Yesterday I bumped into presentation by Lev Manovich. After having seen our national soccer team win of Denmark (with some luck), I was in the same place where he was about to make his appearance. Ignorant as I am occasionally, I didn’t know at all what Manovich was doing. So some time before his presentation I asked some of the more academic folks at SETUP Utrecht what to expect. Since I couldn’t really form a mental image of a media theorist. I was told he wrote a classic book called The Language of New Media and he uses large datasets to analyse culture. Enough to get me interested. Here are my very non-academic observations (watch SETUP for a more academic article) of Manovic’s presentation. Which not only turned out to be a ‘very acceptable’ presentation but highly thought provocative as well.
Read MoreThis week I’ve visited the Impakt festival with a friend. We went to the event called Dopes To Infinity. We saw a cinema performance by Guy Sherwin, a music performance by Core of the Coalmen. After seeing these two events we were baffled.
Obviously I’m a completely ignorant person when it comes to media art and my friend — a physics guy — even more. We watched more than an hour various projectors projecting trains entering and exiting train stations. We started discussing and tried to understand it. It would have greatly helped if the artist would have just said something like: listen folks this performance is about this and that. But probably explaining one’s art is not done. We couldn’t decipher the message.
Freshly in our discussion we met John Butler, a computer graphics artist from Scotland. John was also showing work on the Impakt festival. He was also not convinced by the performances. He wondered why pop songs are able to communicate their message in 3 or 4 minutes, but why do media artists need ages to get their message across. Perhaps to be the antidote of a pop song?
So the three of us come to the conclusion that there is a problem with conciseness of media art. Everybody is trying to be concise. If something is concise other people can understand the point we want to make, without requiring them to spend hours. Or does media art wants to torture us and is it trying to find our maximal pain endurance. Or perhaps I should just not go to media art stuff. Well actually no I like going to new and different things. So I will go anyway even if I don’t understand it.
The Impakt festival 2009 itself is just great. Very nice graphics (is it online somewhere?), and a varied programme. Some other takeaways:
- Darkness’ Seed — a motion captured cgi film inspired by Karel Kapek’s 1936 novel ‘War with the Newts’
- The Singularity — an evening full of imagery and debate about our technological future (Utrecht, Sunday, October 18 2009)
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Read MoreYesterday I managed to leave work early, to go and see Lawrence Lessig (http://www.lessig.org/blog/) at the Meet the Media Guru in Milan, Italy. Lessig is an American expert on law and technology and is probably most known for his statement: code is law. With this expression he investigates the implicates of computer code (source code) fullfiling the same role as legal code.
Not fully familiar with Lessig’s books and ideas I was quite exited and went with high hopes to the Mediateca Santa Teresa. I was wrong.
When I arrived (ten minutes before the official opening) no more people were allowed entrance. That is no “normal people” weren’t allowed entrance — people who knew people obviously could enter without problems. It didn’t look so packed that public security was a serious issue, but since the event is free of charge I didn’t really feel like making a scene. So far no big problem.
From the edge of the balcony I could still see the screen on which Lessig was to be projected. Along with 30 or so people we enjoyed our balcony view of the projection. I could see all the people inside were already enjoying their cold beers. A quarter of an hour later it actually begun. I was about to hear Prof. Lessig!
The first speaker was a lady of the organisation of Meet The Media Guru which applauded all the sponsors involved. And she continued to talk, and talk, and talk. Word to the official sponsor of the Community of Milan who also was very happy with this event. Then again the lady from Meet The Media Guru, she and applauded some more people. She used all the right techno-jargon: open source, freedom, internet, et cetera. A person (sponsor?) from the audience took the Mic, and urged the need for freedom on the Internet in Italy. They even started their own embryonic movement. Great. At this point I was already sighing and complaining fiercely. It’s my nature, yes I am a bit short tempered (mea culpa). Is this event about an interesting speaker or is it a big advertising event?
Finally Prof. Lessig took the word. Obviously he spoke in English. The organisation had arranged a translator to translate *live* Prof. Lessig’s words in Italian. It sounded horribly, and it was confusing to follow. I went home.
It’s probably my ignorance or naitivity. But next time I prefer to miss the Media guru.
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