Social Networks

VK

FaceBook
 

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).