with:
Artists: Aram Bartholl (DE) – Varvara Guljajeva (EE) and Mar Canet (ES) – Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (MX) – Martín Nadal (ES) – Persuasion Lab (IN)
with:
ARAM BARTHOLL, ALICE CREISCHER, FANTASTIC LITTLE SPLASH, FREDERIK FOERT, SOPHIE GOGL, BARBARA HAMMER, MIRIAM JONAS, RALF MEYER, MICHAEL SAILSTORFER, PHILIP SCHEFFNER, CONSTANTIN SCHRÖDER, ALEEN SOLARI
Communication pervades our lives more than ever before. With the digital channels, we are constantly accessible and can publish ourselves wherever and whenever we want. But despite the many great opportunities, the tide of information may often appear confusing, polarizing or hateful, and our public conversation is challenged.
On November 19, 2022, ENIGMA will open new exhibition areas and a large children’s area, in which we look forward to welcoming everyone.
Online, interactive and endless ones and zeroes in algorithms and coding; digital art, in all its forms and designs, is occupying an increasingly important place. And not only that. The growth and developments in the field of digital art also force us to think about the definition and meaning of concepts such as ‚unique‘ and ‚authentic‘. With more than 50 works by 29 artists, the group exhibition Behind the screens – 50 years of computer art shows the various forms of digital art and the developments from the 1970s to the present. A large part of the works of art in this exhibition come from a private collection from Apeldoorn, which includes a number of iconic works of art and gives an impression of the development of digital art.
2023 👋🏻 I am looking fwd to this solo. It will be the 30th anniversary of the Kunsthalle and 375 Jahre Westfälischer Friede 2023. The Kunsthalle is partly located in a former church. It’s quite a space to work in 😮😅 looking fwd to this! It will be a fun project. 🙂 Stay tuned! ✨
Social Media prägt unseren Alltag und unsere Gesellschaft. Messenger-Dienste, Plattformen zum Teilen von Bildern und Videos, bis hin zu Dating Plattformen sind Teil unserer Kommunikation geworden. Auch aus den Künsten sind die Sozialen Medien nicht mehr wegzudenken. Einerseits genutzt als Website, andererseits als Ort der Selbstdarstellung, scheint das eigene Publikum nur einen Klick entfernt.
Die Ausstellung „:-#“ zeigt Arbeiten zum Thema Social Media in der Kunst und stellt die Frage was sozial an den Sozialen Netzwerken ist und inwiefern diese unser Verhalten und Gesellschaft verändern. In unterschiedlichsten Medien setzen sich Künstler*innen damit auseinander, was es bedeutet in einer digital geprägten Welt künstlerisch zu agieren.
Ausstellende:
Aram Bartholl, Felix Chauvin, Michael Dörner, Veronika Domp, Finn Geiger, Gunilla Jähnichen, Amy Justen, Kira Keune, Echo Can Luo, Zhiyi Liu, Julian Öffler, Eun Jung Sim und weitere
Eingeladene Künstler:innen:
Ulf Arminde, Stefan Alber, Aram Bartholi, Fehmi Baumbach, Marc Bijl, Jessica Buhlmann/Zao, Zuzanna Czebatul, Moritz Frei, Jana Gunstheimer, Christian Henkel, Verena Issel, Zoe C. Miller, Anne Mundo, Rainer Neumeier, Angelika Nguyen, Thomas Prochnow, Regina Schmeken, Schroeter&Berger, Kristina Schuldt, Raul Walch, Christian Werner, Ina Wudtke
Die siebte Ausstellung der Reihe KUNST GEGEN RECHTS nimmt den 30. Jahrestag der Pogrome von Rostock-Lichtenhagen als Anlass, um kritisch auf aktuelle, gesellschaftliche Konflikte einzugehen.
Deutschland ist eine postmigrantische Gesellschaft der Vielen. Immer noch wird diese Tatsache viel zu wenig zur Kenntnis genommen. Der Wiedervereinigung am 3. Oktober 1990 folgten rassistische Ausschreitungen und Mordanschläge in Rostock, Mannheim, Hoyerswerda, Mölln und Solingen bis zur Terrorserie des NSU. Es folgten Anschläge auf jüdische Friedhöfe und emanzipatorische Projekte. Eine wiedererwachte deutsche Volksgemeinschaft kroch aus den Löchern hervor.
