Transmediale

I did not feel that this festival was quite as good as it could have been. I found the exhibition quite dry, and the videos in the main hall rather dull. Below is a list of some of the things I saw and my thoughts on them:

Chop-Bot

I could not find a link between this machine and the theme Conspire. I did however think it seemed to be a bit of a health and safety issue.


Breeding Fear

This talk started out well, it was about the affect that the internet and terrorism has had on fear personal identity, and I thought that some of the points one of the speakers made about airport security being performance art to be interesting. The idea of the worker going through the motions of making things look secure, and the traveller going through the motions of trying to look innocent was quite interesting to me. However, I did feel that this talk centred to much on just the idea of terrorism, when the whole ideas of ‘conspire’ and ‘breeding fear’ could have also gone into a discussion about intent filtering and counties that censor areas of the internet for control and to breed fear of stepping over the lines in totalitarian countries.

Faceless

This was a talk by an artist about her inspiration from Busby Berkley, the pioneer of top-shots, and her attempts to create similar works with CCTV footage. She focussed a lot on her research and the legislation that allows people to use CCTV footage within certain boundaries, leading to the facelessness of her characters. The legislation ruined the result of her work really, and I think she did not fully think out ways to get around this or making the piece as artistic as Berkley’s. I really liked her influences, but not her work. I think it would have been interesting to place a CCTV camera directly above rather than at an angle, and control the lighting to play with the shadows of people, rather than the people themselves.

The Cubic Viewing Stations In The Exhibition

I did not think these were very disabled people friendly, not very interactive. I would have liked to see more interactive installations in the gallery rather than just static objects and computer screens.