<nettime-ann> Thinking About Art and Digital Culture (Berlin, 20/21 March)

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

.
Lunch Bytes Conference: Thinking About Art and Digital Culture
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

20 +21 March 2015

Lunch Bytes examines the consequences of the increasing ubiquity of digital technologies in the art world by addressing the role of the internet in artistic practice from a wide range of perspectives. The series consists of events, each dedicated to a different topic and bringing together artists, media scholars, designers, curators and intellectuals. The conference in Berlin marks the conclusion of the discussion series which took place in many different cities: http://www.lunch-bytes.com/events/

Participants include: David Joselit, Ilja Karilampi, Ben Vickers, Diedrich Diederichsen, Kerstin Stakemeier, Christoper Kulendran Thomas, Stephan Dillemuth, Constant Dullart, Hito Steyerl, Maria Lind, Jesse Darling, Cecile B. Evans, Cornelia Sollfrank and others.

Conference website:
http://www.lunch-bytes.com/events/upcoming/lunch-bytes-36/

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

20 March 2015 6-9pm

Performance
"SEO City"
â Paul Kneale, artist, London
Paul Kneale's performance explores how meaning is re-routed, transferred, and affected by the technological and architectural infrastructures it travels through and depends on. His performance is a reiteration of a script of a Lunch Bytes talk in London with the title "Digital Infrastructures and the Organisation of Space." After a video of the discussion was uploaded to YouTube, the platform automatically generated a transcript using language recognition software in order to make its content searchable. Kneale subsequently worked with this generated script and staged it in a video and an installation, each taking into account the distinct architectural and material framework it was shown in. âSEO Cityâ is the most recent iteration of the work and combines video material created in anticipation of it's arrival at the HKW with elements of live performance.

Welcome
Johannes Ebert, Secretary General of the Goethe-Institut, and Bernd Scherer,
Director Haus der Kulturen der Welt

Performance
"Noise Tribe Speaking-Out-of-Control"
â Jenna Sutela, writer and artist, Helsinki
Jenna Sutela's written, directed, installed, and performed projects seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments â most recently, the relationship between the body and its technologically mediated environment. Exploring language and artificial intelligence, Sutelaâs performance "Noise Tribe Speaking-Out-of-Control" treats language as a virus and encryption as poetry. It includes a linguistic scramble suit and audio CAPTCHA.

Introduction
Melanie BÃhler, curator Lunch Bytes, Amsterdam

Keynote Lecture
"Dark Cloud: Shapes of Information"
â David Joselit, Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York
This lecture will explore how the metaphor of "the cloud" as an elastic and scalable information storage system applies to artists' efforts to demonstrate the shapes that information can assume â in other words, informationâs plasticity. Two primary themes will be addressed: profiling, as a technique for personifying configurations of data, and extraterritoriality, as the capacity for information (like the weather) to break free from particular locations and thus to challenge territorial forms of sovereignty. Are spaces of extraterritorial information also sites from which political claims can be made? Or, on the contrary, do we need to protect ourselves from the exposure of informationâs easy circulation â operating not from a darknet but from a Dark Cloud?

Performance
"Kapital FM"
â Ilja Karilampi, artist, Berlin
Ilja Karilampiâs installations, videos, and texts juxtapose industrial effects with biographical anecdotes, staging mythologies in which mainstream cultures and subcultures are synthesised. His performance for the Lunch Bytes Conference is a mixture of a live version of his weekly radio show âDowntown Iljaâ on Berlin Community Radio, fragments of the Lunch Bytes talk he was part of in Helsinki entitled âStructures and Textures: Sound,â which examined signature sounds such as âMaybach Music,â and performative elements in which Karilampi takes on different roles and characters on the mic, with the assistance of a smoke machine.
21 March 2015 10am-7.30pm
10.00-11.15am
Panel 1: Medium
With:
â Maeve Connolly, writer, lecturer in the Faculty of Film, Art and Creative Technologies at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin
â Katrina Sluis, artist, writer, curator Digital Programmes Photographers' Gallery London
â Ben Vickers, curator of Digital Serpentine Galleries, London
Moderated by:
â Toke Lykkeberg, curator, Copenhagen
The first panel will focus on the concept of the medium. Digital techniques and tools have transformed raditional disciplines and blurred their external boundaries, while new and emerging forms of artistic roduction reflect the increasing ubiquity of the digital. This panel invites a discussion of the medium as an analytical entity, revisiting the concept of medium specificity. Does it still make sense to think in formal, media-related categories or have we moved beyond the medium as a recognisable and classifiable entity in the age of pervasive computing?

