Issue 4/2004 - Net section
The new venue of DEAF04 seems like a dream – truly lovely, but just a little surreal as well. The Van Nelle Ontwerpfabriek, built in the twenties, has now been freshly renovated, with parts of it still »under construction«. The building, unbelievably clear, transparent and sculpturally monumental, is situated in the north-west of Rotterdam. Surrounded by lawns, it stands directly next to a canal upon which barges leisurely glide by, while the sun is reflected in the orange-coloured slabs of a new-fangled prison behind it. Where once tobacco used to be cut and coffee roasted, there are now designers of surfaces (design companies). The Es Salaam mosque, one of the biggest mosques in Europe, is right nearby the Van Nelle factory; on the other hand, the new right-leaning attitude in Rotterdam led in July to a ban on the building of new mosques in the city. During the first days of November, the Netherlands were in the midst of a crazy morass of terror centred on the murder of the film director Theo van Gogh. At the same time, Yasser Arafat lay dying in Paris. This specific and general situation could not have be better for negotiating the indirect linkage of the external flood of information with the internal need for information by means of emotions. For it is certain that, as everywhere, media reports provide the connection to the relevant social reality, to the diverse and diversified networks. But it is nice when both directions of a definition of the present come together, as happened at the DEAF04 festival. So outside there was the surreal dream described above, and inside the building there was a flickering and the noise level usual at such events, concentrating the information as an entropic buzz.
The seventh edition of the Dutch electronic art festival took place from November 9-21 under the main title »affective turbulence: the art of open systems«. DEAF04 managed once more to act as an umbrella for several different trends in the electronic arts and scientific disciplines. Although most of the participating artists and visitors belonged to the usual crowd of self-congratulatory insiders with their rituals of self-confirmation1, the small-scale, specialised projects and serious purpose of the participants were stimulating and unpretentious.
At the entrance to the exhibition, the video »All is Full of Love« by Chris Cunningham was running, and Björk's voice purred through the hall, addressing emotions as the basis for our actions. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau made themselves comfortable and gave the visitors egg-shaped devices (»Mobile Feelings«) to hold that physically transmitted heart frequency and respiration. In contrast, the treadmill installation »Run Motherfucker Run« by Marnix de Nijs, where a trip through Rotterdam is partly determined by body movements, was almost massive, as was the sensitive gravitation installation »gravicells« by Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa, which creates a complex audio-visual data construct by converting the weight and movement of the visitors. In »The People's Portrait«, the Chinese-American artist Zhang Ga links up people from New York, Brisbane, Singapore or Rotterdam via Internet and projects them onto large screens, simultaneously and »instantly«. It is the typical mixture of a fascination with interactive technology combined with puffed-up concepts where the idea bears no relation to the result, like Jeffrey Shaw's »iCinema films«, in which the viewers guide the image (the projection) in a dome by means of the direction of their gaze, or the »Membrane« of the group Sponge (US), which allows gestural interaction with other participants on a translucent screen suspended in space.
The small networking booths were a pleasant addition to the exaggerated use of technoid material, because here intelligent examples of software-based mini applications could be called up. Is a virus art, and what consequences would it have if it were?, asks 0100101110101101.org, next to the »Onewordmovie« by Beat Brogle and Philippe Zimmermann (Switzerland), in which a search word produces a sort of randomly generated mixture of images. The list could be easily continued, but without bringing any new insights.
But let us turn to the Austrian exhibits. Roman Kirschner used microwave technology to develop the »Ohrwurmbeschleuniger« [»Ohrwurm-Accelerator«: »Ohrwurm», German for »earwig«, also means a catchy tune.], in which two melodies are remixed in an adapted microwave oven. David Rych and Emanuel Danesch were active outside with their »Utopia Travel«: an old VW bus served as a video installation of their video archive, put together between Cairo and Vienna. The image-transmission method using the short-wave radio frequency by Gebhard Sengmüller was also impressively conventional: paint was squirted into bubble wrap to build up (infinitely slowly) an image: »VSSTV – Very Slow Scan Television«.
The interaction between the exhibited works and the numerous other activities at DEAF04 took place under the title »affective turbulences: the art of open systems«. This is a theme in which emotions are seen as an essential factor in interaction. Emotion is the driving force behind our activities. Without emotion or intuition we would hardly be able to take any decisions. Open systems interact permanently with their environment and thus, like the interactive works at the exhibition, lead the visitors to take part in particular processes. They hope that the work will reorganise itself in an unforeseen correspondence. In the same way, the programme organisers, with their guests, hoped for an exchange of views, whether in the seminars about »emotional machines, immersive spaces and wearable computing«, or in the varied evening programmes, which various stars of the scene were invited to organise: for example, the American avant-garde architect Lebbeus Wood, the Japanese curator Yukiko Shikata and the Slovenian artist Marko Peljhan.
Two days were devoted to the interdisciplinary symposium »Feelings are Always Local«, in which Arjun Appadurai, Karim Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Christa Sommerer and Manuel DeLanda, among others, interrogated scientific and political issues connected with networks. This brings us to the catalogue of the same name, which brings together the theories and ideas of all theorists and practitioners. It provides an interesting medium with regard to the current technologically motivated system theory, as, in addition to philosophical and bio-technological aspects, it also examines problematic socio-political areas which at the moment are triggering terror, particularly in the Netherlands. The financing of terror is examined in »The New Economy of Terror« (Napoleoni), Mike Davis looks at the development of slums, and Arjun Appadurai focuses on the global situation of different minorities as seen from religious and economic points of view.
This festival thus left behind a mixed impression. The spectrum of DEAF04 oscillated between the entertaining and controversial surface and the complex to banal content. It would seem that the most important thing, once again, was to be involved at all – in whatever kind of committed form.
Translated by Timothy Jones