Der rechte Populismus, der die Kultureinrichtungen als Akteure einer gesellschaftlichen demokratischen Vision angreift, steht der Kunst der Vielen feindselig gegenüber. Die Neue Rechte hat die Kulturpolitik als Kampffeld entdeckt, um ihre völkischen Vorstellungen umzusetzen. Rechte Gruppierungen und Parteien stören Veranstaltungen, verhindern Ausstellungen, greifen in Theater-Spielpläne ein, polemisieren gegen die Freiheit der Kunst, gegen Dekoloniale Erinnerungsprojekte und arbeiten an einer Renationalisierung der Kultur. Es wird einFeldzug gegen zeitgenössische, „undeutsche“ Kunst geführt, die als „neumodische Extravaganzen“ und „exzentrische Randgruppenkunst“ bezeichnet wird, wie aktuell gegen den Kunstverein in Zwickau.
Seit dem Ausbruch der Pandemie, stehen viele Dinge auf dem Prüfstand. Es zeigte sich, wer ein solidarisches Miteinander praktiziert und wer als Pandemiegewinnler oder Coronaleugner die Krise für eigene Interessen nutzt. Bei den sogenannten Querdenken-Demonstrationen kommt es zu einer fatalen Zusammenarbeit verschiedener Akteure. Rechte Gruppierungen und Parteien gewinnen immer mehr an Einfluss. Antisemitismus ist in der neuen Bewegung stark vertreten, wie auch eine Verharmlosung der Shoa und der Gleichsetzung der NS-Zeit mit der aktuellen Situation.
Since very early on, artists have understood the power of transformation of play, integrating it into their works with distinct purposes -evasion of reality, social construction and transformation, subversion or criticism of the very mechanisms of play and games. The exhibition Playmode proposes a reflection on these aspects and on the period of ludification that contemporary societies are going through, bringing together the work of several artists who adopt the theme and explore new ways of seeing, participating in, and transforming the world, using play in a critical manner.
with:
Aram Bartholl, Bill Viola + Game Innovation Lab, Bobware, Brad Downey, Brent Watanabe, Coletivo Beya Xinã Bena + Guilherme Meneses, David OReilly, Filipe Vilas-Boas, Harum Farocki, Isamu Noguchi, Jaime Lauriano, Joseph DeLappe, Laura Lima + Marcius Galan, Lucas Pope, Mary Flanagan, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Milton Manetas, Molleindustria, Nelson Leirner, Pippin Barr, Priscila Fernandes, Raquel Fukuda + Ricardo Barreto, Samuel Bianchini, Shimabuku, Tale of Tales (Auriea Harvey e Michaël Samyn) e The Pixel Hunt.
Curators: Filipe Pais and Patrícia Gouveia.
The current mutated “epidemiological” societies within which we exist reveal that any previous indication we had about the term “safety” is now in limbo. TILT Platform has started exploring and developing the concept “Safe Mode” likening it to the indication safe mode appearing on our computers and smart devices, when they stop functioning properly after a major technical crisis. The process of safe mode emerges as the only possible solution. Comparing this state of technological malfunction to the processes of contemporary life, psychology and human behaviour, the term safe mode acquires an anthropological character.
Participating Artists
Nikos Arvanitis (GR), Aram Bartholl (DE), Browser Based (Zsolt Mesterhazy & Alex Zakkas) (NLD / GR), Sofia Caesar (BR), Paolo Cirio (IT), Manja Ebert (DE), Adrianos Efthymiadis (GR) & Iria Vrettou (GR), For Cancel (Makis Faros, Zoi Pirini, Takis Zerdevas) (GR), Elisa Giardina Papa (IT), Basim Magdy (EGY), Theophanis Melas (GR), Simon Menner (DE), Yorgos Papafigos (GR), Michalis Zacharias (GR), Apostolos Zerdevas (GR)
Curated by
Foteini Vergidou in collaboration with TILT Platform (Makis Faros, Zoi Pirini, Apostolos Zerdevas, Takis Zerdevas)
I agree on most of what he says and many of these questions were raised during the „Friends“ workshop I ran at Futuresonic in 2008 . Unfortunately this won t reach my 359 ex-facebook friends any more… haha. I quit 2 days ago ….
