Dancing Pixels
Video Edition Austria/Release 01
six programs curated and presented by
Gerda Lampalzer in cooperation with Medienwerkstatt Wien
will be shown at ACF from May 29-31, 2003.
Medienwerkstatt Wien
"Our name is already a program. As media artists it is very important to
us to have and be able to create new creative freedom. We want to continue to
be a workshop, a lab, a refuge, and an idea center for projects in the field
of independent media art and provide the right conditions to that end."
This is how in an interview with the magazine EIKON in 1993 Gerda Lampalzer
and Manfred Neuwirth responded to the question "What do you see as the
future task of Medienwerkstatt Wien?"
In 2003, this response is still as relevant as ever. Medienwerkstatt Wien, which
this year is celebrating its 25th anniversary, is now in its third decade of
working on "an intellectual and artistic examination of media culture that
allows for depth and speed and promotes strategies for (self-)assertion in cultural
policy" (from the editorial of the program folder for "Five dates
or more", a Medienwerkstatt event series in November 2000).
The origins of the Medienwerkstatt Wien project have to do with media policy:
In 1978, several groups got together in order to work with the then "new"
medium video. Terms like "counter-public," "alternative to government
television," and so on, described an emancipatory concept that sought to
break away from the restrictiveness of commercial filmmaking and the government-run
Austrian broadcasting station ORF.
Initial projects were developed, space was rented, an association was founded,
and activities were initiated that for some of the Werkstatt pioneers (Gerda
Lampalzer, Gustav Deutsch, Manfred Neuwirth, and Ferdinand Stahl) signaled the
beginning of a longer term concept. The initiation of this undertaking was facilitated
by seed money from the cultural budget, and the first productions received financial
support. The organization soon started to rent out its equipment for independent
media projects in order to help the Medienwerkstatt become more independent
financially. For non-subsidized projects, it still considered itself an "open
studio" that supported interesting works. It also produced its own videos.
The community of interests and the communally usable equipment evolved into
a company that was partly self-sufficient and - above all - an artist collective,
an autonomous little image factory. In their variety, Medienwerkstatt's productions
confirm the extensive qualities of its staff. The spectrum ranges from documentary
videos to art videos, installations, media objects, and Internet projects. The
list of festival and exhibition appearances and publications is long.
In addition, Medienwerkstatt supplies film and video history and cultivates
contacts with festivals, media centers, museums, and television companies. The
most important fields of cultural policy handled by its staff include the conception
and organization of events (video cinema, exhibitions, lectures, seminars, etc.),
presentations (curated programs in Austria and other countries), maintenance
of a video archive (tapes for lending and viewing, catalogues, magazines),
artist-in-residence programs (guest artists work at and with Medienwerkstatt),
and training and consulting services for media productions that can be completed
from start to finish at Medienwerkstatt Wien.
Video Edition Austria
An important emphasis of Medienwerkstatt Wien's work is on making video or media
history available. The publication of curated editions is meant to facilitate
access and provide an overview. In 1993, for instance, the 10-volume Video Edition
Austria was produced with a representative program spanning 25 years of video
art and artistic video documentation in Austria. Special editions of individual
artists and the Lower Austrian video edition complete this video publishing
program.
In 2001/02, Video Edition Austria will be expanded by Release 01 (4 art programs,
2 documentary programs; curators: Eva Brunner-Szabo, Gerda Lampalzer and Judith
Wieser-Huber). Since 1993, not only has a wealth of new work been produced by
established video artists and documentarians, but a new generation of media
artists has also emerged and gained a foothold in the international exhibition
and festival scene. The presence of media art in the cultural sector is now
accepted as a matter of course. This means it is becoming increasingly necessary
to maintain a specialized and carefully curated collection that is at once a
historic survey, a presentation of current works, a compilation of audiovisual
information, and an encyclopedia of Austrian video art
and documentation.
