Periodizing Participation | Identity in the Age of Urban Narcosis |
(25 – 26 June) - BEIJING FILM ACADEMY
(25 JUNE)
For an understanding of Subjectivity through the development of the “discourse on new media” in China , their relation to description/construction of Reality dimension. Perception: time and space in video aesthetics; what kind of public domain they describe and what are the present experiments leading to. Inside these perpetual urban scenarios what are the new realms of visibility where the political and the subjective negotiate their existence and thus survival, and how do we move among those?

NOTE:
Collaboration with concomitant Transdisciplinary Research Group on Creative Industries in Beijing (CIB), Mobile Research Laboratory, Beijing ,
http://orgnets.net
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/bei-ci_listcultures.org
Coordinators: Ned Rossiter, Bert de Muynck, Mónica Carri?o

Cultural, Economic and Urban Geographies of Beijing's Creative Industries
Speakers:
•  Danny Butt, Suma Media Consultancy, Aotearoa-New Zealand
•  Shveta Sarda, coordinator of Cybermohalla projects, Sarai, Dehli
•  Adrian Blackwell, Artist, Architect & Urban Designer, University of Toronto , B.A.S.E. ( Beijing Architecture Studio Enterprise )
•  Shaun Chang, New Media researcher, Tsinghua University, Beijing Chair: Ned Rossiter (26 JUNE)

SCREENING PROGRAMs
1) BACK TO THE FUTURE (Part 1)
Video selection curated by Jelena Vesic , curator and writer based in Belgrade
DURATION: 50' min
Is the promise of a ‘better future' conditioned by the change of social relations or by a pleasure trip in a futuristic promise of my flying car that goes beyond the limits of preconceptualized motorways? What is the meaning of the projects of modernity, modernism, and social modernization today? Where that promise of my flying car disappeared, slipped into the oblivion, never to be mentioned again?
Video selection under the title Back to the Future sheds a new light to the old and omnipresent question: How to observe our past and how to imagine our future? Back to the Future programme represents a fictionalized view to the ‘better future' of the Yugoslav socialist past. Lurking through the misty air and dense atmosphere of transition, furnished with social apathy, fragmentation and alienation, it is a certain pursuit for a vanished ‘optimism of the époque'.
Video expeditions taken by David Maljkovic [Scene for New Heritage I and II] and the Association Apsolutno [Absolutely Dead] utilize the language of the adventure and science fiction movies in order to take us to the institutionalized and symbolic places of social vision and progress of the times of Socialism. These unexpected and estranged trips through time and space try to escape the dominant ideological pathways of today: the post-socialist nostalgic revision of the past and neo-liberal museological pragmatism of today.
The film Imported Crows by Goran Devic portrays a democratic petit bourgeois surrounding of the small city in Croatia and the widespread fear of Communism, symbolically represented through the conspicuous presence of the flock of 'disgusting birds'. The film adopts the aesthetics and narrative strategies of the Yugoslav film noire: It combines cinematic and archive material and displaces traditionally tense historical discussion into domestic surrounding of transitional neighborhood.
Appropriate Cultural-Artistic Programme for the occasion of opening of the first built part of the Tatlin's Monument to the III International is a collective work of Glasgow-based group Henry VIII's Wives and different independent and institutional initiatives in Belgrade .
This film is dedicated to the fragmentary fulfillments of the great utopias: to the joy and absurd, possibilities and impossibilities, and the numerous perspectives of individual and collective so-called historical reality. One gets a feeling it is not all about yesterday; by building this architectural mega structure from pieces, by proposing a crawling revolution assembled slowly and gradually from splinters rather then the one proclaimed at any given moment, we stand before the utopian avant-garde project: Monument to the III International by Vladimir Tatlin.
Each of the films of Back to the future selection is an attempt to ‘correct' the pragmatic discourses of the future and the social progress typical for contemporary neoliberalism and its ideology of technological management and global networked society.

