Making strange - Ostranenie '97 Electronic Media Forum

In the spirit of the Bauhaus, Ostranenie '97 was a provocative inquiry into the state of the electronic arts in Central and Eastern Europe sum of two units hundred artists gathered in Dessau last November to view and discuss artwork that critically examines issues about the remapping of Europe This forum differs from greatest in quantity media festivals in two important ways: first, it encourages the nearness of the artists themselves, aiming to create a meeting point for vital conversation; next to the first in an effort to broaden support for and knowledge about Eastern Europe it sought on the outside participants from isolated and under-represent areas. This year's roster included artists from Albania, Moldavia, Bulgaria, Bielerusse - no small feat considering the r tape involved in getting them there.

Due to bureaucratic delays, featured artists Natalya Petrova and Russian Umarov arrived sum of two units days after the screening of their video Chechen's Ancient Land (1997) Visas, a receipts ploy for governments in post-communist transition, are required for travel into the "West." Artists must at hand an original invitation (not a fax or copy) to obtain exit visas from their countries, entrance visas into Germany - and then wait. This post-cold war situation was best described as "post-what" by the agency of art critic Bojana Pejic, referring to the expectations and promises that the terminus "post" implies versus the lived reality of many of the artists present

The forum originated five years ago when codirectors Stephen Kovats and Inke Arns initiated a festival to examine artistic and technological activities in the former Eastern Bloc As political boundaries began shifting, the focus concentrated upon the East/West delineations. Five years later, the East/West focus persists. belonging to all concerns among artists from locations as distant as Bosnia, Bulgaria and Russia are novel national borders, access to technology and support for independent media.

This year's forum included installations, performance, video and a NET-Lounge or digital salon, and was given an historical adjoining matter There was an exhibition of works through original Bauhaus teacher Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, whose dictum was the unity of art and technology. Lev Theremin, inventor of the first electronic musical instrument in 1920 (the theremin, played by means of waving one's hands near metal antennae), was honored with a performance by dint of Lydia Kavina, who mesmerized the audience as she grabbed music on the outside of thin air. Historian Velimir Abramovic (Belgrade) lectur upon the visionary work of Nicola Tesla, the father of radio transmission, whose experiments with electromagnetic fields, according to Abramovic, were 120 years ahead of their time. Tesla's 1898 patent for far off control, the basis of telecommunications, inspired a performance through Marco Peljhan and Carsten Nicolai titled "Wardenclyffe cast No. 2," named after individual of Tesla's unrealized projects: a wireless broadcasting tower built upon Long Island that was awaited to provide worldwide communications.

In his opening articulate utterance theoretician and historian Lev Manovich (Russia/U.S.) provided a critical framework for computer-based art by means of arguing that the "new vision" of the 1920 which introduced aesthetic techniques of the like kind as extreme close-ups, camera tilts and aerial views, is embedded in the commands of computer software ("zoom in," "magnify"). Since the techniques that were one time used to reveal the underlying strive between the old and the of recent origin are now, by his analysis, basic work processs he encouraged the exploration of novel resources for artmaking like the Web site that can be approached from many different perspectives - as a catalog, or as an associative personal experience.

In the former East the question is more rudimentary: the technological infrastructure necessitys to be established. Thus, individual of the critical issues facing artists is access to technology. In St Petersburg for example, there is no support a whole for independent video, so artists bring into view TV programs to gain use of equipment, a solution that has obvious plus and minus points. Iliana Nedkova, in her introduction to the video program Crossing above described a slowly evolving situation in Bulgaria where computer-aided and interactive works are still considered a novelty and hardly any institutions offer technical support. As a accrue aspiring digital artists are oftentimes forced to turn to the advertising industry for access to media and training. Bulgarian artist Petko Dourmana's gin presentation was notable for the description of his proces which involves basically working alone. His intention for his interactive game "Metabolizer" (http://www.naturella.com/metabolizer) is to create a emblem for fighting isolation.

To fight isolation upon a different level, the Syndicate, established by the agency of v2 East (http://www.v2.nl/east/), is a network that couples more than 170 people from 28 European and three non-European countries. Communication is primarily on-line, with meetings held at media festivals. Their aim is to convince funding and governing bodies to accommodate with support to independent media.