With the worldwide largest mobile growth rates and promises of being connected to the global fibreoptic network soon, new possibilities are dawning on Africa's horizon.
SPARCK is a multi-sited, multi-disciplinary project. It is structured around a series of residencies for, and collaborations between, artists and activists from across the African world.
Andrea Goetzke elaborates on the purposes of the session which took place at the Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt as part of the Digital Greenhouse day 'Rehacking Your World'.
Stephen Kovats introduces the second session from transmediale.09's Digital Greenhouse, which is called Sensible Software and is hosted by Andrea Goetzke of newthinking.
Rob van Kranenburg introduces the transmediale.09 conference with a video about Martin Heidegger, providing context for the larger conference themes of environmental shift, cultural diaspora and
(Text: English only) Petko Dourmana is a media artist and organiser of interdisciplinary projects between art and information technology. He is co-founder of the InterSpace Media Art Centre, Sofia, which is a non-commercial combination of artists, computer scientists and media activists.
Post Global Warming Survival Kit consists of a two-channel projection and shows infrared images of the North Sea as a post-apocalyptic landscape that the observer can only see by using a night-vision device. Dourmana portrays a dystopian scenario: a “nuclear winter” initiated by political groups or governments in order to solve the problem of global warming and the melting of the polar icecaps.
The installation aims to be a believable, technological fiction of a future in which human sensory experience has adapted. Without the technology posited within the Post Global Warming Survival Kit, we would be blind. With this in mind, the project asks us to consider our approach to environmental pollution and ecological destruction.
(Text: English only) Monday, January 26th 2009, the german artist Hermann Josef Hack arranged 200 small tents on the square in front of the Brandenburger Tor to build a miniature version of a refugee camp, the world climate refugee camp. Hack’s art refers to current political issues, for him there is no distinction between art and politics. Furthermore he wants to get in direct contact with the public audience instead of presenting his work in institutional art spaces like museums. That’s why he presents his work in public spaces and likes to watch the reaction of the pedestrians, “the very ones who caused the changes that made people refugees in the first place”.
Increasing social inequality, aggravation of living standards, short-sighted environmental policy and the violation of human rights are all facts pointing to the increasing extremes of the conditions