Artists and Works:
Association Apsolutno : Absolutely Dead , 1995, 7'
Association Apsolutno projects are dealing with 'absolutely real facts' of various kinds, from architectural situations and media production to political facts. The attention focuses on the situation found here and now, which reflects the specificity of time and space in a distinct way. The video Absolutely Dead is an investigation of a death of two transoceanic liners under 'suspicious' circumstances. Two abandoned ships are found in the harbor of Novi Sad . Once symbolizing modernization and progress of new Yugoslav society, today they represent absolutely real leftovers of the transitional economy. The video Absolutely Dead is walking us trough uncanny atmosphere of ghostly past and tense suspense of any possible outcome. Information-and-facts approach employed in documentary genres and journalistic reportages is manipulated through the operative strategies of adventure and action movies.
David Maljkovic : Scene for New Heritage I , 2004, 6'
Scene for New Heritage II (Second Coming) , 2005, 5'
In the project Scene for new Heritage, the two expeditions of time-travelers – the future generation of humanoids – will end up near the monument at Petrova Gora; there they will meet the gigantic venture of the major modernist sculptor Vojin Bakic, erected at the time of socialism – the memorial to the main mobile surgical hospital of the WW2 Partisans. The object has been devastated during the conflicts of 1990s, abandoned and left to oblivion. It acquired its new function in the sphere of vulgar pragmatism - as a high enough postament for signal-transmitters by the Croatian State Television and the T-Mobile Corporation. However, the form of this monument unquestionably testifies the social progress and the victory it stands for: the silver tower made of stainless steel, its elegant shapes and monumental dimensions indeed looked like a ‘step ahead' at the time of its creation. Virtually inconspicuous in the assortment of existing forms of historical memorials and standard ideological representations, this monument is unmistakeably recognised as a 'setting' of an action taking place in distant future and fits perfectly in the universal language of 'science fiction'. In such a framework, David Maljkovic will attempt to raise the question of heritage through the fictionalisation of the encounter between the two categories of future: the imagined, and the utopian one. He materializes this encounter by guiding the imagined future generations to the symbolic locus of modernity, which presupposes utopian facets – promises of different and better future.
Goran Devic : Imported Crows , 2004, 22'
Video Imported Crows is dealing with neighborhood and relationship with neighbors. The artist is recording walls and windows of the building filled by its habitants. They very vividly comment the origins and destiny of the numerous crows that usually gather on the three in front of the building. Some of them think that animals have the right to do what they want, some of them are strongly convinced that crows should be immediately chased out of the human's living area. One claims that crow is elegant and sophisticated bird, another one replies that it is actually the most awful creation of God and that actually all of them are imported from somewhere on the occasion of the death of significant communist officer during the seventies. The story about crows, intertwined with a lots of assumptions about political conspiracies of communists, becomes a metaphor for politically loaded narrative of tolerance.
Video Imported Crows is also referring to the scenes of neighborhood in Yugoslav cinematography, where the politics is most often discussed in the domestic surrounding. Appropriate Cultural-Artistic Programme for the occasion of opening of the first built part of the Tatlin's Monument to the III International , 2007, 19'

[Collective work of the Henry VIII's Wives, Horkestar, BGYSS, WoO, Vladmarx, Jelena, Ana, Milos and the group of enthusiasts from Belgrade ]

In 1919 the Department of Fine Arts within the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment commissioned the artist Vladimir E. Tatlin to develop the design for the Monument to the III International. A four hundred meter high spiral tower, made of steel, iron and glass was set to mark the birth of the 'new society' and the principles of new architecture and art. It was designed in a such a way that it's spiral construction should carry three monumental rotating halls in the shapes of cube, cone, and half sphere, while the very top of the tower was supposed to host an informational center, a news agency and a long-range radio transmitter. Tatlin's monument to the III International was never built. Its project became the symbol of avant-garde vision and radical modernity. In the early XXI century, the artistic group Henry VIII's Wives from Glasgow initiated the project of building the fragments of Tatlin's monument worldwide. Tatlin's Tower And The World is a lobbyist project supporting this action. A first real-size part of the Tatlin's monument was built in New Belgrade as sculpture in public space. It is a fragment from the middle part of the steel construction [8,5 x 4,5 x1, 9m .] Erected between Museum of Contemporary Art and the former Central Committee of the Communist Party [now the Business Centre U?ce], the monument bridges the symbolic space of Yugoslav modernity and the modernism from the times of Socialism. On the other hand, this sculptural artwork - a steel construction of 11 tones - does not enclose specific visual features or aesthetic values that would indicate it's origins. The only guarantee that it is part of Tatlin's Tower is an artistic claim, but this is a declaration which brings into play the mental game of 'the art of suspicion' equal to Marcel Duchamp's 55 cc of Paris Air enclosed in glass. We can leave ourselves to this game but if we are looking for any positivist resolution, for any firm guarantee, we have to destroy the artwork. One can be certain about one thing - the fragment of the Monument to the III International is the most monumental ready-made known in contemporary history of art.

