Thursday January 18

20.00-23.00: General N5M Opening Act

The Matter of Media

"The Matter of Media" highlights the complexity of the hardware media artists
are dealing with, and the depth of its influence on contemporary culture. The
Critical Art Ensemble will perform a dual presentation about tactical media,
power, and forms of resistance. Audio-visual and performative elements are
interspersed with more discursive sections. The performances include BwO (Body
without Organs), Cyborg as Bureaucrat, and Data Body, while the parallel
discourses deal with issues like spectacle, virtual alienation, and the impact of
digital media in the workspace. The CAE offer a radical critique of the tasks
of the tactical media and point out directions for the development of effective
tactics of resistance for artists and media practicioners.

Where the Critical Art Ensemble expose the excesses of cyberculture the McCoys
work through critical affirmation. Kevin McCoy who, together with Jennifer
Bozick-Mccoy, will be presenting the performance "Achieving Sufficient Fluidity
- Tactics in Implementing Advanced Media Strategies" during the opening
evening, writes: "The new media seem to require us to endlessly aquire new
vocabularies and levels of technical expertise. For the artist who's goal is to
communicate specific messages and create alternative experiences, these new
media seem to provide promise. The down side is the incredible distraction and
sense of dizzying confusion this technology produces."

On the same evening, and in order to offer - on a lighter note - a few practical
examples, we have invited the submission of drawings, prototypes or verbal
descriptions of Techno-Parasites whose main aim in life is technological
disruption on all levels. Techno-Parasites feed on other machines' energy supply,
they suck them empty, disrupt their circuits, effect power cuts, disable them,
destroy them. Much of the time, electronic and media art suffers from a
straight, functionalist, affirmative character. Among the items it often lacks
are:
ambiguity, anger, attack, collapse, crime cruelty, danger, ..., and, at the
end of the alphabet: passion, pathology, risk, scream, seduction, uneasiness,
yearning. The Techno-Parasites play on these registers, they are means of
disruption and transgression, they fill the machines with a life of their own and
act out of a beautiful and perverse independence. They are joyfully dangerous
and generally amoral.

20.00 Introduction
20.15 Presentation of Techno-Parasites by Erik Hobijn (Berlin)
20.30 Performance by the Critical Art Ensemble (Chigago)
21.45 Performance by Kevin McCoy and Jennifer Bozick-McCoy (Charlotte, NC)

The opening act takes place in the hall of Scapino Ballet, next to the V2_Building.
The exhibition at V2_Organisation will be open throughout the evening.