2007 Summer Residency

Evening Lecture Series: Artist Talks, Presentations, Panel Discussions (public)
July 13 Current projects: presentations and informal discussion with Mary Ting, Klaus Knoll, Christopher Hewitt, and Rosina Santana
July 15 Stefan Keller, artist talk
July 19 Natalie Bewernitz + Marek Goldowski, artist talk
July 21 Contemporaneity of the Archive: panel discussion with Geoff Cox, Claire Daigle, Aaron Levy, Wolfgang Suetzl, and Thomas Zummer.
July 25 Current projects: presentations and discussion with Gebhard Sengmueller, Lynn Book, Jean Marie Casbarian, and Marji Vecchio
July 27 Julius Deutschbauer, Gerhard Spring, artist talk
All events will be held at 18:00 at the "Media Deck" of O.K Centrum in Linz, Austria. The public is invited. 
To RSVP, please contact: info@transartinstitute.org
Visiting Artists' bios can be found here.

Courses:
Studio Workshops
Lynn Book: Transformative Practice - Frames of Action
Jean Marie Casbarian: Multiplicity, Repetition, and Redundancy
Christopher Hewitt: Performative Elements in Contemporary Media Art
Klaus Knoll: Language and Image
Rosina Santana Castellon: What Shamans Know - What's Knitted and Webbed
Gebhard Sengmüller: Archeology of Media
Mary Ting: Poetic Explorations - The Temporal, the Spatial & In-between
Marjorie Vecchio: The Literal: Boundaries of Abstraction

Seminars
Geoff Cox: Software as Metaphor
Claire Daigle: Documenta XII: A User’s Guide
Aaron Levy: Uncurating: Discursivity and Drift Politics in Contemporary Curatorial Practice
Wolfgang Sützl: Art of War, Art of Peace
Thomas Zummer: Archive/Database/Interface - Between Artworks and Institutions

Studio Workshops
are not intended to further technical virtuosity but to enhance creativity by exposing students to new approaches, concepts and methods of working. All workshops are interdisciplinary, therefore participants can work in any medium. It is recommended that students work with what they are technically familiar with for these sessions. Participants should bring their own tools i.e. cameras, powerbooks, sketch pads. Scanners, video projectors and printers will be available.

Lynn Book
Transformative Practice - Frames of Action
This lab brings focus to the slippage of the forgotten and the screen of habituation in everyday life with the express intention of developing a transformative practice that both destabilizes patterns and radicalizes even the most mundane of actions. Each participant will be charged with undertaking a rigorous investigation of daily routines and rituals, tics and reiterative thoughts while simultaneously introducing unlikely modifications, extended elaborations and staging provocative interventions. Necessarily the in-lab work is interactive, demanding full-on body/mind engagement through unorthodox procedures, perceptual challenges and performance practices. As backstory murmur, we’ll explore Fluxus and the implications for model-making and paradigm formation found in that ungainly body of works, philosophies and procedures. Taking the lead from thought experiments and ritual aggregates you’ll evolve a frame of actions that begin to resonate with current work/life interests and demands, pointing you towards a relevant transformative practice that might be quite specific in terms of a particular project or be more general – a set of procedures designed to transform or ‘fluxify’ static or resistant conditions that you tend to encounter.

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Jean Marie Casbarian
Multiplicity, Repetition, and Redundancy
What is the function of repetition? Does the act of multiplying suggest expansion or does it breed collapse? As artists and thinkers, we will create a forum in which to explore the tangled space between rhythm and redundancy, multiplicity and the serial. We will examine the theoretical notions of repetition as they relate to the multiple and its anticipated redundancy within a contemporary visual context.

This cross-disciplinary, process-based workshop will support projects in all disciplines and genres. You will be encouraged to work within your own medium and practice as well as asked to investigate the aesthetic language and skills critical to the creation of time-based works. With daily, hands-on studio work, we will challenge the context of image, sound, and performance and consider the theoretical and practical problems inherent to interdisciplinary forms as they intersect with installation practices.

Lecture will consist of looking at and listening to an array of visual, sound, and performance artists that use multiplicity and repetition in their works. Readings on the historical and contemporary phenomena of repetition in both pattern and image will be an important component to this class. We will look at (and listen to) a rich history of composers, artists, and writers that use repetition including Struth, Sugimoto, Cage, Warhol, Reich, Nauman, the Bechers, Antin, Bryars, Smithson, Gonzalez-Torres, and Roni Horn.