„The End of Solitude“ by William Deresiewicz
There has been a lot of discussion on how we can reclaim, revive and engage Public Space in Europe/West. It was very interesting to see how Public Space is still naturally used in Shanghai, China. The picture shows a kind of public marriage market wich takes place once a week (month?) in the very centre of Shanghai on People’s Square. Parents advertise their grown up kids by short notes and try to find a good match for them. A very classic offline social network, serious dating platform. 🙂
I’ll be be part of the workshop „Urban Space. Time to Play“ 19th – 22th Oct. next week at eARTS Shanghai. I am looking forward to it and I am curious to test China for some paper based realtime urban adventure action. Stay tuned! More info
Thanks to Theo Honohan who did write an interesting essay on my latest project „Friends„.
Aram Bartholl’s workshop Friends actualizes the processes of abstraction and distancing which are involved in the construction of contemporary social networking websites. By turning these immaterial processes into physical action and representations, the work offers a critical model of current software practice on the web.
Under the general name of Web 2.0, social networking sites provide various facilities for publishing content on the web. In the case of Flickr, the content is images; in the case of Delicious, bookmarks; Last.fm, music playlists; Facebook and myspace, general personal information. The material published on these sites is often not particularly interesting to a general viewer. Its value consists primarily in the availability of information to friends. The ability to explicitly create links of friendship between users is therefore the central feature of these sites, and the feature from which the name „Social Networking“ is derived.
Bartholl’s work, which could have been titled Friends?, calls into question the value and meaning of these explicit declarations of friendship. For one thing, the mechanical nature of the process gives it a simplistic quality. Two people are either friends or they are not, according to the system. This binary coding of relationships leaves no room for gradations of familiarity from intimacy to acquaintance. This initial observation is enriched by the level of detail into which the piece goes in representing the internal abstractions of a site such as Facebook. Each level of abstraction can be seen as a distancing from reality and the site of a possible slippage between image and actuality.
The process of creating a personal profile in the system begins with a digital photograph. This image of the user is transformed digitally into a black and white stencil. Affixing a printout of the stencil to a rubber stamp, the user cuts out the white areas to create a reusable stamp of their own image. In creating a reusable stamp, the work captures the infinitely reproduceable nature of a digital image. The image can appear over and over within the „site“, rather than existing just as a single original.
The creation of a profile continues with the preparation of a blank booklet for use as a register of friends. The booklet gains structure entirely through a series of rubber stamps which mimic the process of formatting a blank computer database. Data slots are created for name, email address and website, and a further grid of spaces is prepared to hold references to the user’s details on other social networking sites. The process of registering friends involves stamping, carbon-paper transfers, and the gluing of pre-prepared adhesive stamps into the „data slots“. The complexity of this process parallels the degree of indirection and formality involved in the software behind a social networking site, if not the experience of creating friends on Facebook. Bartholl, by calling attention to this complexity, illustrates the degree to which the information we share fits into an elaborate structure.
The process of adding friends to one’s personal profile is a reciprocal one; each of you ends up with a new page in the booklet showing the details of your new friend. The piece has another component, however, a central volume which includes a page for each user which records their friends (affixed as stamps) and pending friend requests (unglued stamps are held in a plastic pouch.) The analogy here is with a central database on a system such as Facebook. The whole graph of relationships is held in one place, rather than being stored in private, personall relations between profiles/booklets. This central volume is of course the way social networking systems are actually implemented, while the „peer-to-peer“ architecture of the booklets, while offering potential advantages in security and privacy, has not been pursued (except, to a degree, in the case of Skype.)
The presence of a central database is a reminder of the industrial scale and automation of the process. Bartholls‘ work problematizes the mass production of social contacts. While the concrete formal techniques of the workshop (sheets of repeated portraits) evoke images of an artistic practice such as that of Andy Warhol’s „Factory“, the abstract structure revealed by the development of a profile and network of friends shows the potentially dehumanizing nature of social networks. The choice of black and white for all representations produces an impression of direct simplicity but also unyielding control. The idea of a computerized social network, in the end, is a formalism, while social relationships are blurry, vital and inevitably exceed the terms of any fixed representation.
