»Translation« – a four-channel video installation – inaugurates the events celebrating the 25th birthday of Vienna’s Media Workshop. The installation is based on video footage from interviews in Japanese, Russian, Spanish and English. What is »really« being talked about plays more of a secondary role, however, since Gerda Lampalzer, media artist and co-founder of the Media Workshop, is interested only in the »nuances«, i.e. that which, with the help of a video editing program and the painstaking selection of individual syllables and phonemes, has been made to sound like German. By carrying our basic mistrust of the truth behind images and sounds to its logical conclusion, completely new contexts of meaning come to light.

The semantic shifts that accompany this unconventional type of »translation« are already anticipated to some extent in the programmatic title of this 40-day anniversary event series: »partly truth/partly fiction«. A mistrust of the informational content of »state-sanctioned« images, and the desire to produce alternative public perspectives and contexts as a response, was already a motivating factor behind the establishment of the Media Workshop. Originating out of the Viennese Arena movement, the groups of video artists that came together to form the Media Workshop in 1978, mainly as a technical production base, made use of the video medium primarily as a tool for political reporting. In 1980 the program series »Volks stöhnende Knochenschau« was initiated, within the scope of which numerous videos on political, social and cultural (alternative) movements were made. Video was to be used as a »rapid means of communication, with potentially explosive social impact« (Manfred Neuwirth), to educate counter-publics who would be able to produce their »own« images using the new medium. Even if this »explosive social impact« has now been relativized, today the Media Workshop’s fields of endeavor are still committed to this same approach to social and cultural policy. In addition to distribution and sales, media art production still forms the heart of the workshop’s activity. This is not least due to the fact that the self-governing workshop still makes the money that ensures its further existence – in addition to a basic subsidy – from technological training, equipment rentals and project consulting. As a central source of »independent media work«, the archive has swelled by now to some 1,000 tapes. The representative selection compiled on the occasion of the anniversary tells the story of a very differentiated and concentrated deployment of the medium. In addition to early documentary works such as »Arena besetzt« (»Arena Occupied«, 1976), »Salonvideos – Coming Outs und andere Bekenntnisse« («Salon Videos – Coming Outs and Other Confessions«, 1980), and »Küchengespräche mit Rebellinnen« (»Kitchen Talks with Female Rebels«, 1984), the program also clearly demonstrates that the founding members (who included Gustav Deutsch, Manfred Neuwirth, Ferdinand Stahl and Dietmar Schipek) were not only busy with organizational and curatorial duties (among other, collecting biographical data on Chris Marker and Chantal Akerman) but still had opportunity to focus on their own artistic work.

(Video) history is told not only by the archive, but also by the workshop’s technical equipment, which these days encompasses the whole gamut of electronic media – video, DVD, Internet and CD-ROM. While there’s only one device on hand that can still play the old U-matic tapes, digital image editing has paved the way for the advent of Net-based media art in the Media Workshop (including vidok/re-p.org). However, not only this practice- and process-oriented focus, but also its efforts to preserve works on older media has brought the Workshop international exposure, thanks mainly to the video collections: »Video Edition Austria« (1969-1993) and »Video Edition Austria – release 01« (1993-2000), which were purchased by several art institutions and museums both in Austria and abroad. According to Eva Brunner-Szabo, media artist and co-curator of the editions and a member of the Media Workshop staff since 1990, the main problem faced in conservation is that public funds are usually earmarked for specific projects. Archiving and restoration work, which requires a heavy investment in personnel and materials, but is the only way to ensure the lasting preservation of the less-established works, is thus left in the hands of a few isolated initiatives.

The same dilemma is faced by Romana Scheffknecht and Rosa von Suess, the initiators of the »medien kunst archiv«, which has been concentrating on reconditioning and cataloguing media art since 1998/99. The online archive’s offerings are based on the national art inventory, the collections of basis wien, the works belonging to the University of Applied Arts and the video art collection of the State of Lower Austria. The expert team (Judith Fischer, Patricia Grzonka and Thomas Raab) responsible for editorial work on the archive are busy writing art history, since contemporary works are continually being integrated at the same time as long-lost productions are being rediscovered, researched and added to the mix. For example, today the archive boasts a complete set of the videos made during the legendary and, because one-of-a-kind, almost forgotten Performance Festival of 1978.

During the congress »404 Object Not Found – What Remains of Media Art«, Hans Dieter Huber made a point of the necessity of preserving the main installation instructions for media art works in the form of »notations«. The medien kunst archiv is currently doing the groundwork in this area, making both selected texts and images available, as well as the technical logs and operative artistic backgrounds for a series of media art works, on the basis of which the aesthetic and formal »embodiments« of these works can be readily reconstructed.

The members of the Media Workshop also place a great deal of importance on electromagnetic memory: while a video installation by Manfred Neuwirth tries to pin down »Bilder der flüchtigen Welt« (»mages of a Transient World«), Eva Brunner-Szabo’s »memory project« is designed to jog the collective photographic memory. Common to both media initiatives is the existence of the requisite awareness and expertise needed for conservation. However, concerted efforts will be indispensable in the future if the archiving of media art is to be raised to the status of an urgent cultural policy.

http://www.medienwerkstatt-wien.at
http://www.mka.at

 

Translated by Jenny Taylor-Gaida

 

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