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Christopher Hewitt
Performative Elements in Contemporary Media Art
Increasingly, many contemporary media artists are using performative elements in their work. The current technologies that are being used and explored by artists are often specifically designed to be interactive and to facilitate live exchange and communication. From interactive installation and live video work to internet communities and socially engage projects, in one form or another, performance and performativity play an increasing important role in current media art work.

Using the model of performance art, this workshop will take a practical look at some of the issues surrounding performance that arise in contemporary media art. During the workshop, specific issues will be addressed by daily lectures and discussions. There will also be daily workshop tasks in which these issues will be practically explored and small, performative experiments will be made using techniques, concepts and methodologies taken from performance art.

The basic of the goal of the workshop is experiment with applying concepts and techniques from one discipline to another. To utilise the history of performance art to find new approaches to issues of interaction, audience engagement and artist’s own position in their work and to highlight these issues as they relate to media art in ways that may or may not have been previously considered and to start the process of finding tools and approaches to deal with these issues.

This will be a relatively hands on and practical workshop and the lectures will focus on looking at a broad range of examples of contemporary work. The practical tasks will be based around performance art techniques, although previous experience of performance art is not essential, however a willingness to engage in practical exploration is necessary.

The workshop will be particularly suitable for artists who currently use some form of ‘live elements’ in their work, or are interested in issues of interactivity. The workshop is also relevant to participants who are interested in performance art or combining media work with performance. I should point out that although the workshop will be based on a similar format as my previous ‘Concepts of Documentation’ workshop, I will be covering different and new material. So this workshop will be appropriate for those who have already undertaken the previous documentation workshop.

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Klaus Knoll
Language and Image
The workshop looks at relations between textual and visual, how one illuminates, reflects, confirms and confines the other, how one can be/come the object of the other, how elements combine and what conceptual spaces these combinations open.

Following introductory lectures and presentations, participants will be given assignments around combinations and oppositions of language/text/narration/image to combine different forms of visual art and language as starting points for making new work. Teaching will be through group discussion, lectures, presentations and critiques; it will focus on the philosophical and epistemological aspects of each student's artistic practice and the aesthetic and technical possibilities to embrace and exploit the unexpected.

Course goals: The class aims to foster new ways of thinking about visual art and language through making, looking and debating. It will encourage the development of new work by individuals or by collaborative groups. The work generated during the workshop will offer a collective opportunity to discuss and develop each artists personal epistemology.

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Rosina Santana Castellon
What Shamans Know: What's Knitted and Webbed
Some contemporary artistic practices have been compared to tribal shamanic practices present in nonwestern societies. The coded communication of a shaman can contain the cultural keys that move energies within that system. Contemporary art is first and foremost a system of communication. Art, as a living entity, can enter into the daily, the cotidien, and there, help reshape or restructure some of the interactions in any community intentionally, or not. This course is about the ecology of art---the environment around which art occurs and how it affects your piece.

Although my work is in the community, this workshop is applicable to all art practices. It aims at teaching general systems theory --the tracking and mapping of energy of interrelated wholes and parts--applied to art production. It is a basic introduction to a vast subject matter, but not exclusively theoretical. The principles and analytical skills taught here form a dynamic scaffolding, so that the student himself can define which f/actors are at work in a piece and are influencing outcomes.

This workshop is for those who believe their work is meant for a wider public beyond the gallery, museum, and academia. It is presented as one approach to dealing with art production in the midst of complexity. Course goals: The course is organized around four themes: general systems theory, examples of theory applied from my own practice, discussion of the student’s individual work and studio application. In the morning class we will lecture, then look at examples of the theory applied from my own practice and from other artists. In the afternoon, we will discuss the application of the morning lecture in each student's work plus allow time for work and research for the workshop piece itself. In this workshop you will:
• Understand, through systems theory, the role your art can have in dialoguing with a given target audience-- be that a town, a group, or community, or the art world per se;
• Analyze how "thingy-ness" works in light of the larger cultural context;
• Learn to dissect the art from the art containers;
• Learn to look at art, not as a by-product of culture, but as a product of the artist's world-view; art as a producer of culture and in symbiotic relationship with its target environment; and,
• Learn to use systems theory as part of the design stage of a piece to maximize its effectiveness.

