4th December, 2014
Museum of Modern Fine Art
(Independence Ave., 47), conference hall
Lecture by Vera Tollmann, culture expert, independent curator and writer (Berlin, Germany).
The event is supported by the Embassy of Germany in the Republic of
Belarus.
Drone technologies, CGI images
and the release of the Snowden files call for a critique of the technical
conditions and production modes of digital images and mobile screens.
Conditions that always shape the content. In a society whose picture economies
strongly demand visibility (think of Face Time, Skype video, retina displays,
face recognition software and apps like Snapchat), perfectly rendered images
form new moving image empires. For example, Google released highly
aestheticized pictures of their server farms, an example of faux transparency.
A positive effect of these high resolution generic images is, that they can be
easily identified as representatives of capitalism, so they become criticisable
and therefore capitalism and its special effects become obviously criticisable.
How do artists respond? With strategies of affirmation
or withdrawal? How to see beyond the representation of technology? How do
artists reflect on contexts of production and the economies of images?
Vera Tollmann will discuss these aspects based on the
following video works that deal with questions of labor, digital data and
visual culture:
Versions (2012) by Oliver
Laric
All that is solid melts into data (2014) by Boaz
Levin and Ryan Jefferey
Strada Fabricii (2010-11) by Cathleen Schuster
and Marcel Dickhage
Lily's Laptop (2014) by Judith Hopf
Vera Tollmann (1976) studied
Applied Cultural Science and Practical Aesthetics at the University of
Hildesheim and Cultural Studies at the John Moores University in Liverpool. Her
work focuses on the practice and theory of the Internet, the discourse of
climate change and China’s reception in the West. In 2013 she co-curated the
9th edition of Video Vortexconference at the Centre for Digital Cultures of
Leuphana University Luneburg and the web video series The Future of Cinema for
Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. Together with Oliver Lerone Schultz she worked on new formations
and applications of video, which resulted into the term extended video. Vera is
co-editor of several publications and author of contributions for catalogs and magazines.
Most recently, her essay “The Uncanny Polar Bear. Activists Visually Attack an Overly
Emotionalized Image Clone” was published in Image Politics of Climate Change. Visualizations, Imaginations, Documentations. (Birgit Schneider, Thomas Nocke (eds.), transcript 2014).
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