This film represents the celebration of the opening of the monument - the joint initiative of group of artists, activists, musicians, independent and institutional cultural workers, technical associates and other enthusiasts.

2) CROWD AND PERFORMANCE (Part 2)

Video selection curated by Jelena Vesic , curator and writer based in Belgrade

DURATION: 50' min

There is nothing man fears more than the touch of the unknown. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. Only among the crowd this fear stops. Animated crowd in which a body is pressed to body, crowd whose physical constitution is also animated, compact, is making one not notice anymore exactly who is touching him. Once surrounded by the crowd, one ceases to feel its touch. Ideally, all are equal there. (Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power)

From the setting of art history we can recall two faces of the crowd: the first, recognized as the holder of political will (demonstrations or revolutionary masses), appearing on many historical or allegorical paintings, and the second one - more neutral and more dispersed, usually connected to the representation of the city, modernity and urban life. Of course, the crowd is never neutral... Apparently nameless bodies, anonymous minds and ordinary settings are always producing narratives and images related to the dominant politics of public spaces. Even impressionist chroniclesthat what tends to be 'disinterested' mass scenes are not only the random frames of the street life. As a records of early modernity, they basically announce standardization of the city crowd, early control of public space and regulation of the behavior of the masses in the street.

Is it the only perspective?

Standing out as an individual in the crowd becomes the most important aspect that constitutes identity today. It becomes a recognizable sign of successfully realized authorship, originality and authenticity. But, the perspective of this claim can be observed as just another aspect of new "experience economy", where lifestyle industries are transforming the individual into a unique ”commodity personality”.

In the culture of the spectacle everybody is a performer.

The transformation of cultural and political space during 1990' s encompasses different mechanisms of control of public space and, at the same time, establishes a propaganda of guarantee and security. Spectacular reports of mass events and war scenes or violent demonstrants are turned into aestheticized images which feed our imagination. This images we start to love and enjoy the same way we enjoy action movies, horror movies and disaster movies. They tell us that the horror is somewhere else and that we can freely surrender to the visual pleasure and feeling of security.  

Capitalist modernization of society and gentrification of core city areas across the world is taking place parallely with entrenching and widening of political control of public spaces. The surveillance of space and the introduction of new regimes of behavior is induced through simultaneous process of privatization of public space and new forms of division between the spheres of private and public.

The video program Crowd and Performance examines the new possibilities of collective thinking and collective acting in the public space. It offers the possible counter-image to the one propaganda is truing to create, one of a formless and unconscious mass, standing in the way of the individual freedom of choice.

This video program is part of theoretical-practical platform No More Reality (Crowds and Performance: Re-enactment, Public Space, Use of Body) initiated by Claire Staebler and Jelena Vesic. The platform places into focus performative images of the crowd and different uses of the body in public space. It includes re-enactment of real and imaginary events, media interventionism and collective performance.

No More Reality is developing in stages starting from 2005, as a mobile exhibition and discussion project which involves a group of artists, theoreticians, activists, radio groups, curators, art writers and magazines. Exhibitions, publications and discussions accompanying this process have been conceptualized as fragmentary situations and steps in the research, not as the final projects whose standpoint is fixed and unchangeable.

