From March 7th to April 15th, Brno

One of the most important parts of the REMAKE project is the final international exhibition of new media art REMAKEs at the House of Arts in Brno, Czech republic. Parts of the exhibition will travel to other places (Bratislava, Cluj).

See the GALLERY GUIDE.

Venues:
Dům pánů z Kunštátu, G99 Gallery, Dominikánská 9
4AM / Gallery of Architecture, Starobrněnská 18
REMAKE: REthinking Media Arts in C(K)ollaborative Environments is an international art project taking place between June 2010 and May 2012. Its aim is to foster creation and presentation of contemporary works inspired by the history of media arts. The project’s final part is an international touring exhibition which will be shown at Dům pánů z Kunštátu (The Brno House of Arts) from 7 March until 15 April 2012. More than a static exhibition and a traditional approach, it will be rather a dynamic social happening featuring a series of artistic events presenting new, as well as selected pioneering media art pieces.

Project curators: Dušan Barok (SK/NL), Katarína Gatialová (CZ), Mária Rišková (SK), František Kowolowski (CZ), Slávo Krekovič (SK), Catherine Lenoble (FR), István Szakáts (RO), Barbora Šedivá (CZ), Alexander Zaklynsky (IS), Rarita Zbranca (RO).

Cooperating organisations: The Brno House of Arts (CZ), Atrakt Art (SK), Alt Art (RO), Ping (FR), Multiplace (SK), The Lost Horse Gallery (IS), Institute of Music Science – Theory of Interactive Media MUNI (CZ), Olomouc Museum of Art (CZ), CIANT (CZ), Academy of Fine Arts and Design (SK) and others.
Artists:

Richard Loskot (CZ): Logging the present (G99 Gallery)

The installation Logging the Present draws on the work of the eminent Polish author of concrete poetry Stanisław Dróżdż (1939–2009), in particular his piece Untitled (Clocks) [Bez tytułu (zegary), 1978]. In this work, Dróżdż developed his own system which allowed him to control clocks. His concept, based on combining clock hands that engender their own time, inspired the young Czech author Richard Loskot to produce 12 systems in which each measures its own time upon different actions. Hyperbolically speaking, the author offers various time measuring models based on water dripping, plant growth or rotation of the gramophone record. In the second part of this installation, the viewer is incorporated into the temporary image.
„We have always derived certain temporal divisions from a natural course of events. The alternation between day and night is the most natural and in a way absolute for us, but as we know, even this is not thoroughly regular. Empirically, we have found the most accurate part of time, the rhythm which lets us measure all happenings. The atomic clock time, for instance, is based on the caesium half-life. When we fast-forward a film with a plant in it , its motion might appear entirely alive and we should not interfere with its own time. Every tone of a melody also appears after a certain time. In everyday life, we usually do not ask but rather look at our watch: for us, the time is something to count and measure. The most common conception of time originates from Aristotle: Time is a measured movement with regard to ,before‘ and ,after‘.“ (Richard Loskot)

Zuzana Husárova – Ľubomír Panák (SK): I : * ttter

I : * ttter is a multimedia artistic project based on the Kinect 3D sensor. This interactive installation utilises the ‚remake principle‘ in two ways: a textual level – interacting with leading works of international Net.Art and a sonic level – in relation to the fundamentals of the theremin.
Thanks to the sensors, we can easily browse, erase or mix dialogues that resemble (online) communication of persons/machines on a projection screen. The text is remixed from selected textual fragments of European Net.Art (My Boyfriend Came Back From the War by Olia Lialina, This Morning and IBM by Alexei Shulgin, zkp3.21 by Vuk Cosic, 100cc and g33con by the art collective JODI, Irational by Heath Bunting, City by Markéta Baňková, four. Values by Perfokarta, Falling Times by Michal Bielický, Koniec swiata wg by Emeryk Radoslaw Nowakowský and AE by Robert Szczerbowsky). Through a virtual aerial, we will also control the oscillator pitch and thanks to the possibility to activate a drawing mode, we can ‚enter‘ the individual pieces with our own drawings.

Andrej Boleslavský & The Vasulkas (CZ/US): Hi Woody

Hi Woody is an interactive installation that pays homage to the artworks of Woody and Steina Vašulka. The art piece was created in cooperation with Woody Vašulka during his visit of Prague in 2011 and was produced by the International Centre for Art and New Technologies (CIANT). It is inspired by the aesthetics of the early video art works created on the Rutt-Etra synthesizer in the Electronic Media Atelier at The Kitchen in New York. The author, Andrej Boleslavský, attempts to invoke similar visual impressions with state-of-the-art technologies – high-powered digital graphic cards, the Kinect sensor and stereoscopic screens conjuring an abstract and immersive image generated in real time. In this moment the visitor has an opportunity to interact with his own digital replica. The atmosphere of today‘s media art scene closely resembles The Kitchen studio – elated by new possibilities, techno-optimism and the will to share. This is the reason why the authors decided to offer the software used for this piece available for a free download at id144.org/hi_woody/.

