At the end of the 1920s the International Review i10 was published in the Netherlands. This avant-garde magazine was characterized by the search for radical innovation in art and society. The editors of i10 created an international platform where several European avant-garde movements could exchange their ideas. How did this avant-garde platform realize the transnational ambitions of the editors? And what kind of ideas on Europe can be identified in i10 in the context of a more general discourse on moder-nity? This article focuses on the extent to which i10 realized these transnational ambitions to provide an innovative platform of the European avant-garde.
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Wat gebeurt er als een kunstinstelling de dialoog wil aangaan met de buurt? Janna Michael observeerde een jaar lang de artistieke interventies van hetInstituut voor Avantgardistische Recreatie WORM in de Rotterdamse buurt Cool-Zuid. Ze beschrijft in dit artikel drie casussen en gaat in op de kenmerken vandialogische kunst.Het Instituut voor Avantgardistische Recreatie WORM (WORM) zoekt een betekenisvolle verbinding en dialogische relatie met de buurt, de inwoners van Cool-Zuid in Rotterdam. WORM-medewerkers zien de snelle verandering die de buurt ondergaat door gentrificatie en verkennen daarom WORM’s positie en haar potentiële rol in de buurt. Ze zet in op het bijdragen aan sociale inclusie en diversiteit in Cool-Zuid. Tegelijkertijd is WORM geen klassiek buurtcentrum, maar een kunstinstituut dat innovatieve en creatieve processen ondersteunt. Ze ontwikkelt artistieke praktijken die buurtbewoners betrekken en die hiermee bijdragen aan een nieuwe positie van WORM.In dit artikel verken ik de ontwikkeling van deze nieuwe relatie en haar dialogische karakter door in te zoomen op verscheidene artistieke interventiesin en om WORM. Ik zal op basis van interviews, observaties en digitale documentatie beschrijven hoe deze praktijken gedurende één jaar zijn geëvolueerd. De analyse richt zich op drie casussen: Issue Wrestling, Eten en ontmoeten in Cool en een hoorspel van een lokale dj en kapper, Haar en Hem. Deze casussen verschillen qua betrokken kunstenaar, proces en doelgroep en vormeneen nog incompleet verhaal over WORM en haar positie in de buurt. Ik verkendeze interventies als voorbeelden van een dialogische relatie tussen artiesten publiek of deelnemers. Daarbij ontleen ik ideeën aan dialogische kunst(Kester, 2005) en in bredere zin aan dialogische relaties zoals Bisschop Boele inde inleiding van dit themanummer formuleert. Om juist de context waarindialogische kunst plaatsvindt te begrijpen, bestudeer ik niet alleen kunstpraktijken zelf, maar bekijk ik deze ook vanuit WORM als organisatie. Hiermee kom ik tot een voorlopig antwoord op de volgende vragen: hoe is derelatie tussen WORM en de buurt zich aan het ontwikkelen? en wat kenmerkteen dialogische relatie tussen kunstinstituut en buurtbewoners?
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Hoofdstuk in wetenschappelijke boekeditie van internationaal vakblad Avant Garde Critical Studies
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What’s online video today, fifteen years into its exponential growth? In the age of the smart phone, video accompanies, informs, moves, and distracts us. What started off with amateur prosumers on YouTube has spread to virtually all communication apps: say it with moving images. Are you addicted yet? Look into that tiny camera, talk and move the phone, show us around, and prove the others out there that you exist!With this third reader the Video Vortex community — initiated in 2007 by the Instituteof Network Cultures — proves that it is still alive and kicking. No matter its changes, the network is still driven by its original mission to develop a critical vocabulary for this rapidly spreading visual culture: what are the specific characteristics of online video in terms of aesthetics and political economy of image production and distribution, and how do they compare to film and television? Who is the Andre Bazin of the YouTube age? Honestly, why can’t we name a single online video critic? Can we face the fact that hardly anyone is using the internet? What are you going to do with that 4K camera in your smartphone? Have we updated Marshall McLuhan’s hot and cold media for our digital era yet? Who dares? We see the Woman with a Smartphone Camera in action, but who will be our Vertov and lead the avant-garde? Who stops us? Let us radically confront the technological presence as it is and forget the pathetic regression to past formats: radical acceptance of the beautiful mess called the net.