Artists and Works:

Johanna Billing , Project for Revolution , 2001

Johanna Billing's video Project for Revolution silently portrays the group of fashionably dressed young people sitting in the university classroom and mingling around without the clear goal. It actually remakes the famous scene from the Zabriskie Point by Michelangelo Antonioni – an emblematic movie that represents the 1968 youth movements, the political unrest in the university campuses, and the conflict between counter-culture and capitalist-conformist establishment. Re-enactment of this particular and remarkable scene is, without doubt, related to the feelings and political perspectives of the youth of today. While with the very first shot in Antonioni's film we are plunged into a room overcrowded with faces and voices, into a passionate students debate that intends to be revolutionary - on how to recognize the enemy, what tactics and course of action to take, Billing's characters hang out in a university room as if waiting for something to happen, but there is nothing going on, communication is interrupted and the people even avoid the eye contact. The silence and feeling of infinite suspense is broken by the noise of a photocopy machine, but in this seems-to-be point of culmination, instead of the important proclamation leaflet, what comes out from the machine is a blank paper. And then the film loops from the beginning.

"It was our parents' generation who brought the revolution. They took care of all that for us and we were told that now everything had been done and it wasn't something we need be bothered with. We were to pursue a career and invest in our own lives." - wrote Johanna Billing in 2001, and Project for Revolution carefully embodies this thought.  

Skart , Your Shit—Your Responsibility (2000-present)

Skart group was founded in 1990 in abandoned graphic atelier in Belgrade 's Faculty of Architecture, as a 2-persons-quarrel&dialogue sort of collective. Skart (means 'scrap' in Serbian) was formed by Dragan Protic and Djordje Balmazovic, who call themselves 'collective-in-progress' and base their activities on 'selfproduction-and-selfdistribution of critical communication'. Skart often collaborates with the groups of amaterus, enthusiasts or fans, whose motives, driving forces and modes of incorporation are contrary to the logic of interests, effective production or team management.

The work of the Skart group is based on the combination of various experiences - poetry, performing arts, architecture, graphic design and community engagement. It is often connected to the street life and the attempt to act in the public sphere. Skart is often using in a tactical way the aesthetic forms connected with representations of socialism: choir singing, blue workers uniforms, flyers and leaflets, speeches, different forms of collective appearance, etc. This tactical aesthetics signifies their opposition to the false criticism of socialist values, followed by nationalistic politics and politics of free market.

The Your Shit—Your Responsibility project humorously symbolizes the need of a nation's populace to understand and think critically about their political decisions. It is one of the famous Skart slogans which is commenting on personal responsibility in/of not only the hard times, but also in everyday life and day-to-day situations. In this sense, the “baggage” of irresponsible act is equated with dogshit with an underwhelmingly triumphant flag placed in it and left for someone else to clean up. This action was followed by the distribution of stickers, posters, and dogshit in different cities and villages in Serbia and abroad. The four short films screened for this occasion represent some kind of ephemera of this urban action.

Inventory , Coagulum - a momentary clot in the heart of commerce , 2000

Inventory is a group of artists-essayists who founded the journal of the same name in 1996. Coagulum is a medical term which describes a clot in the blood. Inventory produces different actions, interventions and situations created in relation to the passive and consumerist character of the contemporary social sphere. They often work in collaboration with other people and their actions are usually documented on video and in photographs.

Coagulum - a momentary clot in the heart of commerce represents two filmed actions: one made at Oxford street in London , and another one in a suburban shopping mall in Kingston . Inventory sent out posters, flyers and e-mails inviting people to join the Coagulum. The intention was a simple one - to obstruct the flow of the main thoroughfare of the shopping area and to disturb the daily routine of consumerist ritual. The tool of the obstruction was a clot made of human bodies - a circular formation modeled on the form of the rugby scrum. Assembly point for the 'coagulants' who answered to the call was a small park nearby the shopping mall. They met each other there for the first time and carried out a quick rehearsal for the upcoming performance. During the course of the performance all the surroundings, the shops, the pedestrians, the buskers and browsers, all the unconscious movements of a Saturday afternoon shopping became absurd and laughable from the perspective of the participants of the action. As Inventory wrote later, they had an impression that they are viewing this hustle and bustle from behind a glass screen. The actions took place outside of individual shops, in the ‘public' space, and were essentially non-aggressive in nature. However, they cause extreme consternation among the security staff, who swiftly act to intervene.