11.45am-1pm
Panel 2: Structures and Textures
With:
â Diedrich Diederichsen, critic, journalist, author, Berlin
â Kerstin Stakemeier, researcher, critic, Munich
â Christopher Kulendran Thomas, artist, London/Berlin
Moderated by:
â Victoria Camblin, editor/artistic director of Art Papers, Atlanta
â Carson Chan, writer and curator, Princeton University, New Jersey
Computational processes can be traced everywhere and are intrinsically interwoven in the fabric of our lives. This hybrid reality increasingly affects the materiality of artistic production in a variety of fields and disciplines. This panel will examine how online culture has affected our understanding of materials and question how contemporary art is shaped by the infrastructures that subtend the digital realm. Considering how the art world's traditional spaces, such as the gallery or the museum, relate to the internet as a repository and space for the reception of art, the discussion will explore how spectatorship is constituted now that we have become used to online viewing habits. How do artistsâ practices extend and relate to online spaces, and how has the production and dissemination of artworks changed?

2-3.15pm
Panel 3: Society
With:
â Stephan Dillemuth, artist, Munich
â Constant Dullaart, artist, Berlin
Co-moderated by:
â Kristoffer Gansing, artistic director Transmediale, Berlin
â Hito Steyerl, artist, filmmaker, writer, Berlin
When considering the history of online culture, one sees a significant shift in how networked environments have been perceived as common spaces. The 1990s ideal of cyberspace, where knowledge and resources were shared freely, has largely given way to a webspace that is commercial and enclosed. Vast parts of the contemporary internet are presently owned by a few private mega-companies, which capitalise on the content and data generated by the users of their platforms. The internet has turned into a network via which everything is profiled and monitored for commercial and state interests beyond usersâ control. This panel focuses on artistic strategies of resistance in response to present mechanisms of control.

3.45-5pm
Panel 4: Life
With:
â Jesse Darling, artist, London
â CÃcile B. Evans, artist, Berlin/London
â Cornelia Sollfrank, artist, Dundee
Moderated by:
â Elvia Wilk, writer, editor, Berlin
The last panel will zoom in on the individual subject, discussing notions such as affect, emotion, and solidarity online. Artists are invited to talk about their work relating to the question of how identities are established and configured through the various digital and material environments constituting our realities. If bodies donât end at the skin but instead extend to and reconfigure themselves with the material environments they engage with, what kind of implications do digital technologies have for conceptions of representation, embodiment, and gender? If the various platforms we engage with influence our structures of feeling, how do they shape the way affective ties are created and mediated?

5.30-6.15pm
"What Was Pre-Post-Internet? Why Net Art and Cybernetics Are Forgotten"
Keynote Lecture
â Melissa Gronlund, writer, critic, co-editor of Afterall journal, London/Abu Dhabi
In her presentation Melissa Gronlund will contest the notion that the present postinternet moment occupies a uniquely ahistorical position based on the enormity of the internet's effects on daily life. The histories of net art, cybernetics, and other new media forms, which would appear to be the obvious forerunners to today's internet-based art, are not typically cited by artists as relevant, nor do their concerns and methodologies seem to have taken off. This presentation will offer some hypotheses as to why this might be the case, including a shift away from modernism and towards depiction and literary realism. Other contextual factors, such as the role of contemporary internet art in the art world and market, will be addressed.

6.15-7.30pm
Closing Panel Discussion/Q&A
With:
Melissa Gronlund
David Joselit
Paul Kneale
Hito Steyerl
Moderated by: â Maria Lind + Melanie BÃhler
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