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| Artists participating in Debates & Credits |
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(Please Note: Most of the Russian sites require installation of Cyrillic fonts for proper legibility!)
Archaeopteryx / .ru
This group of young artists from Izhevsk have already produced a series of actions where they represented their artistic reflections on functions of different archetypal images; both of traditional folk and contemporary mass cultures.
Their project PACKING was presented at the Cultural Capital, 2001 festival. The idea of the Package action was to paint 9-storey housing blocks (the traditional Russian standardised housing "boxes") in Izhevsk with protection labels, normally used on transport boxes. The labels give notice of special requirements during transportation and usage. The action Package uses the standardised visual language of commodity circulation to redirect the attention to the residents these "boxes". The common relation of these labels to the objects they were meant to protect now seems projected onto the people themselves, as if urging to protect people: DO NOT WET, DO NOT BREAK, HANDLE WITH CARE.
This humorous intervention acquires a second layer of meanings when situated in the Russian context where several explosions in similar living blocks, ascribed to fundamentalist terrorists, became an incentive to step up Russian military efforts in Chechnya. For Debates & Credits Archaeopteryx will repeat their PACKING action in Moscow. In Amsterdam the possibility of recreating the project in the high-rise district Amsterdam Southeast is under consideration - a district under large scale reconstruction and still traumatised by the crash of a Jumbojet freight airliner10 years ago.
* Home page Archaeopteryx:
http://i-art.udm.ru/eng.htm
* PACKAGE Project:
http://i-art.udm.ru/packing/index.htm
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Arno Coenen / .nl
Arno Coenen is a representative of a young generation of Dutch media artists who works in a wide range of traditional and electronic media. All his works start from computer-based 3D modelling. Coenen constructs his images in a 3D digital environment and then exports the results to different media: a floor mosaic, traditional Dutch blue & white tiles, stained glass windows, film, video, computer animation or even interactive installations. His work is always visually highly spectacular. Coenen is obsessed by the symbolism of the new heroes of popular culture, computer game heroine Lara Croft, Thai Boxing World Champion Ramon Dekker, "Gabber" hardcore techno dancers, Ronald McDonald, US West-Coast trash culture, artificial new Dutch landscapes with high-tech windmills and cubical houses.
In Moscow Coenen has become inspired by the heroic wall paintings, mosaics and lavish decorations in the Moscow subway stations. It has inspired him to develop an up-date of the heroism of the former Soviet Union for contemporary Russia. In Holland he updated the folkloristic Dutch sceneries of traditional windmills and wooden shoes, with Rotterdam's Gabber youth culture (the hardcore techno dancers), hyper modern architecture and electricity generating high-tech windmills, yet skilfully executed in ceramic blue & white tiles produced at Holland's oldest blue & white tile factory, the Royal Tichelaar in Makkum.
The iconographic update of the heroes of the new Russians has brought him on a tour to St. Petersburg with one of Holland's most renown free-fighters, who challenged Russian free fighters on their native soil. The images of the free-fight spectacle in St. Petersburg, the fighters as heroes, the audience, the organisers, their exuberant following have been extensively documented by Coenen on video and in photography. With this material he intends to develop a iconographic cycle of digitally processed and reworked images depicting the 'Heroes of the new Russians' in a series of lightboxes and video-animations. Ideally this iconographic cycle is to be shown as the decoration of a metro station in Moscow and Amsterdam South East (the home base of the Dutch fighter Coenen followed to St. Petersburg).
* Home Page Arno Coenen:
http://www.solidrocketboosters.com
* Projects overview of Arno Coenen:
http://www.solidrocketboosters.com/new_site/data/projects/projects_overview.htm
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Oleg Kireev / .ru
Oleg Kireev is an art critic (Moscow-correspondent of "Flash Art") and a political activist. He was a member of the "Against all parties" campaign, the "Svoi 2000" movement, and an editor for the infamous "Radek" magazine. He has been involved in a movement of young intellectuals, artists and writers who organised various large scale street actions to engage in social and political debate in public space.
Momentarily Kireev is curator of a project called "Ghetto", dedicated to cultural and political analysis. "Ghetto" consists of the site http://www.getto.rema.ru , the mailgetto mailing list, and publications such as a collective edition "Against all P's" which was the first of its kind in Russia.
The internet is looked upon in the Ghetto project as the last remaining space for free publication and unfettered forms of cultural expression in the Russian media landscape. The project is focused on influencing public opinion and has definite political aims, a counter-action to the Chechen war first of all.