"One cannot read the act of shopping or shopping centres as abstractions. There are concrete characteristics that structure certain everyday practices. The shopping centre is literally and symbolically closed from the outside world while simultaneously providing, through its internal architecture (the provision of seating areas, fountains, toilets etc.) the illusion of a real public space. Yet these internal streets have only one function, to facilitate consumption. It is a space where conduct, forms of behaviour, are intensively policed." - was the comment that Inventory made in reviewing this action.

Ligna , Radioballet , 2003

The performance-, theatre- and radio art group LIGNA (in existence since 1997) consists of media theorists and radio artists Ole Frahm, Michael Huners and Torsten Michaelsen, who work in the FSK - "Free Broadcaster Combine" - a non-commercial, local radio in Hamburg. LIGNA repeatedly designs experimental situations, which aim for the transgression of conventional application of radio technology and re-actualization of its inherent, but forgotten or ignored potentials.

The action Radioballet took place in the main station of Hamburg and one year later in Leipzig . Both spaces had been recently privatized and subjected to control by surveillance cameras and security guards. The people who beg, sit on the floor, and express 'inadequate behaviour' are usually expelled from the space. The Radioballett brought back these excluded gestures. Several hundreds of people followed the invitation to spread around with small radio devices in their pockets. The participants could act where they wanted to: on the platforms, on the stairs or the escalators or in the shopping mall. The 'ballet' was synchronized by the instructions that participant received through portable radios: sit down, stand up, hold your hand in a begging motion, turn around, dance and wave good-bye to the departing train of the revolution... The Radioballett was not conceived as a demonstration or assembly (that could have been forbidden by the police) but rather as a 'Zerstreuung', a german term, that could be translated as dispersion, distraction or distribution. Like ghostly remnants, the excluded gestures haunted and disturbed the surveyed public space during the 90 minutes of the performance and opened it up for uncanny and uncontrollable situation. If the medium of radio is sometimes blamed for the depopulation of the public sphere and keeping its listeners in their homes, LIGNA turned radio reception into a public event.

3) VIDEOTAGE SELECTION

1. 2006 CATALOGUE PREVIEW

DURATION: 1 H

Game of Death 2

Choi Wai Hung ( Hong Kong )

2004, 3'18"

Animation

Hong Kong is a small place. A place fills up a lot of things. Running cars in the road. Busy people on the pavement. And a forgotten old building. Hidden in the city of glass pane. Sudden sound of fighting. Breaking a quiet afternoon. Showing a mystical Kungfu. In Tang-lai, an old building. This animation is especially designed for appreciating kung fu movies from a different angle and enjoying the classic parts again.

Sliding Whites

Eric Siu Chi-man ( Hong Kong ) 2003, 8' 40”

Experimental/ Video Art

‘White as color is just a fluid concept. White of ice, white of paper, white of milk, white of cloud… white of air, liquid and solid, the whites are all different and each of them owns unique property. The fusion of Materials and Eyes reveals the truth of colors. Sliding Whites --- an experiment on the TV cells, the representation of

color and the originality of digital image.'

IdoLetHerMyHeadHave

Rita HUI Nga-shu (Hong Kong) 2004, 17'

This is a video about my journey, which start from 2001 to 2003, finish in 2004. It recorded a few trips in France , Taiwan , Beijing and Hong Kong . During my journey, I wrote a girl's story. Her name is Xiaohan ( 小寒 ). She accompanied with me and enjoyed the trip much more than me. But sooner she ran away with her new lover. When I came back home, I realize I totally lose her, and lose my head. This is a game, playing with my fictional characters like Alice, Xiaohan, and I was never being in the trip. I'm lost, lost in my home, lost in my identity, lost in my memory. I finish in 2004, I start over again, create another character. She's a red queen named YangMei ( 揚眉 ).

NIGHTS REHEARSAL NOTE

Ong Yong-lock (Hong Kong) 2003, 4 min, DV PAL, Col

A fragment of familiar memories is found, misplaced in an abandoned campus, where a shaken body recklessly flees to escape. Before she can run away, a blazing fire ignites and burns everything into ashes.

