footnote: I forgot to mention that in the "Sound Art. Sound as a Medium of Art" exhibition at ZKM i made several discoveries, and one refers to the subject we briefly discussed this morning (media lab culture). I watched an hour long film that depicted work – and the lab and the instruments and inventions - by overlooked Finnish visionary Erkki Kurenniemi - an I had indeed never heard of this material. (the section where this is exhibited is titled "unheard avant-gardes). I was amazed by the things Kurenniemi said in the film, and the electronic instruments he built since the 60s. Curiously, the film was installed in a dark room with three screens and multiple speakers, and one of Kurenniemi's sound compositions was playing throughout while the film also ran, and both together created a most hallucinatory effect on my mind.
The Future Is Not What It Used to Be (2002) Director: Mika Taanila (Erkki Kurenniemi Born 1941 in Hämeenlinna, Finland. A pioneer of electronic art in Finland, Erkki Kurenniemi, composed computer-based music and designed his own instruments as early as the 1960's. His career embraces music, film, computers, robotics - in other words, both art and science - with natural ease. He is a nuclear scientist/inventor/artist, whose projects and ideas have been surprisingly ahead of their times. He is best known as a designer of unique electronic instruments at Helsinki University's Department of Music during the 1960s. He subsequently had an impressive career as a pioneer of industrial automation at Rosenlew in the 70s, an automation designer in Nokia's cable division in the early 80s, and as head of exhibition planning at the Heureka Science Centre in 1987-1999. An exploratory search for totally new kinds of user interfaces for musical instruments and the semiautomatic generation of music have been among Kurenniemi's main goals throughout all these years.) After this brief excursion to Scandinavian media lab culture, I also wish to say that I realized, after posting, with embarrassment that I tended to assume media art labs were evolving in industrialized regions, globally. But there must have been media lab cultures on the African continent as well; for the Caribbean, I recently saw a book which I enjoyed very much: Julian F. Henriques, Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques and Ways of Knowing, London: Continuum, 2011. and Julian talks very eloquently about "sound systems" as a cultural praxis. At the ZKM book table, i also saw Eduardo Navas's new book, Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling, Wien/New York: Springer, 2012, and he describes dub and remix culture in similar terms, a a larger cultural discourse. Do you know resources about lab culture in Africa and the revolutionary Northern African regions? regards Johannes Birringer ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Johannes Birringer [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, August 31, 2012 1:40 PM To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Media Lab Culture in the UK and beyond thanks for this interesting reference. The development of research oriented/arts and science labs is of course not a UK phenomenon alone, but an international one, with interesting precursors (say, interdiscplinary arts & design schools and workshops as they were formed in the Bauhaus) reaching back to the early 20th century.... and with quite fascinating lineages that probably deserve a complex media lab archaeology, if you also think of the emergences of sound art and sound research in the 20th century. As to the history of sound art experimentation, there is a stunning exhibition currently on view (until January 2013) at ZKM in Karlsruhe, I can recommend it. Sound Art. Sound as a Medium of Art http://soundart.zkm.de/en http://soundart.zkm.de/ The website publishes the two key essays of the catalogue, on sound art, by Peter Weibel and Julia Gerlach. In 1999, Michael Century (now at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) presented an extensive study and outline on research/media labs: Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture, 1999. This is still available at: http://www.nextcentury.ca/PI/PImain.html Kerstin Evert, who I believe now works for the Hamburg Kampnagel Fabrik, wrote her dissertation about dance labs: Dance Lab: Zeit genössische Tanz und Neue Technologien. Wuerzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2003. In the Netherlands, Anne Nigten (formerly with V2) published her findings in Processpatching, Defining New Methods in aRt&D, Phd Thesis, University of the Arts London (Lulu publishing ISBN 1409299260) (2007) see also: http://www.patchingzone.net/ http://www.processpatching.net/publications (also: Joke Brouwer, with Arjen Mulder, Anne Nigten, Laura Martz, eds., aRt&D: Artistic Research and Development, Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers, 2005) It would be interesting to know whether there are similar studies and overviews of media lab culture in Asia, Australia, and the Latin continent, but also, for example, in Russia (since Vitebsk/Unovis and VUKhUTEMAS) and Eastern Europe. In 2000 a series got started in France, Anomalie digital_arts, which I believe has issued six volumes so far, and the no. 5 was dedicated to Brazil media arts. I would be particularly interested in reports on performance/media lab culture. with regards Johannes Birringer director, Interaktionslabor http://interaktionslabor.de _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
