Videoart on the big LED display in Berlin

 
deutsch

Invited by The International Media Art Festival Transmediale in Berlin, the artists initiative STRICTLY PUBLIC presents video art under the theme "Fly Utopia" on Berlin’s largest video board.

January 30 - February 29, 2004, ten different art videos were shown at the highly frequented Ku'damm-Corner (Kurfürstendamm 227). Videoart interrupted the normal program 96 times per day. For this event, the four members of STRICTLY PUBLIC - Gudrun Kemsa, Anke Landschreiber, Monika Pirch, Myriam Thyes - and six invited international artists have realized their visual utopia.

What may art provide on a display / screen in a public area ? Can the retreat into privacy be interrupted and urban social life be stimulated through encountering art by surprise? What happens to a viewer, who allows himself to stop and to watch? Suddenly no messages of agencies, publishing houses, federations and manufacturers will be displayed. The board will then be a public window, an utopian part of our reality. A platform for a “daydream”: True or false, reality or dream? Utopia is only conceivable if it already germinates in reality.

STRICTLY PUBLIC intends to break through the strategies and rules of commercial communication by displaying artistic utopian messages on the video board. The short videos shown there are suppposed to deal with the specific possibilities of a digital video display in urban space, investigate its utopian potential and let this potential become reality.

 

Historic Website of Transmediale.04 FLY UTOPIA

Transmediale.04 Exhibition
Strictly Public @ Transmediale.04
Strictly Public lecture/screening @ Transmediale.04

The Artists

Denis Beaubois (Australia)
Masayuki Kawai (Japan)
Gudrun Kemsa (Germany)
Anke Landschreiber (Germany)
Niamh McCann (Ireland)
Irena Paskali (Macedonia)
Monika Pirch (Germany)
Dion Sanderson (Australia)
Jacquie Soohen / Big Noise Films (USA)
Myriam Thyes (Germany / Switzerland)


Lecture: Videoboard Utopia

At the Transmediale, STRICTLY PUBLIC will offer a talk with video screening and discussion about their projects from 2000 up to now.

Is art perceived differently in the art context (galleries, museums, ect) and in public space? - How does the ordinary program on a public screen influence the perception of art in this context? – And does art between ads and news influence the perception of the normal program? - Is the urban environment linked to the fleeting and ephemeral character of video art? - Can the function of a public screen be broadened in an utopian sense? – And will that change the medium itself?

Date and time:
Sunday, 1st February 2004, 12-13 h

Location:
House of World Cultures, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557 Berlin