MATHING FOUR WITH TWELVE: orchestrating apollo

Jamsen Law ( Hong Kong )

2005 /9'15" / No dialogue

DANCESCAPE@MARGIN@BEIJING

9' 2004 DV Pal

Choreography: Li Hanzhong, Ma Bo （ Beijing Modern Dance Company ）

Video ： Winnie Fu 、 Terry Lai 、 Franky Lung

Music ： Kar Fai Samson Young

Two familiar bodies wheeling through a familiar city. Capturing normal life or presenting an abnormal ride? Life is often seen as “challenging”, but in effect, it is pretty “exhausting”. You are mostly recycling happenings, reading recycled news stories and drifting through architectures .

Being a recycled being, you do not recognise your real self anymore, or you can only recognise your real self at the marginal area – far from the core.

The moving bodies do not belong there, they are simply looking for possible interactions. If luck permits, they might create some “workable space” at the margin, or create a spark or two – just like the fast-moving bicycles that flash in front of your eyes.

Beijing – a homeland? a foreign city? It's at once our romantic metropolis and their living space. We basically belong to two different worlds but still look familiar.

BEYOND, 2005, 3 min 13 sec

Kalim Chan

A poetic rumination on the conflicted atmosphere of world events, Beyond was a film commissioned for integration with a dance performance

by Choreographer Kristin Smiarowski.

THIS WAY UP , 2005, 5min 56 sec

Kalim Chan

This Way Up explores the irony and the convolution of the American Dream. Game logic and corporate culture collide in the perpetual pursuit of upward mobility while we traverse an animated tableaux inspired by Dante's Inferno, Metropolis, Constructivist aesthetics, scientific visualization and video games.

4) DISTORTED FABRIC

Curated by Nata?a Petre?in ( Paris )

This video program was for the first time presented in De Appel Foundation in Amsterdam , The Netherlands , in January 2007, in the framework of the project Art in the New Field of Visibility.

Distorted Fabric traces the production of the plausible in the contemporary art through the videos of various artists and installation by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige which warp our sense and knowledge of reality and render it questionable, odd and alienated. They operate with the categories of the logic of facts and logic of fiction as with two extremes on the same line of experience and thought that can be blurred, not as with two separate entities of experience, copying and mimicking one another. They confront the spectators at first with a subtle confusion, generated by the artistic methods of fabrication of the real, fictionalization of the visual documents or of imposture and decomposition of the first-person-singular narrative. The alienation rendered by the confusion, furthermore, invokes the Brechtian epic theatre of making his audience realise that what it sees on the stage is merely an account of some events that should be watched with critical detachment. As Brecht wrote, " alienation is necessary to all (critical) understanding. When something seems 'the most obvious thing in the world' it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up ." The works in the video screening could be described as being between the subjective documentaries, docu-fictions or autofictive narrations. In a way the works presented are, as Hannah Arendt would call them, " forms of action ", since they function as statements that try to change the common belief in the material authenticity of the images and information that construct our daily reality.

1. Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige: El film el mafkoud (The lost film), 2003 ( 42' )

2. FICTIONALIZED DOCUMENTS

DURATION: 42' min

Daya Cahen: The Stalin That Was Played By Me , 2006 ( 15' )

Walid Raad/The Atlas Group: We Can Make Rain But No One Came To Ask , 2005 ( 17' )

Sebastián Díaz Morales: Lucharemos Hasta Anular La Ley , 2005 ( 10' )

3. FABRICATION OF REALITY

DURATION: 28'

Driton Hajredini: Somewhere in Prishtina, 2003 ( 3' 37' ')

Ahmet ??üt: Cut It Out, 2004 ( 1' 46' ')

SilentCell Network: Looping Hooman Sharifi, 2004 ( 2' 44' ')

Natascha Sadr Haghighian & Judith Hopf: Villa Watch ( 15' )

Egl? Budvytyt?: Secta, 2006 ( 5' 56' ')

4. IMPOSTURE

DURATION: 39'

Jakup Ferri: An Artist Who Cannot Speak English is No Artist, 2003 ( 3' 58' ')

Keren Cytter: The Date Series. 21/5/04 , 2004 ( 5' 24 ' ')

Clemens von Wedemeyer & Maya Schweizer: Rien du tout, 2006 ( 30' )