23 September 2008
I just finished the documentation for my latest project „Friends“ which has been premiered at Futuresonic 2008 a month ago. It was a lot of fun and it came out really well. Friends will be shown again during Futuresonic-Leeds and Futuresonic-London sometime 2008/2009. Don’t miss to become part of the Friends network. 😉
Credits:
– Thanks to Veronika Becker and Holger Lindmüller for advice, design and production assistance during preparation phase in Berlin.
– Thanks to Kit Turner (Futuresonic art production assistance) and Ben Harding (Futuresonic tech. and exhibition architecture) for the production in Manchester.
– Thanks to my exellent Friends workshop assistance Charlotte Barnes and to the volunteers: Josephine, Dan, Sofia, Maya … among others.
– Thanks to the whole Futuresonic 2008 team for support!
New project „Friends“ started today at Futuresonic. Finally the workshop is up and running. If you are in Manchester drop by CUBE gallery and get your own Friends book.
All recent posts on „Friends“.
Friends
The project Friends is a workshop which translates the so-called social web – online services such as Facebook, Myspace, etc. – into a paper-based form in physical space.All workshop participants contribute a profile page to the big Friends Book and make their own personal friends booklet in which to collect as many friends as possible. With their own hand-made profile photo stamp and a large amount of prefabricated web 2.0 service stamps, users trade among each other information about their favorite online services and web activities. In order to be recognized as Friends workshop participants, users can wear a button with their own profile photo or display their Web 2.0 preferences on Friends Tattoos.
Social networks in the internet, which have become hugely popular over the last few years, have given the term „friend“ a completely new meaning. In contrast to the usually restricted and time-consuming circle of friends in everyday life, in the internet it is possible to find a large number of friends quickly with just a few clicks.And only a few of these friends are actually personally known by the user. Without a great deal of effort it is possible to have hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of friends in the Internet. Who has the most friends? Who is the best-known and the most often to be seen? The development of the internet in recent years enables the individual to gratify his/her desire for recognition and attention in quite a new way.
With reference to the classic German poetry album or the friendship book in the USA, the Friends workshop takes this development as the central theme and opens a debate over the many-layered types from friendship. The time-honored paper-based technology and tools used in the workshop as well as the handicraft skills of its participants contrast with the screen-limited but highly efficient online world of the social networks. In contrast to the obvious open contact with private information in the social web, the classic paper document conceals a high degree of obligation and protects privacy.The data from the web services documented on paper during the Friends workshop pose anew the question of the private and public nature of web identities.
Who is my friend? How well do we know each other? Where do we meet?
How does the Social Web effect inter-personal relationships?
Aram Bartholl 2008
Stamps for „Friends“ workshop at Futuresonic arrived. 🙂
(more than 30)
Join the Friends network at
Futuresonic 2008!
Get to know cool new friends and hook up. Find out which online social networks they belong to. Extend your list of friends and let new people discover you. Get ready and take offline networking to the next level!
Join the Friends workshop to create your own paper profile page in the ground breaking big Friends network book. And take away your personal Friends booklet, to carry on collecting new friends around the city. Create your handmade profile picture and leave your mark with special stamps and ink on all your friends’ booklets. A wide range of tools and materials are provided. Show off your Web 2.0 identity in paper mode!
Instructions:
1. Sample your personal Friends booklet from high end manufactured paper sheets to start your unforgettable collection of new friends!
2. Use your hands! Cut a stamp with your web profile picture. This personal tool plays a central role in all Friends communication. Leave your traces in real life!
3. Connect! Coin your basic profile data by using Dymo label tape. All your friends can get an easy carbon copy of your basic contact info!
4. What Social Web services are you on? Stamp and customize your personal Web 2.0 info. Create a collection of Web 2.0 stamps to distribute and inform all your friends about your online activities.
5. Contribute to the big, public and constantly growing Friends book. All users of the Friends network have a profile page here! Take a look at who is already part of it! Create your personal profile page and share your digital life!
6. Find new friends! Place friend requests on user profile pages and exchange info directly via carbon copy and Web2.0 stamps. Collect and share your online identity in your Friends booklet.
7. “Yes, I am using Friends and it is great!” Create your personal button badge to find other Friends users and extend your network during Futuresonic 2008.
8. Customize and wear Friends tattoos. Wear Web2.0 on your skin! Inhale Social Web!