For D&C Kyreev wants to create a public spectacle in one of the larger squares in the inner city of Moscow. Temporarily the square will be transformed into a public site of celebration and social encounter. The square is intended to be repurposed as a large scale open air discussion forum, a gigantic speaker's corner, a celebration of public space as a space for encounter and exchange.
In Amsterdam Kyreev will develop a silent street performance that will transport certain aspects of Russian daily life to the streets of Amsterdam.
* Ghetto project by Oleg Kyreev:
http://www.getto.rema.ru
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MACHINE (Mark Klaversteijn & Paul du Bois) / .nl
MACHINE is an office that operates at the exact border of design, (media-) arts and club culture. Klaversteijn and Dubois formed previously, together with Leo van Munster, the famous collective DEPT.
DEPT & BEZET.NL
DEPT created extensive typography, graphic design, fashion and object design that has won numerous prices and is included in important collections of international museums and new Dutch design anthologies. They created art installations for famous museums such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, combining electronic and traditional media, and created large scale media-environments for art performances and large club events. In the project BEZET.NL ("occupied.nl") a series of weekly plastic shopping bags were produced with a stark black/white/red design commenting on political, social and current events. These bags were distributed at important cultural locations throughout the city and started to move through the city-environment as hybrid signs. The bags were connected to weekly changing web sites that extended the narrative of the images and texts on the shopping bags and hybridised the different spatial logics of the bags, the city space and the media space of the internet.
Moscow Plans:
About their plans for Moscow they write: "By using a number of places and surfaces in the streets of Moscow we intend to carry through an intensive 'campaign' during a short period of time. This 'campaign' will not address so much a set of political aims, but will rather communicate with the audience, the people passing-by, on a more personal level. These messages can deal with fear or cheerfulness, about humour or beauty in day-to-day events. They can be appeals to gather, or to consider something unexpected."
BeamMobile(tm)
Together with Leo van Munster MACHINE intends to create BeamMobile(tm), a truck fitted with mobile beam-equipment that can create a temporary 'light graffiti' by beaming onto large buildings, bridges and other physical structures. BeamMobile(tm) will create a temporary presence of the message without ever affecting or damaging the buildings used as an extended projection screen in the public urban space. It will be developed as a series of mobile street performances that appear suddenly and unexpectedly in different locations throughout the city, sometimes in connection with a planed and announced event and sometimes without prior warning.
* MACHINE web site:
http://www.ourmachine.com
* Former DEPT home page:
http://www.dept.nl/
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Leonard van Munster (DonLeo.org) / .nl
Leo van Munster is a young artist who works across a range of different media. He was formerly part of the famous DEPT collective, together with Mark Klaverstein and Paul Dubois. .
DEPT & BEZET.NL
DEPT created extensive typography, graphic design, fashion and object design that has won numerous prices and is included in important collections of international museums and new Dutch design anthologies. They created art installations for famous museums such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, combining electronic and traditional media, and created large scale media-environments for art performances and large club events. In the project BEZET.NL ("occupied.nl") a series of weekly plastic shopping bags were produced with a stark black/white/red design commenting on political, social and current events. These bags were distributed at important cultural locations throughout the city and started to move through the city-environment as hybrid signs. The bags were connected to weekly changing web sites that extended the narrative of the images and texts on the shopping bags and hybridised the different spatial logics of the bags, the city space and the media space of the internet.
Recent work and plans:
Van Munster produces installations, media works, graphic design, web works and recently styled an imaginary TV station for the most innovative Dutch national public broadcast organisation VPRO. For this imaginary TV channel (called Channel 7) he developed a complete visual styling, including graphic design, logo, typography, stage set design, web sites and video leaders. Recent work includes art projects specifically realised for the Internet, such as RSI, a game which if played properly till the end will result in a Repetitive Strain Injury for the player, and the internet peepshow Solo-para-Adultos. (http://www.solo-para-adultos.com )
He has also taken up a fascination for sensing technologies that can automatically register movement, the presence of persons and otherwise are able to scan the environment. He wants to apply these small scale and essentially low-tech technologies to create responsive public environments, that will start to interact with the public primarily on the level of sound. The space in a sense will start to 'talk' to the people who pass through it and suggest the presence of an alien intelligence.
For D&C he is developing a further project which involves customised mirrors with engraved almost hidden phrases, addressing the person looking into the mirror - "I know where you are". The phrases in turn are connected to web sites, where the phrase becomes the URL.
