KEYNOTES

Wednesday, 17th, 19.00–20.30

Keynote 1

Critical Archive
a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko
Interlocutor: Ryszard W. Kluszczyński

 Critical archive is possible, perhaps indispensable but on the condition that it is based on things and matters that are most difficult to grasp, comprehend and publicly shared:  the unacknowledged and unwanted past, difficult knowledge and experience of the present, and the critical and constructive vision of the future.

Simple acts of collecting and archiving our “heritage” or “legacy” are in themselves boring, mindless and hopeless practices.

In other words, the care and preservation of historical facts, events and places of memory that mark and testify to our great achievements and heroic deads, will be condemned to become a mere contribution to such hopelessness and mindlessness unless we inscribe and project into such monumental archivism things that we do not wish to remember, and speak, and which – sadly and tragically – remain a continuing (historical) part of lived-through human experience. ‎

In the context of such conviction and such concern, in my presentation I will share some thoughts and documentation of my participatory projections-animations of historic city monuments, and elaborate on the design and implantation of related to them “cultural prostheses” which all attempt to inspire, provoke and disseminate the honest discourse in critical memory in the public space.

These projects ‎have been developed and realized thanks to active engagement of people who are themselves the living monuments of the past which should not have happen, and the living archives of the present that must not be allowed to perpetuate in the future.

I would like to believe that in the process of assisting in development of these people’s voice, which enforces their public presence and expression, my participatory projections and communicative devices become useful tools for their own performative artistic acts and through which they can bring openly and in the open, important to us all, new vital narrative, new critical hope and new vision of the future.

Krzysztof Wodiczko is best known for his public projections that give life to monuments and public buildings using images of expressive physical movement, paired with the voices of marginalized citizens: the homeless, immigrants, survivors of domestic violence, war veterans. He has organized and performed more than ninety such public projections in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Northern Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. At the same time, he has been designing and implementing a series of nomadic instruments and vehicles with homeless, immigrant, and war veteran operators for their survival and communication. Wodiczko was awarded the Hiroshima Art Prize in 1998 for his contribution as an international artist to world peace, and has represented Canada and Poland in the Venice Biennale. He is Professor of Art, Design, and the Public Domain at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and teaches at Media Arts department of Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He lives and works in New York, Boston and Warsaw.

Ryszard W. Kluszczyński Chair of School of Media and Audiovisual Culture, University of Lodz, Poland. Professor of the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz. His reaserch concernes new media arts, cyberculture, theory of media and communication, information and network society, experimental cinema and video art. He critically investigates the issues of contemporary art theory, avant-garde, and recent art practices [the list of the publications on his website]. Some of his book publications (in Polish): Interactive Art. From Artwork-Instrument to Interactive Spectacle (2010); Information Society. Cyberculture. Multimedia Arts (2001, Second Edition 2002); Film – Video – Multimedia. Art of the Moving Picture in the Era of Electronics (1999, Second Edition 2002); Images at Large. Study on the History of Media Art in Poland (1998); Avant-Garde. Theoretical Study (1997); Film – Art of the Great Avant-Garde (1990). He is the editor of Towards the Third Culture. The Co-Existence of Art, Science and Technology (Gdansk 2011), Crude Life. The Tissue Culture & Art Project: Oron Catts + Ionat Zurr (Gdańsk 2012), Wonderful Life: Laurent Mignonneau + Christa Sommerer (Gdańsk 2012), Robotic Art and Culture. Bill Vorn and His Hysterical Machines (Gdańsk, 2014), Meat, Metal & Code / Contestable Chimeras: Stelarc (Gdańsk 2014), Ken Feingold: Figures of Speech (Gdańsk 2014).
http://media.uni.lodz.pl/rwk

Thursday, 18th, 18.30–19.30

Keynote 2

Bridging theory and practice of film heritage. On preservation, restoration, presentation and access.
a conversation with Giovanna Fossati
Interlocutor: Łukasz Biskupski

Giovanna Fossati is the Chief Curator at EYE Film Institute Netherlands where she oversees a collection of over 40,000 titles. She is also Professor of Film Heritage and Digital Film Culture at the University of Amsterdam where she has taught on the M.A. Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Image since 2003. Her main areas of specialization and research are the digitization of cinema and film heritage, theory and practice of film archiving, restoration and access, and color in silent cinema. She is the principal investigator of the project Data-Driven Film History: a demonstrator of EYE’s Jean Desmet collection and, together with Marijke de Valck, she coordinates the ASCA research group Moving Images: Preservation, Curation, Exhibition.

Fossati is the author of From Grain to Pixel. The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam University Press, 2009 and 2011) and Found Footage: Cinema Exposed, with Marente Bloemheuvel and Jaap Guldemond (Amsterdam University Press, 2012).

Recently, she published illustrated book Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema with Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe and Jonathon Rosen, which was presented at the conference, The Colour Fantastic, Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema that was held at EYE in March 2015. She is currently working on the third revised edition of her book From Grain to Pixel (to be published in 2016), on the edited volume Exposing the Film Apparatus. The Film Archive as Research Laboratory, together with Annie van den Oever (forthcoming 2015).

Łukasz Biskupski is a researcher at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the Universitiy of Social Sciences and Humanities SWPS. In his work he focuses on the history of film culture. In 2013 he published in Polish a book on early cinema exhibition in Łódź before 1914 City of attractions (National Center for Culture, 2013).

