Friday, September 10, 2010

ISEA - Connecting net art and recycling

ISEA is known for its very full program. Such a full program is necessary and nice, but it forces you to make choices. It is impossible to see all the lectures at ISEA. During this afternoon however I am not able to choose. There are two lectures where I would like to go, but I am giving a lecture myself at the same time.

The lecture can only be fifteen minutes long, including questions and answers. So I have prepared a presentation which contains just the essential information and still gets to the point where I want to get.

I am not sure though if the outcome of my research really makes sense to the people in the audience. I was talking about the relation between my work as a recycling artist and my work as a net artist, but when my presentation is finished, all the questions that are asked are about the art center which I started in a small village in Austria some years ago.

Well, maybe this small art initiative is the outcome of my work combining net art and recycling.

I didn't prepare a presentation about the art initiative, I just mentioned it briefly in the talk. But no matter all the theoritical research that I tried to put together in my talk, the old farm was what fascinated the audience the most. Maybe my lecture made as little sense to them as many of the other talks of the previous days made to me....

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

ISEA - Dortmund

ISEA continues in Dortmund. I have driven back to the Netherlands from Essen, coming back to Dortmund on tuesday. I am amazed how close it is by car from Utrecht to Dortmund. It is just about the same as from Graz to Ljubljana. The car parking near the train station in Dortmund costs 9 euros per day. Very cheap compared to Utrecht.

In Dortmund the ISEA venues are all over the city. I quickly notice the ISEA signs, which have been connected with adhesive tape to street lights and traffic signs all over the center. I keep following the signs until I come to the university, where I walk into one of the Janez Jansa's. He guides me to the club where the morning session of ISEA is taking place. Inside a dark cinema, a young guy from Singapore is showing a very long video of himself jamming together with two other musicians. The jam session is nice, but it doesn't really fit into the idea of paper presentations and the organizer at the side of the room is gesturing anxiously to the moderator that he should stop the video.

Since I missed the first lectures that morning, it is not easy to follow the discussion that starts after the presentations. So I sneak out, buy a coffee and look at the people passing by. In the afternoon it will be time for my presentation, in which I will be talking about the relation between recycling arts and virtual reality...

Thursday, September 2, 2010

ISEA - Why

You may wonder now, why do I drive all the way to Germany, to spend the whole morning listening to lectures of which I am not able to recall anything afterwards? And why do I drive all the way to a conference to spend half the day walking around the area?

Well, maybe here I  do have to refer to Brian Massimo's talk. The only thing that I understood from his lecture, for which I drove such a long time to be there, was that it had something to do about the relation of different events, that seemed to be not related to each other at all. And that he was trying to find out how these events were influencing each other and how they were influencing art history and art in general.

And maybe I misunderstood all that from his lecture. But while walking around the terrain, completely amazed by the totally unexpected area, it occurred to me, that very often that is exactly the reason why I am going to a symposium. The symposium is just a starting point, which creates an event, an experience, that is different for anyone. I know, that when I will go there, that I will come across many new interesting people and many new interesting places, of which existence I otherwise would never have known...

On purpose I spend the whole morning listening to lectures which I cannot recall, exactly to have the experience of discovering an unexpected place in the afternoon...