressions: permeable black walls divide this year’s transmediale exhibition part at the entrance foyer into a black cube system and this seems adequate to express the questions touched in the announcing information: |
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… Although technical products promise enhanced agency and security, we experience an increased disorientation: the ethical question of what one should do and take responsibility for, is eclipsed by an immense number of options.
Technologies open up fields of agency and provide interfaces for designing these personal and communal realities, – always also implying mechanisms of exclusion. However, in order to appropriate the creative potentials, it is necessary to know about the ethical and aesthetical effects of the technologies applied, as well as their limitations. As to get some structure into the mentioned increasing disorientation the first impression is the one of an aesthetical system which installs dividing cabins for each project. But this interpretation would just mark an overtake of common art exhibition strategies onto a field emerging from experimental attitudes. Reading the hand-out though tells about the recent collapse of categories for works submitted to the award jury. Having this in mind thoughts spin around the slightly transparent and permable fabric walls as a possible metapher for the accumulating pervasive influences of electronic devices either in the sense of connecting or surveilling space. The contradictory impression left might be a perfect hint to many of the unresolved questions which still linger around many of the new technologies …. basic problems to answer … but still often lost between tech beauty and intentional pretensions. |
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| One example is the aesthetically impressing work Gravicells (site) which reminds the interacting participant of her bodily presence through acoustic and visual signals and simultanously measures and displays GPS coordinates onto the wall. Thus one can perfectly request ones own position at the HKW, but it makes me think again about the obviously incresing demand to locate a position within a bound spatiality. |
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| … a request at the moment primarily used to relocate ones physical presence coded into data – the virtual reassurement of exsistence within media transmission … as a symptom of the postmodern collapse of ground … | |