Friday 19th, 18.00–19.30

Keynote 3
The Complex Expression of Digital Art
a lecture by Oliver Grau
Chair: Antonio Somaini

Digital Art opens up thinking spaces for reflection and engagement in substantial contemporary discussions to confront the challenges, dangers and proposed transformations to our lives in relation to the digital era. It has the unique capability to address the digital challenges of our complex times within the very medium that shapes them, whereas traditional art media can principally offer metaphorical approaches. Thus, Digital Art is an art form with the multiarious potential of visualisation of our information societies, thematising globalization, media and image revolution, ecological crises, surveillance, virtualisation of global finance, and societal norms and aesthetics regarding the human body. As multifarious and complex as these phenomena are and as diverse as Digital Art itself is, it takes highly disparate forms, like time-based installation art, telepresence art, genetic and bio art, robotic and net art.

However, due to the imminent problems of archiving, the digital arts are threatened by its LOSS – a problem that is reinforced by the inadequate practices of cultural institutions with regards to the display, collection and research of digital art. Post-industrial societies require digital arts based on contemporary media dispositives to reflect upon current and future challenges, just as art history has always been informed by its own contemporary media technologies. By establishing concerted international strategies and new scientific tools, the aim is to put media art histories on a contemporary basis in order to enable the humanities to meet with its (current) responsibilities.

Oliver Grau was appointed first Chair Professor for Image Science in the German speaking countries at the Department for Image Science at Danube University in 2005. He has received several awards and his publications are translated into 13 languages. Grau’s book Virtual Art (2003) is internationally, the most quoted art history monography of the last decade (H-Index). Other publications: Mediale Emotionen (2005), MediaArtHistories (2007), Imagery in the 21st Century (2011). His main research concerns the history of media art, immersive images, emotion and immersion, the history of telepresence and artificial life and digital humanities. Grau has given keynotes at conferences worldwide, including the Olympic Games and the G-20 Summit and was founding director of the MediaArtHistories Conference Series. He has conceived new scientific tools for image science, a.o. the first international archive for digital art (ADA, since 1999) www.digitalartarchive.at. Since 2005, Grau has also been head of the Goettweig’s Graphic Print archive www.gssg.at and is an editorial board member of international journals. In 2001 he was among the first elected members of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science. In 2014 he received a Doctor Honoris Causa.

Antonio Somaini is Full Professor of Film, Media, and Visual Culture Theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. In 2013, he worked as the Gastwissenschaftler at the Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturforschung in Berlin, and from 2014–15 Senior Fellow at the IKKM – International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy of the Bauhaus University in Weimar. His research deals on the one hand with the film, media and montage theories of the 1920s and 1930s (Béla Balázs, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, László Moholy-Nagy, Dziga Vertov), and on the other with issues related to contemporary visual and media culture, such as the aesthetic, epistemological and political implications of the distinction between high and low definition images. The French and English translations of his book, Ejzenštejn. Il cinema, le arti, il montaggio [Eisenstein. Cinema, Art History, Montage] initially published in Italian by Einaudi in 2011, are scheduled to be published by CNRS Editions and The University of Illinois Press. His edition (together with Naum Kleiman and François Albera) of Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Notes for a General History of Cinema was published in French in 2013 by the Editions de l’AFRHC (Association Française de Recherche sur l’Histoire du Cinéma), and is scheduled to be published in English by Amsterdam University Press. He is currently working on a book on the history of the concept of “medium”.

Saturday, 20th, 18.00–19.30

Keynote 4

MUSEUM COMMONS. Research driven art practice and the public function of archives, collections and exhibitions.
a conversation with Marysia Lewandowska
Interlocutor: Jarosław Suchan

Marysia Lewandowska is a Polish born artist based in London since 1985. She collaborated with Neil Cummings from 1995 to 2008. Research has played a central part in all her projects, which include the book, The Value of Things (Birkhauser/August 2000), Give & Take at the Victoria & Albert Museum and Capital (2001) inaugurating Contemporary Interventions series at the Tate Modern. The Enthusiasm (2004–2006) project has been shown at the CCA Warsaw, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, KunstWerke in Berlin and Tapies Foundation in Barcelona. The film project Screen Tests (2006) featured in the British Art Show 6. Social Cinema (2006) events were part of the London Architecture Biennale. Generosity Broadcasting House (2006) was at Kunsthaus Graz. Post-production (2008) featured in Manifesta7 in Bolzano. The film Museum Futures: Distributed (2008) was commissioned by Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and Tender Museum (2009), a sound and film installation, is in the collection of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. Intellectual Property was a subject of How Public is the Public Museum? (2010) at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Re-Distributed Archive (2011) featured at the European Culture Congress, Wrocław; Open Cinema (2012) developed with architect Colin Fournier was a public intervention for Guimarães 2012 European City of Culture, and in the 2013 Architecture Triennial in Lisbon. The book Undoing Property? co-edited with Laurel Ptak was published by Sternberg Press in 2013. She has been a Professor of Art at the Public Realm at Konstfack in Stockholm from 2003- 2013 and a Visiting Professor at the CUHK Faculty of Arts 2014/15. Throughout 2014/15, she has been Artist in Residence at the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong.

www.marysialewandowska.com

Jarosław Suchan is an art historian, critic and curator. Since 2006, he has been Director of the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz. Previously: Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (2002–2006), Director of the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery in Cracow (1999–2002) and Curator of the Starmach Gallery, Cracow (1991–1998). He has curated and co-curated many exhibitions of modern and contemporary art and authored numerous texts about modern and contemporary art.

A selection of the films from the Enthusiasts archive will be screened during the conference.