Department
Hans Schabus
Friday 7 October 2016
Workshop, Re-Mediating Cinematic Experience
Performance and discussion, Vinyl -terror & -horror
Vinyl -terror & -horror is a collaboration between Camilla Sørensen (b.1978) and Greta Christensen (b. 1977), both graduates from the Royal Danish Art Academy in Copenhagen in 2008. The project focuses on the relationship between objects and sound, presented as installation, sculpture, composition or as a live concert. The work – whether it is an installation or a concert – uses sound to create a narrative that always directly refers to the medium playing it or the situation it is presented in. The sculptural work includes amounts of various materials whereas the live concert relies exclusively on LP-records and turntables.
Photo © Sculpture and Space
Friday 7 October 2016
Workshop, Re-Mediating Cinematic Experience
Group discussion
Photo © Sculpture and Space
Friday 7 October 2016
Workshop, Re-Mediating Cinematic Experience
Lecture, Volker Pantenburg, Aggregate States of the Moving Image
Today, the term “Moving images” accommodates a vertiginous variety of different forms and practices. It covers analog film in different manifestations between 8 and 70mm, a plethora of electronic video technologies from reel-based early formats via U-Matic to BETA, and, since at least 20 to 25 years, digital files of different resolution, different modes of compression, different forms of circulation. If moving images were a species, they would drive a biologist crazy since new specimen within this expanding species seem to pop up every day. This situation is of course not new, but it has gained momentum with digital modes of production, circulation and reception. What, then, could the function of the museum and the gallery be in a time when the notion of movement, and its corollaries of variability, flexibility, change, has become the default mode of existence and permeates our lives so insistently? In my lecture, I would like to juxtapose two practices that entertain quite contrasting relations to questions of materiality. On the one hand, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder’s gallery based work that uses film projectors in a sculptural mode, on the other contemporary works that are based on notions of digital image-making and circulation.
Photo © Sculpture and Space
Friday 7 October 2016
Workshop, Re-Mediating Cinematic Experience
Lecture, Erica Balsom, Unreproducible: Cinema as Event
Film and video tend to be understood as reproducible media, grounded in an economy of the copy. Questioning this common assumption, this presentation will examine the relationship between cinema and the singularity of the live event, with particular attention to the traditions of experimental and artists’ film. Turning to Nelson Goodman’s categories of allographic and autographic arts, I will probe the implications of this shift in perspective, exploring how the event functions equally as an admission of variability and as the site of a possible reinscription of authorial control. I will consider paradigms of cinematic liveness such as the filmmaker’s presence at screenings and overtly performative practices, but will also propose that liveness can function as a critical method by which one can approach any work, even those that appear to exist beyond the domain of “live cinema.”
Photo © Sculpture and Space
Friday 7 October 2016
Workshop, Re-Mediating Cinematic Experience
Lecture, Giuliana Bruno, Material Encounters: Surface Tension, Screen Space
What is the place of materiality in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? Professor Giuliana Bruno, the Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, will discuss these elements in her talk based on the her latest research and book, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Bruno examines how material relations appear on the surface of different media - on film and video screens, in gallery installations, or on the skins of buildings and people. Showing how technologies of light produce new forms of materiality, the lecture will focus on the historicity of the screen. The screen surface is a site where different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place. On the surface, new object relations and material connections are revealed, across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media.
Photo © Sculpture and Space
Friday 7 October 2016
Workshop, Re-Mediating Cinematic Experience
Photo © Sculpture and Space
Thursday 6 October 2016
Workshop, Elisabeth Oberzaucher
In the workshop we looked at urban settings with “evolutionarily stained glasses”. A standard inventory was discussed and applied to different urban settings from “Wiener Gemeindebau” to Seestadt Aspern.
Photo © Sculpture and Space
Thursday 6 October 2016
Morning lecture, Elisabeth Oberzaucher, Urban Space – Where Anonymous Space Can Turn into Neighbourhoods
Urban space design has to satisfy various needs at the same time. A downtown setting generates pressure to make its space useful for economic purposes and for transport. City councils are keen to make urban settings unique by adding an element of art to them. Between considerations of functionality and art, there remains little room for addressing matters of usability and human behavioural tendencies. In this talk, I will challenge the prioritisation of economics in design decisions. Urban space is much more than an empty room between more relevant areas. It is the place where urban dwelling can grow into a socially coherent form. In order to fulfil its critical role of establishing a sustainable social structure, public space needs to be designed to invite social interaction. Human evolutionary history can instruct us into how to achieve this goal. This lecture will outline core elements of human landscape preferences that allow for inclusive urban design.
