Accompanied program – Miya Yoshida

Programme of events

Friday, March 19, 2010, 7 p.m.
OPENING
Welcome by Christiane Mennicke-Schwarz (artistic director of the Kunsthaus Dresden)
Introduction by Miya Yoshida (curator of the exhibition)
Followed by a party with cyclotron aka Johannes Schmuhl
IDM, Electronica, Ambient (soundcloud.com/cyclotron)
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DJ PERLE (kursoundz) presents:
mixturas with swinging landscapes and avantegarde currents
downbeat / electronica / romaragga / dub / afro / electro / jazz
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Visual installation by Peteris Ziepel based on works from the NODEBOX Library

Thursday, March 25, 2010, 7 p.m.
ARTISTS TALK
Kente for the Space Age
With Rikki Wemega-Kwawu and up and down, Thilo Fröbel with Sebastian Bellmann, Erik Niemz, Stefan Schille, Manuel Siegert, Roald Sorms, Ronny Voß

In The World in Your Hand the continent of Africa plays a major role. In Kente for the Space Age Rikke Wemega-Kwawu applies a traditional form of weaving used in African textile production to pre-paid cards as used in mobile telephony. Economic structures that arose as the result of violent historical and geographical intervention become perceptible in forms which Rikki Wemega-Kwawu uses as elements of the pattern.

In the work Schmutzige Geschäfte[Dirty Business] an installation consisting of two and a half thousand cell phones collected from recycling depots and friends, up and down examine the raw ore coltan. In self-made films, screened on the mobile phone displays, they thematize the connections between the extraction and exploitation of coltan as it makes its way along global trade routes and the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Rikki Wemega-Kwawu is an installation artist and painter in Takodari, Ghana. up and down is a media project by Thilo Fröbel with young people from the Prohlis district of Dresden.

April 1,2010, 8 p.m. in Filmtheater Casablanca
FILM &TALK
Calling Hedy Lamarr
(75 min | D, A, GB | 2004 | Dir.: Georg Misch)
with Helga Tauscher

A documentary film on the trail of the legendary Hollywood diva, Hedy Lamarr (aka: Hedwig Maria Kiessler) who was regarded for some time as the ‘most beautiful woman in the world’. However, the fact that parallel to her film career she was a visionary inventor is almost unknown. Hollywood had no place for clever women, so her patented inventions remained a secret. Her technology, incorporated into torpedoes, created a decisive strategic advantage for allied troops in the Second World War. Even today it is used by the US army in certain weapon systems. Present-day mobile telephony is also based on her so-called ‘frequency hopping’, something she never made money from.
(Hanfgarn und Ufer Filmproduktion information sheet)

The Hedy Lamarr evening is a contribution to the Ada Lovelace Day (http://findingada.com), a day when the achievements of women in the natural sciences and technology are commemorated and celebrated. Helga Tauscher is an architect and software developer. She lives and works in Belin and Munich. Using the pseudonym gaga she has self-published comics and is engaged in freelance art and open source projects.

Where: Filmtheater Casablanca, Friedensstr. 23, Dresden – Neustadt

Thursday, April 8, 2010, 7 p.m.
ARTIST TALK AND BOOK PRESENTATION
Gorbatschow bei Nokia [Gorbachev visits Nokia]
with Paul Feigelfeld and Jan Wenzel

In November 1989 the Berlin wall fell and just a few days later the licence for constructing a digital mobile radio network was awarded to the Mannesmann concern. The accompanying transformation of telecommunications and the pervasive reorganisation of social communication, is the subject of the art works as well as the book for the exhibition. For the book Paul Feigelfeld and Jan Wenzel have written five fictive telephone conversations. These dialogues which accompany and comment on found visual material on aspects of mobile telephony, play with a very old form of knowledge production – the conversation. The give and take of the thought process circles the mobile telephone and the new social and spatial relationships that are enabled by these talks.

Paul Feigefeld is a cultural scientist in Berlin and the co-publisher of the book The World in Your Hand. Jan Wenzel is an artist represented in the show as well as being a writer and publisher in Leipzig. He is co-publisher of the The World in Your Hand book.

