Boundaries

Biography:

Since 40 years working in the field of art and technology, creating videos, data driven, web based-interactive projects, as well interactive projects using AI. Showing works around the globe: ZKM Karlsruhe, MOMA New York, Centre Pompidou Paris, Ars Electronica Linz, National Gallery Prague, Biennales in Havana, Sevilla, Moscow, Chengdu etc., since 2005 collaborating with Kamila B. Richter.

1954 born in Prague

1969 emigration to Germany

1975–1978 medicine study (disrupted)

1978–1982 living in New York City

1984–1990 Academy of Fine Arts, Studio of Nam June Paik

1991–2006 AVU Prague founder – Professor New Media Art Studio

2006–2023 HFG Karlsruhe Professor Digital Media Art

Symposium presentation

I will present several art projects I have created in the past. All are exploring boundaries in a different manner and with a different approaches. They always deal with physical as well as metaphysical dimensions. The human existence is basically built around and within the efforts of nearing or crossing boundaries and beyond. Obviously this symposium is moving itself towards the boundaries of the boundaries. It seems that the boundaries are boundless.

Biography:

Dr. Denisa Reshef Kera is a philosopher and designer, Senior Lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society program at Bar Ilan University, Israel. She is the founder of a Design and Policy lab, Dando.design, that explores innovative and creative ways of embedding ethical and regulátory norms into the fabric of technical infrastructures. Her commitment to public participation in science and technology is reflected in her unique projects. Her award-winning work Lithopy combines a fairy tale with functional code in a smart village that operates via satellites and blockchain services. Her academic career over the past decade includes University of Malta,Tel Aviv University, University of Salamanca, the National University of Singapore, Arizona State University, and Charles University in Prague, her hometown.

Symposium presentation:

Boundary objects, trading zones, and exploratory sandboxes: prototypes between technology, policy, and art using examples of prototypes from my design practice, I will discuss various strategies of “boundary-work” that demarcate, transgress or separate different “powers” (science, technology, policy, and art). The presentation will offer a new perspective on combining science, technology, and art to engage the public in issues of governance. How experimental regulation over prototypes and sandboxes that uses design and art strategies helps communities decide on their common future?

Workshop:

Creative uses of GPT (LLaMA) prompts for boundary work. We will experiment with creative uses of models and prompts in mock trials, simulations, role playing, performances. From ChatGPT, Microsoft Guidance, to AutoGPT and various Open APIs connected to models, we will explore the role of prompts as an art object and practice. We will try algorithms in specially defined “court”, translate philosophy lessons into Disney stories, and use folk proverbs to define EU AI Act regulations.

Biography:

Martin Kollar (1971) Born in Zilina, studied at the Academy of Performing Arts Bratislava. He has been working as a freelance photographer, director and cinematographer since he graduated there. He has received several grants and awards, including the Prix Elysee and Oskar Barnack Award. His work has been exhibited across the world, including Brooklyn Museum, the Slovak National Gallery (Bratislava), Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany, among others. His previous books include, Nothing Special (Actes-Sud, 2008), Cahier (Diaphane, 2011) Field Trip (MACK, 2013) Catalogue (Slovak National Gallery, 2015) Provisional arrangement (Mack/ Musee Elyse 2016) and AFTER (Mack, 2021). His work has been part of the public institutional collections as Victoria and Albert Museum, Fonds national d’art contemporain (FNAC), The Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), Slovak national Gallery and other. As a cinematographer, Martin has worked on a number of films, including 107 MORHERS (2021) KOZA (2015), VELVET TERRORISTS (2013), COOKING HISTORY (2009), 66 SEASONS (2003) and others. He made his directorial feature debut, 5 OCTOBER (2016).