Photo © Elisabeth Oberzaucher
Wednesday 5 October 2016
Workshop, Jakub Szczęsny
The workshop participants looked for a place possessing its own strong specificity that can have a ‘one-line characteristic,’ like, “everybody knows the tomatoes here were always the cheapest in the city,” or “Alice doesn't live here anymore.” Through asking around for more information, searching in all available sources, and discussing it in small groups new narratives evolved, depicted by a project or a physical object. The goal was to tell a story as directly as possible showing that there's more than meets the eye. A good reference to the workshop is Milan Kundera’s book Le rideau. Essai en sept parties (The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts), about the continuity of concepts in Mitteleuropa's prose since Gargantua et Pantagruel by Rabelais to Kafka's Metamorphosis.
Photo © Sculpture and Space
Wednesday 5 October 2016
Morning lecture, Jakub Szczęsny, The 4th S is the Symbolic
The usual antinomy of pragmatic versus symbolic is strongly embedded in art theory, literary history and in the teaching system. The binary perception of the two “oppositions” is thus an academic or cultural simplification: our contemporaneity as well as our European past suggest that there's no socio-technical tool more useful than the symbolic. It is perfectly visible in today's “engineered history,” skillfully created and disseminated by various political powers of radically different societies, from Russia and China through to Europe and both Americas. The practice of shaping symbolic meaning grows in importance when embodied as commemoration and participation. Architecture, public art or mere monument-making achieve a new-found importance for past-oriented powers who treat cities as their battle-grounds and as starting points for media-run propaganda. How can we unravel these manipulations, unveil the weaknesses of these constructs and propose our own symbolic strategies?
Installation Coal Heart Mother in Warsaw's Ujazdowski Park
Photo © Radek Pasterski
Tuesday 4 October 2016
Workshop, Volker Kirchberg, Stephen Weil's thought experiment "The Museum of the Lusitanian Settlement"
Photo © Sculpture and Space
Tuesday 4 October 2016
Morning lecture, Volker Kirchberg, Legitimizing Museums as an Agent of Social Change?
It is an ivory-tower concept of museums to declare for themselves an existence outside of society, and to insist on their autonomy and self-determination. At all times, they are dependent on societal factors, be it the political climate or socio-demographic shifts. Agreeing to this obvious fact, museums must then become more actively oriented to their social surroundings. It is the task of museums to assimilate to these surroundings and to make themselves able and ready to shape their environments actively and self-confidently. Basing myself on sociologist Robert Merton’s classification of institutions as either ‘conventional,’ ‘ritualistic,’ ‘innovative’ or ‘rebellious,’ and having extensively reviewed the literature on museums as potential social agents, I classify museums into eight types: 1) the responsive museum, 2) the engaging museum, 3) the participatory museum, 4) the legitimate museum, 5) the community museum, 6) the inclusive museum, 7) the new museum, and 8) the contesting museum. I will provide references and examples for all eight classes of agent-oriented museums. At the end of these remarks I will return to Merton’s classification and range the eight classes of museums accordingly. I will then ask – based on the literature and the examples – what museums can be classified as ‘conventional,’ ‘ritualistic,’ ‘innovative’ or ‘rebellious,’ and have there been changes within the international museum landscape in recent years and among national museum associations? My lecture will end with a request to museums to become more socially reflective and active with respect to the urgent needs of our contemporary lives.
Climate Change March, 2014
Photo © Volker Kirchberg
Monday 3 October 2016
Workshop, Hans Schabus, North, East, South and West from Paulusplatz 5, 1030 Vienna
Photo © Sculpture and Space
Monday 3 October 2016
Morning lecture, Hans Schabus, From Lassnitz to Vechte
For a sculptural project an old train steel truss bridge was transported from south-eastern Austria to north-western Germany. The enormous size of the bridge – 3.8 x 5.6 x 25.5 meters – defines the greatest dimensions of a single transportable object over a highway. The bridge at Lassnitz had to be replaced by a new one due to increasing load capacities. Instead of being recycled, the bridge travelled 1,500 km via heavy-duty transport over six nights to reach its future location. On the new site the isolated steel bridge has become a sculpture that crosses the river Vechte. The lecture including a video screening addressed the development of the entire project as part of a sculptural program along the river Vechte.
Lassnitz, 2012
Concrete, steel framework bridge
5,3 x 6 x 25,8 m
Photo © Helmut Claus