To be satisfied with little space can be more difficult that filling up whole volumes. Nevertheless the simplicity of fewer words can transform a banal machine into a transmitter and, surprisingly, strike a chord with the recipients of such messages. The impression of a fleeting but direct connection between writer and reader is the strength of this format which was originally developed for short, pragmatic messages. Poems were written for the The World in Your Hand project by three young authors from Dresden: Roman Israel, a Sax Royal Lesebühne author and originator of numerous multi-media literature projects; Moritz 7, poet, lyric writer, and member of the Lesebühne Lettermen, and Stefan Seyfarth, also a member of the Sax Royal Lesebühne who also writes a weekly literary column for the literary in the magazine of the Sächsischen Zeitung.

Thursday, April 22, 2010, 7 p.m.
FILM EVENING & DISCUSSION
Afro Digital Kit
with Jochen Becker

The video reportage, Afro@Digital(52 min | Congo/France | 2003 | Dir.: Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda) tell of the far-reaching consequences of the massive introduction of digital communication technology in Africa. For it, the filmmaker, who was born in colonial Belgian Congo, visited a host of filmmakers, musicians, programme directors, and engineers who alternate between the newest media technology and extreme isolation. The second film, RocketKitKongoKit (30 min | USA | 1986 | Dir.: Craig Baldwin) is a kaleidoscopic whirlpool of images, a tour de force through the history of the Belgian Congo (later Zaire, today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo). With the aid of found footage, the Californian filmmaker constructed a connection between the plans of the West German armament company OTRAG, CIA activity, and the plot involving the Mobutu government. Put together like a construction kit, the film proposes an alternative historiography of post-colonial Congo.

The cosmopolitan exploratory journey, Afro@Digital, and the experimental agitation film, RocketKitKongoKit, will introduce and discuss a postcolonial Africa that lies somewhere between rocket technology, information revolution and civil war.

Jochen Becker works as a writer, lecturer and curator in Berlin. He is a founder member of metroZones and curator of the projects series From / To Europe #1-3 in the Shedhalle, Zurich(2006-2007) with its follow-up at the Brussels Biennial 2008. www.metroZones.info

May 6, 2010, 7 p.m.
LECTURE for the wire / less series
Welcome to the Wireless World
Simultaneity and Ubiquity in Art and Media from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Centuries.
by Dieter Daniels, followed by a conversation with Miya Yoshida

Right at the inception of radio communications in the early nineteenth and early twentieth century, the worldwide simultaneity of the ‘wireless’ makes it a paradigm of a new chronology. This should be understood literally because a time signal was the first global ‘broadcast’ to everyone – long before the advent of the radio. The beginning of the ‘wireless’ media also begins here and goes on to become pervasive, in both the public and private spheres. Nowadays we undertake the coordination of space and time by means of cellular radio, GPS navigation and radio clocks taken directly from the global ‘wireless’ network. This is a subject with which contemporary artists are also concerned – in ways that are innovative, critical, sensual, and also entertaining.

Dieter Daniels is professor of art history and media theory at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst/Leipzig. He has issued and curated numerous publications, multimedia projects, and exhibitions in the area of media art. Miya Yoshida is a curator, writer and scientist in Berlin. Her thesis, Invisible Landscapes, The Construction of New Subjectivities in the Era of the Mobile Telephone (2006), at Lund University examines the construction of new subjectivities in the context of mobile telephony and art.

May 20, 2010, 8 p.m. at the Filmtheater Casablanca
FILM & TALK
John & Jane
(83 min | India | 2005 | Dir.: Ashim Ahluwalias)
with Miya Yoshida

Ashim Ahluwalias’ second film introduces us to six call centre employees. What begins as a documentary about the consequences of globalised capital in India develops into a complex film essay about utopia and the ‘American way of life’. John & Jane shows an aspect of global capitalism which, at first glance, seems to be bizarre. As far as possible, companies attempt to outsource services to countries with low wages so that whoever uses a free 1-800 service telephone number may well obtain advice about technical equipment, make credit card purchases, or negotiate a new mobile telephone contract, all through a call centre in India. The ‘call agents’ there undergo training about the cultural peculiarities of the USA and learn various regional dialects. John & Jane shows their attitude to their jobs which lies somewhere between critical distance and unconditional identification with the American lifestyle.

Miya Yoshida is the curator of The World in Your Hand show, writer, and researcher in Berlin.

Where: Filmtheater Casablanca, Friedensstr. 23, Dresden – Neustadt