RETHINK
It comes as no surprise that the festival's Congress is dedicated to
the 25th anniversary of EMAF this year. Media theoretician and
Director of the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) Peter Weibel and Swiss
media philosopher Gerhard Johann Lischka have been invited to present
their positions on the development of Media Art and its future in two
key lectures.
Kathy Rae Huffman will introduce the diverse range of network projects
presented and organised over the years at EMAF, and will explain the
role they played in transforming the festival into a meeting place for
international artists.
With a Van Gogh TV presentation, Mike Hentz will look back at the 1988
festival. It's exciting to see how commitedly and enthusiastically
artists experimented with the possibilities open to them back then by
the "new" media. Andreas Leo Findeisen uses the term "Future Fluxus"
to refer to analogies of the impetus of historic Fluxus actions with
the character of actions undertaken by today's critical media
activists that take place in a digital environment.
Daniel Cockburn deals with his history in an entirely different
manner: he views his work with humour and describes the mistakes he
made in the past as an artist and filmmaker.
Other lectures at the Congress will address the topical political
issue of the revolutions in the Arab region: Jasmina Metwaly from
Cairo is a member of the "Mosireen" media collective, born out of
citizen journalism when President Hosni Mubarak was forced to stand
down. She will present her work, located somewhere between documentary
films and video art, demonstrating how the revolutionists rebel
against the censorship imposed by the government.
Even more controversial is the presentation by Charlotte Bank from
Berlin who will give a lecture on the work of Syrian artists, followed
by a movie screening. Creative forms of protest emerge under basic
conditions and constant time pressure in the terror-ridden country.
The Congress will close with the current topic of videos on the web.
Dagan Cohen will screen videos that have been deleted from the
worldwide web, mainly from YouTube, whether for political, religious
or ethical reasons.
At the same time, his project takes web videos out of the realm of
private viewing and places them back in the collective world of
experience of cinema, presenting another way in which the media could
develop.
Alfred Rotert
www.emaf.de