Video Edition Austria's Release 01 encompasses the art programs Confrontation,
Moving, Narration, and Space (242 min. total), and the documentary programs
Reflections and Travelogue (350 min. total). Participating artists are Uli Aigner,
Eva Brunner-Szabo, Linda Christanell, Se-Lien Chuang, Ricarda Denzer, Carola
Dertnig, Barbara Doser, Elisabeth Fiege, Gertrud Fischbacher, Halt+Boring, Amina
Handke, Oliver Hangl, Hofstetter Kurt, Barbara Holub, Bernadette Huber, Anita
Kaya, Karl-Heinz Klopf, Sigrid Kurz, Gerda Lampalzer, Holger Lang, Maia, Markus
Marte, Sabine Marte, Maschek, Elizabeth McGlynn, Gertrude Moser-Wagner, [N:ja],
Christoph Nebel, Manfred Neuwirth, Manfred Oppermann, Norbert Pfaffenbichler,
Michael Pilz, Michaela Pöschl, Oliver Ressler, Constanze Ruhm, Fiona Rukschcio,
Lotte Schreiber, Terese Schulmeister, Heidemarie Seblatnig, Skot, Franz Wassermann,
Constantin Wulff, Erwin Wurm.
With the expansion of Video Edition Austria by Release 01, the collection is
gaining growing significance as a document of the times. Aside from cinema and
festival activities, which tend to be seasonal, the range of artistic positions
from 1969 to 2001 makes it possible to pursue continuities in sociopolitical
issues as well as highly varied aesthetic elements. The change in production
conditions, the virtual elimination of genre-dependent categories, and the selection
of
diversified public groups characterize the complex developments that become
clearly recognizable in an edition as comprehensive as this. The works selected
for Release 01 repeatedly exhibit surprising overlaps with earlier video works
that communicate the political, technological, and aesthetic history of Austrian
media art.
Dancing Pixels
Since its founding, Medienwerkstatt Wien has focused special attention on its
interest in formal openness - both where its own productions are concerned and
in the selection of its projects and lending programs. Many productions are
hybrid forms between essays, experiment, and documentation and represent an
attempt to enable and promote productive discussion between the various media
arts. Video Edition Austria and Release 01 consistently pursue this concept
by giving artistic and documentary videos equal consideration from the outset.
The recent Documenta 11, where documentary film and video works were presented
as an integral part of the current international art scene, demonstrates just
how much this approach anticipated current developments.
The Dancing Pixels program takes this permeability of forms into account and
therefore includes works from all disciplines among its individual thematic
focuses (from classic video art to pure documentation). The compilation is exclusively
justified by the logical consistency of the issues raised by the individual
works.
For instance, the program called the body 2 juxtaposes the video "what
to do?," a work about a husband's physical neglect of his wife and her
subsequent death, with "The Rote Zora," a work about a militant women's
group that was active in Germany in the 1980s: a possible logical consequence
and an open question.
By contrast, the body 1, which is more like a purely artistic program,
examines potential conceptual expressions of bodies as sculpture ("one
minute sculptures"), as moving form ("tried," "lovers' walk"),
as a carrier of history ("backspace," "actual reality"),
and as actors in space ("byketrouble," "welldone").
In the space 1, the selection ranges from constructive access to space
("studio," "ID.remix," and "catch in the cage")
to the development of a narrative concept of space ("door 14 - reading
in absence") and art documentation ("indicatore - project") where
formal concepts and narration related to a specific location intermingle.
In the space 2, two different directions and two styles of storytelling
meet. "Driven" is a car ride including an audio play on open and suppressed
desire in personal and public life, while "#1:<common.places>"
is a statistical listing of places where women were subject to "entirely
normal" harassment by men and report on it from those places.
Two other programs, the medium 1 and the medium 2, relate exclusively
to the hidden or ambiguously interpretable messages within a narrative universe.
Stories within stories ("japanese letters"), symbolic and metaphoric
levels ("caroussel deux," "now I am one of you," "crossover"),
satire ("the alternative Tokyo trilogy part 2: Sir Elton"), and precise
observation ("war games") are the methods used in the medium 1.
In the medium 2, the medium is examined even more closely with respect
to its function. Memory as a medial construction is explored in two different
ways: as a found audio recording from childhood ("trying to remember to
forget") and as a reinterpretation of "found footage" to rewrite
history ("the grey star 2 the wehrmacht"). In "paranormal,"
finally, the medium's ambiguity is exploited. It becomes an apparatus for taking
up contact with supernatural powers and at the same time a means to prove their
existence. It is a vicious circle that can only be approached with irony.
Of course, this compilation of works is just one of many possibilities. Video
Edition Austria is conceived as a collection that can be recombined again and
again. One criterion for the selection of the works in the edition was their
complexity. This allows for consideration from all sides, which is an important
prerequisite for artistic and human dialogue.
By Gerda Lampalzer