Symposium presentation:

After

31th August, 2019... from that moment the way I look at the world changed. Everything has changed. Maria’s untimely death, her decision to end her own life, is a distinct cut, a sharp delineation of the before and after. After, as the time slowly passed, I cautiously began to browse through the photographic archive and the scores of material gathered from trips, location scouting and filming together. In the last years we had visited various research centres and scientific institutes, and started to prepare and shoot the film Letopis. It was to be our film. The excursion into our past life through the archive happened in various stages, lurching from an inability to bring myself to open the files, to obsessive periods in which I could do nothing other than continuously browse through the multitude of images, re-visiting the years, months and days spent together. Hidden contexts and threads I had not perceived before began to emerge and I started to link them. My aim was not to reconstruct our life but rather saw it as an expression of my desire to capture how the before transcends the after. And how even highly anticipated events always finds you unprepared.

Walking nowhere slow

Two years ago I hit the road and I walked 42 days from Bratislava to Rome. Till then I did not know about myself that I am in essence a walker. Another long walks followed later. I started to walk aimlessly, with no clear destination or purpose. There is a random element in my destination’s decisions, but there is an analogy to our everyday reality. WALKING NOWHERE SLOW suggests a feeling of aimlessness or confusion in society, most probably due to a lack of clear direction or purpose. As I’m planning to move in different speed, I am also planning to use a carrier from different times. POSTCARDS. The idea is to carry small portable printer on my journeys. Handmade postcards will be sent to the gallery directly while walking. The collection of self-produced postcards should be part of the installation. WALKING NOWHERE SLOW is the way, how to focus on the present, rather than worrying about the past or future. The ambition of the project is to create a photographic record-chronicle of the present, illuminating the absurdity and the inexplicable phenomena of our times.

Biography:

Thomas Kuijpers (b. 1985, the Netherlands) is a visual artist whose work explores the role of contemporary medianarratives within our perception of the actual world. Acting as artist, editor, anthropologist and collector simultaneously, he scrutinises and rearranges his archives until the structures of our media-saturated world are uncovered. Kuijpers then assembles his findings into new constellations, often taking the form of experimental, multimédia installations, inviting us to be aware of the illusions and rhetoric that mould our everyday lives. Ironically, it is only through Kuijpers’ obsession with the minute parts of the world that we see just how fragile it is as a whole. Thomas Kuijpers completed his MFA Photography in 2011 at AKV St. Joost (Breda, the Netherlands) and has been exhibited at institutions, fairs and galleries internationally including: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Foam, Amsterdam; Krakow Photo Month, Krakow; Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall, London; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; Red Hook Labs, New York City and MASP, São Paulo amongst others. In 2017, he was nominated as a Foam Talent and his latest book, Hoarder Order (Fw: Books, 2020) was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards 2020.

Symposium presentation:

Using my latest publication Hoarder Order, which – as the name suggests – is a compilation of collections of visual material, I will také you through my collecting frenzy from project to project, and share the motives behind it. Show the order behind the hoarder.

Workshop: Collectivism

Thomas Kuijpers is a visual artist, educated as a photographer, but nowadays barely photographing. His works deal with the contemporary value of images; the way images and other forms of visual communication are used to tell stories about contemporary events. Do we need to add more images, if all the ingredients stories that touch our lives are already up for grabs? Within this workshop we will explore the possibilities of creating a narrative about a contemporary situation, by only collecting materials. How do we re-arrange these materials, balance them, re-mix and re-shape them into ingredients that fit the story we want to tell?

www.thomk.nl

Instagram @thomthomk

Biography:

Nika Kupyrova is a visual artist and curator. A graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, Iceland University of the Arts and University of Applied Arts in Vienna, she is living and working in Vienna and Prague. Exhibitions include Wien Museum MUSA (Vienna), WIELS Contemporary Art Centre (Brussels), EXILE Gallery (Vienna), Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh), Belvedere 21 (Vienna) and Meetfactory Centre for Contemporary Art (Prague).

