Armin Medosch's blog

The Broken Mirror - Art after the dreamworld of digital utopia

Armin Medosch — Mon, 26 May 2014 06:47:37 +0000

Starting from the premise that the financial crisis of 2008 made only visible a deeper, structural crisis of information society, the exhibition Fields was conceived as a survey into possibilities of renewal through art. Art used to be understood as a mirror of society. Then, in the twentieth century, media became the preferred mirror of mass society. At the end of the 20th century, information superseded the media and was supposed to become the perfect mirror - the dreamworld of digital utopia. But this mirror is broken, as virtuality and the real have collapsed into an 'integral reality' (Baudrillard). Reality has lost its shadow, its capacity to dream, its underbelly of radical alternatives. As the world is urgently in need of a new social imaginary, the exhibition Fields is an articulation of that search. Fields is about an epistemic shift from subject-object relations within traditional, hierarchical ontologies towards new, networked, horizontal connections. While this slow, glacial transformation happens anyway with a degree of inevitability, we cannot awaken from the dreamworld of digital utopia soon enough. What can an art after information be like? How can we articulate artistic imaginations of a new society? How can we talk about it, categorise and develop such a vision as a more long term, infrastructural goal?

Fields Exhibition Setup

Armin Medosch — Wed, 14 May 2014 07:57:57 +0000

Some Video impressions from the setup, done by a young videoartist called auto-awesome.

Fields Exhibition Setup from Armin Medosch on Vimeo.

Press Release: FIELDS exhibition

Armin Medosch — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 08:49:59 +0000

The exhibition "Fields - patterns of social, scientific, and technological transformations" will open on May 15th at Arsenals Exhibition Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art. FIELDS, jointly curated by Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits and Armin Medosch will show work by app. 40 artists and is part of Riga 2014, European Capital of Culture. You find the full announcement and press release below.

Die Zukunft im Rückspiegel - von der Geschichtlichkeit der Kunst mit (neuen) Medien

Armin Medosch — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 14:39:19 +0000

Braucht Medienkunst eine Geschichte? Ausgehend von der Konferenz Media Art Histories, Riga 2013, und einer Reihe von Interviews für die Sendung "Braucht Medienkunst eine Geschichte?", ORF Ö1, Radiokolleg, 27.-30.Januar 2014, wirft dieser Artikel einen inter-subjektiven und polyphonen Blick auf die Geschichtlichkeit von Kunst und Medien.

Technopolitics in a Nutshell: Commented Reading List on Key Categories

Armin Medosch — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 09:58:38 +0000

This article presents in overview form some of the key categories of Technopolitics together with essential reading. Technopolitics is a project that has began as a collaboration between Brian Holmes and me on these pages in 2010. Since 2011 a Technopolitics working group exists in Vienna. There is a lot of additional material which you can find spread out over Thenextlayer, so I thought for newcomers its time to collect a few basic references.

A Canadian Story - Railways, Telephones, Satellites, an Interview with Robert Adrian X

Armin Medosch — Mon, 13 Jan 2014 14:53:45 +0000

Robert Adrian X is one of the true pioneers of art as telecommunications. This file presents just a few random samples from an interview with him about the need for a history of media art. Bob mixes his thoughts about the meaning of communications with his memoirs about working those technologies from the late 1970s onwards. The beginnings were characterised by the specifically Canadian situation, a vast country that needed telecommunications to keep its ends together.

Contradictions of a Tiger Cub, Part I

Armin Medosch — Sun, 12 Jan 2014 10:51:32 +0000

Video sequence taken during recent Vietnam trip. What strikes me is the contradicition between Vietnam's apparent dynamism, allegedly having joined the club of fast growing economies as a 'tiger cub' - in reference to the other Asian 'tiger economies' such as Taiwan, South Korea or Thailand - while at the same time this catching up modernisation process starts from a very low level.

Check out this river view of a village between Can Tho and Cai Be, in the Mekong delta.

From Total Recall to Digital Dementia - Ars Electronica 2013

Armin Medosch — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 16:08:34 +0000

Year by year Ars Electronica gets larger, greater and more successful. One visible sign of this success are the blinking lights of the ACE at night, like an upgraded spaceship out of 'Close Encounter of the Third Kind'.

Greening the Network Commons

Armin Medosch — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 15:53:32 +0000

In 2001, Shu Lea Cheang created Steam the green, Stream the field (Cheang, 2001-02), a work which anticipated a major shift in the discourse and practice of post-media art by 10 years. Shu Lea Cheang insists on calling herself a 'self-styled' artist, emphasising her autonomy to define her activities as art. Her projects highlight the potential of the coming together of social self-organisation with a social and trans-media art practice that combines landscapes and datascapes, the natural and the digital commons.

Fields - an Index of Possibilities

Armin Medosch — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 10:54:12 +0000

This text outlines a research strategy and context for the Fields exhibition to take place in Riga in 2014. While not directly about the exhibition, this text explores the notion of Fields as a broadening and deepening of an inquiry began with the exhibition Waves. The notion of the field and its various links into scientific disciplines purports a long term epistemic shift from fixed identities and dualisms to vectors and forces/lines of attraction and repulsion; from a world of fixed entities to one of energies and the exertion of force from a distance.