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EU president Ursula von der Leyen wants Europe to tap into its inner avant-garde. In her inaugural State of the Union speech from September 16, 2020, she pledged to revive the historical Bauhaus - the experimental art school that married artistic form with functional design, founded a century ago in Weimar, Germany. Their objective was to democratize the experience of aesthetics and design through affordable commodity objects for the masses. Today, the European Union sees a chance to create a new common aesthetic born out of a need to renovate and construct more energy-efficient buildings. “I want NextGenerationEU to kickstart a European renovation wave and make our Union a leader in the circular economy,” von der Leyen said. The new Bauhaus is not just an environmental or economic project, “it needs to be a new cultural project for Europe. Every movement has its own look and feel. And we need to give our systemic change its own distinct aesthetic—to match style with sustainability. This is why we will set up a New European Bauhaus—a co-creation space where architects, artists, students, engineers, designers work together to make that happen. This is shaping the world we want to live in. A world served by an economy that cuts emissions, boosts competitiveness, reduces energy poverty, creates rewarding jobs and improves quality of life. A world where we use digital technologies to build a healthier, greener society.”
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The following exchange, over email, between Dutch media theorist and Internet critic Geert Lovink and Aaron Moulton occurred on the occasion of the exhibition The Influencing Machine at Galeria Nicodim in Bucharest, which closed on April 20, 2019. The show, curated by Aaron Moulton, was an anthropological investigation into the macroview of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA), an unprecedented network of art centers that existed across twenty Eastern European capitals throughout the 1990s. A survey of historical and contemporary artwork that explored ideas of influence, revolution, colonialism, and cultural exorcism, the Bucharest exhibition included a large archive covering the SCCA network that allowed first-time research into the institutionalized strategies of curatorial practice in the early years of the SCCA network, trajectories of influence that lead to specific kinds of cultural production.
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After the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia, a flourishing cultural scene was established in Croatia’s capital Zagreb. The scene calls itself: independent culture. In this book, Sepp Eckenhaussen explores the history of Zagreb’s independent culture through three questions: How were independent cultures born? To whom do they belong? And what is the independence in independent culture? The result is a genealogy, a personal travel log, a mapping of cores of criticality, a search for futurologies, and a theory of the scene.Once again, it turns out that localist perspectives have become urgent to culture. The untranslatability of the local term ‘independent culture’ makes it hard for the outsider to get a thorough understanding of it. But it also makes the term into a crystal of significance and a catalyst of meaning-making towards a theory of independent culture.
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Een kunstenaar moet hedendaags zijn, wil hij serieus genomen worden. Maar waar komt die verheerlijking van het hedendaagse vandaan? Hoe relevant is hedendaagsheid in de kunst en het kunstonderwijs eigenlijk? Dit boek gaat vanuit diverse perspectieven dieper in op het thema hedendaagsheid. Wat maakt het hedendaagse nu zo belangrijk dat haar schijn een haast mythologiserend karakter krijgt?
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US new media artist Ben Grosser and I met at the 2013 Unlike Us #3 Institute of Network Cultures event in Amsterdam where he presented his Demetricator, a free web browser extension that hides all the metrics on Facebook. I have followed his work ever since. We got in contact again in 2019 when he premiered his video art clip Order of Magnitude.[1] The cut-up piece features Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with growth. Instead of taking the traditional critical approach, Ben Grosser magnifies particular words that return in each and every one of his sentences: more, millions, billions, trillions. Covering the earliest days of Facebook in 2004 up through Zuckerberg’s compelled appearances before the US Congress in 2018, Grosser viewed every one of these recordings and used them to build a supercut drawn from three of Mark’s most favoured words: more, grow, and his every utterance of a metric such as two million or one billion. Inside the exploding galaxy of Facebook there are no limits of growth. After a few minutes the viewer gets exhausted and is ready to swipe the video away, stand up and walk out: the exact opposite response to what we experience when we’re on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp. The emptiness of the guy suffocates. Well done, Ben.
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