Aleksandra Hirszfeld (PL) – Infotainment

The sound installation Infotainment delivers a disturbing experience in which we are confronted with enormous amounts of data and information that describe the world we live in affected by showbusiness and the omnipresent mass media. Infotainment is an attempt to repeat and revise the methods of the French writer, filmmaker and founder of Lettrism and Situationism Guy Debord (1931–1994). Aleksandra Hirzfeld draws on his film The Society of the Spectacle (La Société du spectacle, 1973) and the eponymous book (1967). In her rework, the young Polish author contemplates the possibilities of recontextualising Debord’s ideas at a time when patterns of social and cultural policies have been radically altered.
„What in the past was considered an escape from the system, today loses its critical impact and is absorbed by the system itself. Critical thinking has been transformed into accepted and consumerist lifestyle and becomes just another commodity. Coming to terms with these new conditions of contemporary criticism is only possible through a new, closed and autonomous space that will serve as a platform for independent observations of reality. This principle worked in times of Guy Debord and can be also reinstated today.“ (Aleksandra Hirzfeld)

reCYSP1 (2011)
Julien Bellanger – Guillaume Brunet – Cédric Doutriaux – Catherine Lenoble (FR)

ReCYSP1 is a remake of the first autonomous cybernetic sculpture called CYSP1 created by the French artist Nicolas Schöffer (1912–1992). ReCYSP1 was developed in October 2011 during a three-week workshop at the PiNG Media Lab. Through a collaborative approach and latest technologies, its authors J. Bellanger, G. Brunet, C. Doutriaux, C. Lenoble try to reinterpret the work of this pioneering author of European media art. Thus, they examine the artistic potential of digital production and the possibilities of reusing materials intended for recycling.

Andrew Prior – David Strang (UK): Distributed presence
In cooperation with: Miroslav Tóth (SK)

Distributed presence is an installation that turns back to composer Jozef Malovec and highlights the ‘golden age‘ of the Slovak electroacoustic music in 1960s and 70s. Malovec together with a sound engineer Peter Janik created in Experimental Studio in Slovak Radio the timeless electroacoustic composition Orthogenesis (1966) in which he used stochastic principle for organising musical material.
This interactive sound and image installation brings together presence and tele-presence, to explore and re-work composition of a seminal Slovakian artist Jozef Malovec. It combines motion-tracking control of this material through granular synthesis within the gallery, with DJing processes of mixing, looping, slicing and manipulation online (thus ‘WebJaying’). Within the gallery space, the use of motion tracking replaces the time domain of these archival materials with a spatial dimension, encouraging a sense of exploration and physical interaction. The sounds produced in the gallery are streamed online through use of a downloadable MaxMSP application, and in turn this application allows people to mix and manipulate material, in response to these sounds, the results of which are then streamed back into the gallery space to produce a distributed collaborative response to the sounds of the archival material.

Ján Šicko (SK): Hit Bonačić
In cooperation with: Mária Rišková

Our installation refers to the early objects of Croatian mathematician and cybernetician Vladimir Bonačić, who was a prominent member of the New tendencies movement (international network dedicated to the interconnection between art and science, based in Zagreb between 1961 and 1973). According to the artist and theoretician Darko Fritz “Bonačić criticised the use of randomness in computer-based art, as he considers humans to be simply better in “making the ‘aesthetic program’ relevant for human beings”. (darkofritz.net/text/bonacic.html)
The critique of randomness, making of ‘aesthetic program’ but also other thoughts of this author inspired us to make a 2D paraphrase of the so called dynamic objects Vladimir Bonačić created in the late 1960s and 1970s. They were kinetic light installations pioneering interactivity in the computer-based art, programmed in a way that the viewer/user could control several parameters (rhythm, sound). In the installation Hit Bonačić, the viewer can also intervene into the prepared sequence and “program” his/her own code. In contrast to the usually delicate manipulation of technical devices, our installation is controlled by energetic hitting on the table, which enables the visitor to enter his/her own sequence of instructions that create patterns.

Lucid Light Comp.#2
Elvar Mar Kjartansson – Unnur Andrea Einarsdottir – Joseph Marzolla – Leo Stefansson – Alexander Zaklynsky (IS) – Tony Maslić (NL/RS)

A dynamic instalation created through the collaboration of artists as an explorative remake of aesthetics and ideas exhibited by Bulat Galeyev and the Prometei Institute in Kazan, Russia. – Galeyev researched “synaesthesia and its manifestations in art, arguing and defending the opinion that it is not the mind anomaly but a norm of human psychics (perception, imagination, creativity). He considers it as a specific manifestation of non-verbal thinking, realized by either involuntary or purposeful comparison of the impressions of different modalities, on the basis of structural or semantic and, most of all, emotional similarity. On his opinion, synaesthesia is social, cultural, but not biological phenomenon. It is exactly language and art that serve as the “testing areas” where synaesthesia is formed and most actively cultivated.”

Václav Peloušek – Ondřej Merta (CZ): Standuino (4AM / Gallery of Architecture)

4AM / Gallery of Architecture will serve as an exhibition venue and media laboratory where the local DIY scene will be presented through the original student platform Standuino, which has been inspired by the works of the musician and FaVU lecturer Stanislav Filip and the phenomenon of kludging. In the exhibition, Václav Peloušek and Ondřej Merta present a remake of Stanislav Filip’s installation User Interface (Uživatelský interface), lead a DIY workshop where participants can create their own sound / video synthesizers and together with Stanislav Filip, conduct a workshop focused on blasting off transistors and other electronic components and the physicality of these occurrences. Their presentation will also encompass interventions in public space, launch of a pirate television broadcast or a device emitting Standuino datasheets into universe through photon pulses with a wave length of 650 nanometres.
„We will construct and introduce prototypes of devices that will allow an analytical observation of their digital and electronic principles in the modernistic sense of the word, such as the relation between the carrier (electronics) and the essence (digitality) or the analysis of gestures of an artist-kludger . Standa Filip has been helping us actualize this vision. He is a remarkable personality in our country because he studied physics and has experience with constructing music instruments. Therefore he is able to understand the nature of electronics and at the same time, think about it within an artistic context.“ (Václav Peloušek, Ondřej Merta)