MANY VENUES- WIEN
13 - 23 SEPTEMBER 2007
The second annual Paraflows
festival for digital art and cultures, taking place from 13rd to 23rd September
2007, establishes in Wien a new festival tradition. As an annual fixture between
the Ars Elektronica and the Steirischer Herbst, paraflows functions both as
a platform for the young local net art and net culture scene and as an interface
to the more famous domestic and international positions within media art.
Un_Space
is the title of this year’s Paraflows festival: the topic is the exploration
of inaccessible, invisible, theoretical, and immaterial spaces.
At the MAK-Gegenwartskunstdepot Gefechtsturm
Arenbergpark, about 30 positions in net art and net culture, as well as in adjacent
artistic strategies will attempt an approach to the Un_Space. Virtual spaces
- a prominent issue in media and net art - as well as social and personal space
dimensions and territories (see Erving Goffman, Territorien des Selbst) and
real spaces like architectonic, geographic, or elementary, are to be compiled,
visualised, and discussed according to their characteristics, their meaning,
and their respective insufficiencies.
Paraflows organisers think of Un_Space as
the elimination of distances, borders and barriers interfering with cultural,
social, political and media reality. Concepts dealing with the development of
inaccessible territories, technical approaches and theoretical attempts are
key aspects of this year's exhibition.
Symposion Boundary
Layers of the Sea
14.-16. September, Barocke Suiten, quartier21/ MQ
In the last chapter of Marshall McLuhan’s
War and Peace in the Global Village, titled ‘A Message to the Fish,’
the reader is confronted with the question of how much we can understand about
the media anyway, taking into account that – once set up – they
establish a homogenous, quasi-natural environment including and cybernetically
controlling man. For modern man, technical media have become as natural a habitat
as water is for fish. It is not by chance that as a next step, McLuhan depicts
the surfer as the archetypal media theorist: knowing the laws of the medium
as far as he has to, yet elegantly remaining on the surface.
A second classic of media theory also established
the ocean surface as the place of knowledge about media. A floating sardine
tin, reflecting sunlight, initiates Jacque Lacan’s reflections on the
gaze. He ends up stating that it is not just the observer who looks at the tin,
but the tin that also looks back at the observer. "[E]lle me regarde",
it says in the French original, including the double entendre ‘she looks
at me/she is something to me’ which is lost in the translation; Something
in this picture seems to accommodate a need unfamiliar to me, I notice its effects
which aren’t accessible for consciousness. Our preoccupation with the
media and our knowledge about it is – one could say – driven by
a desire for differentiation and appropriation eluding itself from rational
control.
Paraflows Symposion is going to follow these two thoughts and from there derives
further questions regarding the relationship of knowledge and media. Attempting
this, the themes of the boundary layers of the sea (ocean surface, ocean bed,
coast line, horizon) act as epistemological and historical probing utilities
www.paraflows.at
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