Aram Bartholl – Blog

( More physical speech bubbles … the ‘be Berlin’ city ad campaign runs already for a while, found this morning at SXF, Berlin)

DON’T MISS THE KANYE WEBST WEEK AT FFFFF.A.T. LAB !!!!

(Chat during 25c3. NOOOO, @Bre !!!!!!! THAT’S SUPER COOOOOOL !!!!!! ;;;;;;-))))))

There are just too many advertisement speech bubbles around …

“Chat” will be shown during (quite big!) STRP festival 3./4.4.09, Eindhoven, NL. I have 2 VIP full week guest passes available for you. 1st and 2nd comment on this post will make it. Check the line up! Don`t miss Aphex Twin!

V2 Lab Rotterdam invited Daan Roosegaarde and me to run each a four day workshop track during the eARTS festival Shanghai 19.-22.10.2008. The title of the workshop setup by V2 was “Urban Space. Time to Play.” The idea was to develop with chinese students a work wich would be presented in public space at the end of the festival. During these 4 days we had a lot of lectures, introductions and discussions. The students came from different schools of Shanghai and had different backgrounds, but mostly design and media design. After I introduced my style of work and a range of materials the Students were invited to develop their own concept. After four intense days of working, discussing, translating and testing my workshop track resulted in two different public space interventions. “Jump’n Run Shanghai” and
“QQ PaperChat”. Although the police intervened and we had to stop our public action we had a lot of fun and lot’s of reactions from the public audience.

I think it was for all of us (especially eARTS) quite an experiment to do this kind of public intervention in China. The people in the street were very curious and totally not used to it. I was told Shanghai plays a special role in China (yes, the city is quite special ;-) and that it was not possible to do these kind of interventions i.e. in Beijing. But let’s just try. :-) There is a lot to learn about China. There are of course strict rules in this country but it seams to me that these rules are quite flexible (to a certain extent). I got quite different feedback from chinese people on how they rate what you could or could not do in public space. Let’s join them to work on that and to extend that fuzzy border … ;-)

Thanks to all the participants. You were a wonderfull group and I hope you had a good time.
Thanks to the eARTS team: especially to Iris Huang, Xuan Xuan and Chen.
Thanks to V2 Lab: Michel, Simon, Anne and Alex.

I had a very good time and I am looking forward to learn more about Asia.

Workshop and public performance movie doucmentations

Jump'n Run Shanghai from Aram Bartholl on Vimeo.

“Jump’n Run Shanghai” is an adaption of the video game Super Mario reenacted in front of the South Railway Station Shanghai on 22.10.2008.

QQ PaperChat from Aram Bartholl on Vimeo.

“Jump’n Run Shanghai” and “QQ PaperChat” movies are as well online on Youku.com the Chinese Youtube

I have that feeling 2008 (or 2007 already) is the year of the speech bubble. I keep seeing them everywhere …

Zurich was great fun. The first time that I had so many kids using Chat. All pics on flickr.

Sherwood Forlee designed a nice paire of speakers in speech bubble design. Hmm… that is maybe a good alternative for “Chat” ;-)

Thx for the link Peter!

Drew pointed me out that there are beautiful pictures of Chat and WoW taken during Futuresonic online.

Picture and copyright by Jan & Emily Dixon

Chat at Futuresonic a week ago was great fun. We started at the Acadamy before the Wire concert (pic) and then had fun in public space on Oxford road. Best anecdote happend in the end at Contact Theater. Someone with an open Skype video channel on his laptop had his online contact chatting to one of the speech bubbles via webcam. Hehe. So in the end Chat went back online.

… “OMG, Nooo, doooon’t do it. It’s too dangerous. The on- offline cycle will be closed. A black web-time hole will suck in all matter … aahhhhrg !!! “
;-)

Thanks for the nice pic, Jerry!

(btw, next Chat performance at www.next08.com german web conference in Hamburg on 15.5.2008)