European Media Art Festival 2011

Details

Parent Category: Other Festivals

Category: Video/TV

Published on Monday, 25 April 2011 10:00

Written by L E Shannon

The 24th European Media Art Festival (EMAF) is being held April 27 - May 1, 2011 in Osnabrück, Germany, the place for experimental Media Art, witth the Exhibition, Planet M, on display through May 29.

The EMAF in Osnabrück is one of the most important forums of international Media Art, an open laboratory for creative and artistic experiments that help shape media and aesthetics.

The Festival is comprised of 170 short and feature-length films in 25 film programs, 29 art exhibit installations, 9 lectures, 8 workshops, 7 performances, two parties and a Media Art Garden at 13 different locations in Osnabrück.

Film Program
This year, some 2,200 film and video contributions were viewed and selected. Some of the chosen films are:

Unter Kontrolle / Under Control
dir. Volker Sattel (Germany)
This documentary reveals how the so-called peaceful use of nuclear technology originates from the Cold War era of the 1950s. The German nuclear panorama showing the efforts to control the antiquated technology and in the process, they reassure us: "When faults occurred in the past, they were always due to the inadequacies of the operator. The actual system is able at all times to regulate and control itself or, if necessary, switch itself off".

Branded to Kill
dir. Seijun Suzuki (Japan)
A hit-man with a fetish for sniffing boiling rice deals with the consequences of a job gone awry, including having to face the phantom-like hit-man known only as Number One. With Jô Shishido, Kôji Nanbara, Isao Tamagawa. This 1963 film was considered so defiantly bold that the studio, Nikkatsu, fired Suzuki.

Avó / Muidumbe
dir. Raquel Schefer (Portugal)
Using old Super-8 footage in a politically motivated context, Schefer has clothing tailored based on the clothes worn by her grandmother on her journey to what was then the Portuguese colony of Mozambique which she re-enacts.

Swieÿ ze wiśnie / Fresh Cherries
dir. Anna Baumgart (Poland)
This film is re-enactment of an oppressive – and often suppressed – truth in Nazi concentration camps. In stylised barracks, Baumgart stages the tale of two Jewish Polish women forced into prostitution in Auschwitz. Even 50 years on, they were too ashamed to talk about it.

Free Radicals
dir. Pip Choderov (New Zealand)
This biography pays homage to the New Zealand grand master of handmade film, Len Lye. Raised in an American household of filmmakers, Choderov was exposed to experimental and avant-garde film by such icons as Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas and Robert Breer. In interviews and film clips, they express their views of new, progressive filmmaking and the radical social change of the 1960s.

The Retrospective is dedicated to Standish Lawder, who even now at age 75 teaches young photographers and filmmakers in his Denver Darkroom how to deal with analogous image composition. His complete cinematic works in original 16mm are having their German premiere..

The Fruit Basket is an unconventional short and animation film program by the young clip art generation.

In addition, EMAF presents a selection of animation films from the Japan Media Arts Festival (JMAF) in Tokyo.

The Art Exhibition includes:

The Tenth Sentiment by artist Ryoto Kuwakubo takes the audience with him on a train journey. A model railway, equipped with a light source, goes past all kinds of objects, creating an impressive landscape of shadows in the room.

Norimichi Hirakawa’s the irreversible is a video project in which 1,024 explosions are played in reverse, creating a game with the time line.

The main part of the EMAF exhibition Planet M is an international co-operative project: Moving Stories. With funding from the European Union, six organisations from Belgium, Italy, Austria, France, Poland and Germany produce and present new artistic works.

The artists are encouraged to question the narration of moving images and to explore new strategies of narration. The videos and installations created in the process demonstrate a great variety of form and content. By including fiction or documentation, facts or speculation, in a linear or interactive form, they show new perspectives of narrative structures. Moving Stories will be shown in the six partner countries during 2011.

Some of the works are:

Candice Breitz (D/ZA): Moving Stories
Breitz showed 15 Indian adolescents a Bollywood film in which a child plays a leading role. Afterwards, the youths described the role the child played, their view of childhood and youth in film and their feelings towards children in Indian cinema.

Nicolas Provost (B): Untitled
A romantic love story using dialogue excerpts spoken by a young couple. Found advertising footage of aircraft flying towards the sunset open up a game between illusion and cinematic narration.

Masbedo (I): Guardare se stessi guardarsi
A beautiful piano is destroyed by bullets. The report of the shots shakes the room, the instrument loses its shape; what is left is an indefinable heap of material.

Mihai Grecu (F): Under the Centipede Sun
Grecu creates the portrait of a landscape following its destruction by a war, by a natural disaster or an environmental catastrophe. Barren and deserted, it develops its own dynamics.

Pawel Janicki (PL): Oceanus
As with a journey on the high seas, the interactive installation offers various possibilities of navigation through the stories of “Oceanus”.

Rainer Gamsjäger (A): Cluster
The visitor is confronted by a massive bank of clouds, a huge horizontal column of smoke. What appears at first glance to be an exploration of natural phenomena and borderline experiences is simultaneously an intensive preoccupation with the digital possibilities offered by video technology and its suggestive power.

Japanese Media Art Now

Among the live performances are:

Ryoichi Kurokawa, award-winner of the Prix Ars Electronica 2010, performs Rheo, which means flow or flowing in Greek, as the audio and video shots of real landscapes flow into a graphical analysis.

Also performing is Braun Tube Jazz Band by Ei Wada in which old TV sets – Braun tubes – are transformed into musical instruments.

TRANSIT – European Young Talents Forum also presents four live performance works by students from Germany and Belgium utilizing video projections, sound installations, dismantled TV sets and glass wind instruments.

Palm Top Theater Mobile 3D Wunderkammer
Presented by V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam
The Palm Top Theater Mobile 3D Wunderkammer presents a series of 3D moving images small enough to watch in the palm of your hand by using a special device called i3DG.

Mortals Electric by Telcosystems, from the Netherlands, lets visitors experience a journey to the frontiers of human perception, using an enormous screen and a gigantic sound system.

From Archive to Living Database III, the renowned media philosopher Siegfried Zielinski from the Villem Flusser Archiv at Berlin University of the Arts.

Media theorist Timothy Druckrey from New York will lecture on the significance of archives and the history and future of the media and cinema.

These are just the highlights of an amazing and comprehensive festival of the arts. For more information, visit www.emaf.de.

European Media Art Festival 2011
April 27 - May 1, 2011

European Media Art Festival
Lohstrasse 45 a
D-49074 Osnabrück
Germany
www.emaf.de

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