m.m.m.
– media, models and metaphors –
Each year, the Department of Media Design & Communication at the Piet Zwart Institute co-operates with The International Film Festival Rotterdam in organising an intensive day of mini-masterclasses around one of the IFFR theme programs
This year some of the most distinguished thinkers and practitioners in the field of film, visual art and media archaeology will articulate their personal viewpoints on the interaction between media and the human mind.
As Friedrich Kittler once remarked: ‘We knew nothing of our senses until media provided models and metaphors.’ But to what extent do we actually acknowledge this metaphorical implication of the media that control our daily lives?
The conference is part of the IFFR exhibition and film programme Nuts & Bolts. With its trans-historical focus on image technology this programme deals with the ways in which artists have dismantled and reassembled the conventions of cinema—screen, projection, darkness—to reactivate the debate regarding the apparatus in the age of new media.
Working against the rhetoric of technology as progress and promise, the artists in Nuts & Bolts recalibrate technology and its effect on mediation. They modify obsolete cinematic techniques to develop alternative interfaces that produce moving images. Their media archaeology is in many ways a follow-up to the critical attitude of filmmakers from the seventies who, inspired by Foucault’s notions of the apparatus and the dispositif, questioned and deconstructed both the technological and ideological constellation that we submit ourselves to, while watching a film.
The artists in Nuts & Bolts enter into a dialogue with the history of media, paradoxically through the design of new technological dispositifs. Each prototypical contraption engages the amazed viewer in a specific way. Their installations and performances are laboratories for self-reflexive research on our cultural responses to an image.
Date: Monday, January 30th
Programme:
[doors open at 10:00]
10:15 > 11:00 : introduction by Simon Pummell (Piet Zwart) & Edwin Carels (IFFR)
11:00 > 12:00 : Patrick Bokanowski on the mindset behind his methods of image making
12:00 > 12:45 : Siegfried Zielinski on Arab automata
12:45 >13:30 : lunch break –
13:30 > 14:15 : Andrew Lampert on his project ‘Don’t Loose the manual’
14:15 > 15:00 : Patricia Pisters : on her new research project on cinema, metallurgy, alchemy
15:00 > 15:30 : coffee break + Screening PROJEKTOR
15:30 > 16:15 : Wim Janssen and Dušica Dražić on their ‘Projektor’ project
16:15 > 17:30 : Peter Kubelka – Bread, Butter and other Metaphors
17:30 > 18:30 : concluding drinks
Location of the Symposium & the Nuts & Bolts exhibition
Het Atelier (former CBK) – Exhibition
Nieuwe Binnenweg 77, Rotterdam
Artists represented in the Nuts & Bolts exhibition: Guillaume Bijl, Jason Dee, Wim Janssen & Dušica Dražić, Honoré d’0, Peter Kubelka, Andrew Lampert, Guy Maddin, Julien Maire, Serge Onnen, Mathijs van Oosterhoudt, Brothers Quay, Joost Rekveld, Teatro Dondolo, Sarah Vanagt, Floris Vanhoof.
The exhibition runs from Thursday 26 until Saturday Feburary 4: Open daily from 11:00 – 20:00
For the full Nuts & Bolts programme, see www.iffr.com
Image: ‘Projektor’, Wim Janssen and Dušica Dražić, 2017