Symposium presentation:

Contemporary art easily cohabitates analogue and digital spheres: production methods merge and influence each other and even the artwork made primarily in the physical space will mostly be viewed on a screen as a digital reproduction. It may seem that for the artwork to be re-translated and re-interpreted across the media that way is a disadvantage, however it actually exposes some of the intricacies of the creative proces and lays open the methods of digital world creation. Using examples from my own artistic and curatorial practice I will talk about the malleable border between the digital and the analogue and working with exhibition space as a narrative device. In response to the symposium’s theme “Boundaries:travel” we will explore parallel worlds as imagined by digital media, where the screen becomes a portal and having the right set of tools allows you to step into alternative realm with its very own parameters and constrains.

www.nikakupyrova.com

Instagram @nikakupyrova

Biography:

Felice Moramarco is a writer and curator, founder of the curatorial platform DEMO Moving Image Experimental Politics. His practice and research focus on rethinking art’s agency in light of the current cultural, technological, and political paradigms shifts, exploring the possibilities of artistic practice to operate politically and configure new realities.

Symposium presentation: The Politics of Images. Representation as a space of subjective re-composition.

My presentation revolves around the idea of travel as a process of transformation developing in time and through the encounter with external agents. This notion is deployed here as a perspective to recollect the way in which the moving image resulted from the combination of the photographic image with the temporal dimension, as well as with other media (sound, spoken language, text). Considering the development of these systems of representation in relation to processes of subjectivation, my aim is to investigate the political agency of images, particularly focusing on moving images. Finally, by presenting different case studies, I will demonstrate how recent experimentation in the field of the moving image have deployed this medium critically, reflecting on its limits and possibilities, in order to develop the cinematic space into a site to experiment with new processes of subjectivation, thus enhancing the political agency of the moving image.

Biography:

Sami Siva’s work mainly focuses on fractured identities and has documented conflicts in India (Kashmir, North East India etc), Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan and geopolitical issues in Central and Eastern Europe and South Caucasus. Currently his work focuses on the ongoing war in Ukraine. He is a recipient three grants from Pulitzer Center on Crisis reporting and his work has appeared in number of international publications.

Symposium presentation:

Topic: Fever Dream

My images are part of a photographic journal crossing and re-crossing the boundaries of reportage, landscape and the private moments of a life, bound together by the dual idea of photographer as witness and photographer as participant, complicit in and open to the suffering, joy and rawness of the fleeting, often unreported moments of life and death. In my lecture I explore the role of photography in creating the diachronic process between “self” and “other” by sharing my images, stories and experiences and how they shape up both personal and political discourses.

Empathy in Photography

Aim of this workshop is explore the intersection of empathy and photography. Photographs have become increasing relevant in expressing oneself and the world around. Empathy closes the distance between the photographer and the photographed; it allows photographers to understand people and thus make better photographs. In this workshop we discuss and practice what makes images empathetic and powerful in conveying a message. During this workshop participants are encouraged to think of ways in which they can combine their personal experiences, feelings and emotions in their practice.

Biography:

Elejan van der Velde is a visual artist from the Netherlands with a material-based practice using models, sculpture, installation, video, photography and drawings. Elejan finished his BA in Fine Art in Arnhem (NL) where he worked mainly with light installations and spatial video projections. In 2014 he graduated (cum laude) from The Studio for Immediate Spaces at the Sandberg Institute, where his work shifted from the immaterial light to materials like sand, concrete and asphalt. After his graduation he has had residences in Prague, Moscow, Rotterdam, Alkmaar and Rijeka and received the talent development grant from the creative funds NL and the grant for emerging artists from the mondriaan funds. In 2017 he made his first public work in Alkmaar (NL).

Symposium presentation:

I would like to present a selection of my works within framework of a passage by George Perec in his book “Species of Spaces”, more specifically the chapter “the bed”. This passage started my thinking about spaces in the past as a memory in my mind and the possibility to (re-)create this memory in the present as a way of remembering while at the same time as an action that is altering my image of that past. By trying to remember the places I’ve slept in, as Perec does in this chapter, I started to draw plans, find objects reminding me of that spaces and found an interest in trying to create the blunt dimensions of a space experienced once that I cannot return to, be it that it doesn’t exist anymore or that I as a human being am not the same as back then.