BeamMobile(tm)
Together with MACHINE, Leo van Munster intends to create BeamMobile(tm), a truck fitted with mobile beam-equipment that can create a temporary 'light graffiti' by beaming onto large buildings, bridges and other physical structures. BeamMobile(tm) will create a temporary presence of the message without ever affecting or damaging the buildings used as an extended projection screen in the public urban space. It will be developed as a series of mobile street performances that appear suddenly and unexpectedly in different locations throughout the city, sometimes in connection with a planed and announced event and sometimes without prior warning.
* DonLeo Home Page:
http://www.donleo.org
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Galina Myznikova and Sergei Provorov / .ru
The artists from Nizhny Novgorod work in different genres: video art, installation, sound poetry, clothes design, TV advertising. In their work they touch the problem how the communication mechanism functions per se, first of all its visual aspect, structure and representative models. Seemingly without any effort the artists switch between serene poetic video-poetry and fast-cut, tightly designed and highly stylised advertisement clips. These contradictory modes of visual production have an almost natural presence in their work.
For Debates & Credits the artists develop two public installation projects. In Moscow they plan to erect a public media monument for collective memory. In Amsterdam the artists have been invited to create a 5-screen video installation for the facade of De Balie, which reflects, indirectly, the 9/11 theme and will be launched exactly one year after the tragic date of September 11, 2001.
(no URL available)
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PARK 4D TV / .nl
PARK4DTV is an Amsterdam-based organisation that specialises in one thing: every night PARK4DTV broadcasts a 60 minute television-art piece made by one artist. 1 hour 1 thing. Pure sound, pure image. The works vary from computer-generated abstract work (including pure noise) to ultra hard-core reality tv. Moving paintings. Bombardments of electrons. Adult stuff. Kid stuff. Their programs are sometimes exciting, sometimes boring, but always art.
Apart from their daily broadcast in Amsterdam, they have weekly programs in Rotterdam, New York (Manhattan only, sorry) and Berlin. PARK4DTV has collaborated with a number of public & commercial TV-stations around the world, and our tapes have been shown in museums, galleries, bars, theatres and basically wherever there's a tv-set or video-beam around.
In Moscow PARK 4DTV plans to realise a series of nightly PARK 4D TV programs on Moscow cable television, preferably between 01.00 - 0.200 hours every night. Each program is an authentic art work developed for television within the PARK 4D TV format: one hour, one thing, pure sound pure image. For this series PARK 4D TV will select a number of classic works from the extensive PARK archive. New works will be produced by Dutch artists on-site as well as by invited Russian media artists to be screened in this series. The series will be screened at least for the duration of the Debates & Credits project, but might be extended beyond it, if there is sufficient interest by artists and TV organisations.
To attract viewers to the Moscow PARK 4D TV programs, the artists will develop a promotion campaign, consisting of advertisements in local weekly and daily cultural press and newspapers, promotion clips aired on TV channels in Moscow, and promotional actions in the Moscow city space. PARK will also create a temporary PARK office in Moscow that will be open to the public during and even beyond office hours.
* PARK 4D TV website:
http://www.park.nl
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Arseni Sergeev / .ru
Arseni Sergeev from Yekaterinburg, can be regarded as a representative of an important new generation of artists in Russia, who operate both inside and outside the traditional art system. His work was featured quite recently in the exhibition Davaj! during the Berliner Festspiele of 2002 ( http://www.davaj.de ). Beside his work as an artist, Sergeev is also connected to the Yekaterinburg branch of the National Center for Contemporary Art and he is one of the editors of the art magazine "Komod".
Earlier he executed an art project-action "Agitation for Art" with the Yekaterinburg center. For the project artists from various parts of Russia produced works in the form of mass-printed paper posters "agitating for art" that were distributed throughout the city space with various types of street actions. The content and range of artistic manifestations was defined by the "leaflet' genre. From advertising of contemporary art and artists as useful, attractive, prestigious "goods and services", to the popularisation and social advertising of contemporary art as a life-style, a new religious confession, a party, and contemporary artists as political and spiritual leaders.
Sergeev is interested in the appearance of collective subconscious complexes of fear in different discursive forms, starting with folklore horror stories and ending with their use in popular culture and political propaganda. He is going to produce an art action based on ironic exploitation of certain elements and motives found in popular black stories and sujets. While the content of the project is inspired by archetypical images of traditional and popular cultures, its formal realization will be based on the sophisticated use of contemporary strategies and technologies appropriated from the media industry. Thus, it will become an art parody on methods of exploitations of "basic instincts" by mass media.
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