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Gebhard Sengmüller
Archeology of Media
Unlike conventional media history, this workshop is intended to reveal a hidden history of media. This “secret” or “forgotten” media history deals with parallel, presumably lost, little regarded, perhaps even merely fictive strands in the development of today’s media apparatuses.

In an age of the rapid development of constantly new technologies, which become more and more quickly obsolete, it is interesting to create archeologies of individual media. For example, this could be an archeology of mobile media (as suggested by Erkki Huhtamo), an archeology of operating systems (Neal Stephenson), or even an archeology of dead media, as Bruce Sterling calls for in his “Dead Media Manifesto”: “Plenty of wild wired promises are already being made for all the infant media. What we need is a somber, thoughtful, thorough, hype-free, even lugubrious book that honors the dead and resuscitates the spiritual ancestors of today’s mediated frenzy. A book to give its readership a deeper, paleontological perspective right in the dizzy midst of the digital revolution. We need a book about the failures of media, the collapses of media, the supercessions of media, the strangulations of media, a book detailing all the freakish and hideous media mistakes that we should know enough now not to repeat, a book about media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance, media that didn’t make it, martyred media, dead media.The handbook of dead media. A naturalist’s field guide for the communications paleontologist.”

I would like to show how artists interested in media archeology (these include, for instance, Paul DeMarinis [“Firebirds”], Perry Hobermann [“Faraday’s Garden”], Vuk Cosic [“ascii history of moving images”]) purposely use artefacts from media machines and media technologies “the wrong way” in their practice, developing them into previously unplanned hybrids, opening unknown back doors and thus often turning what were originally defects into strengths.

The workshop deals with unexpected paths of the history of technology, abstruse media machines, Sumerian PDAs, strange analogies in the development of television, singing flames, or the consequences of a blind faith in technology.

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Mary Ting
Poetic Explorations - The Temporal, the Spatial & In-between
For all artists the objective is to show the viewer versus to tell. To arrive at that difficult, blurry place, both minutely specific yet ambiguous in a universal manner, is a constant challenge. Notions about memory, longing, fragmentation, duplicity, ritualized gesture, and time and spatial manipulations which are often found in literature, are increasingly explored in contemporary film, installation, performance, photography, and new media. This is an intensive hands-on (no lectures) workshop that tries to actively get to the poetic space between the temporal and spatial, inner and exterior spaces - the combination of logic, spontaneity and revelation.

This workshop uses a variety of exercises to generate new ideas and approaches that emphasize reflection over narration. Each day will have a different focus beginning with a brief discussion of the premise, followed by specific exercises that utilize the inherent emotive powers of the oral/written word and the visual. These exercises will generate immediate responses in the vivid image based written passages, lists, sketches, movements and diagrams. The intensity and nature of the exercises greatly encourages spontaneity, experimentation and new approaches to subjects that are of importance to the participant. The exercises are appropriate to all formats and are a combination of practices found in choreography and writing workshops (note:exercises are not detailed in order to retain spontaneity during the workshop). The process will include both collaborative and individual opportunities. During the studio time, participants will select one of the exercises (or a combination of) and expand it into a drawing, skit, story board, monologue or whatever format suits your work and aesthetics. At the end of the day there will be optional assignments to further develop or complete that day’s project.

This course seeks to provide new structures, ideas and approaches to create work that builds on what you already know and allows for reinvention. Participants will generate by the end of the five days a resource of images, text,and linear and non-linear narratives for future projects. Additional exercises/project sheets will be available on the final day to assist in continuing this process.

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Marjorie Vecchio
The Literal: Boundaries of Abstraction
A concentrated look into any local gallery, museum, international biennial or art periodical, and one notices that abstraction is not popular. May we suggest during times of war and an uncertain future that artist, curator, editor and audience alike search for answers rather than revel in the mysterious haunting no-man’s-land of abstract wandering? Has the abstract been redefined outside of its formal art-historical meaning and into the place of representing postmodern narrative confusion? How has a communication-raised generation of artists been affected by the new responsibility to represent a whole planet of people and problems? Do generalizations about current art-making tell anything meaningful about politics, the sociality of a culture, or our global relationship to war and environmental failure? How does art reflect fear?

This interdisciplinary and cross-field content workshop will investigate the boundaries of contemporary abstraction. As opposed to defining that which is abstract and not, this workshop will play with potential leaking points in definitions and navigate through the relationship of the literal to abstraction. Assignments will explore the five senses and re-imagine our perspectives. We will also discuss issues of globalism and war as related to art and how the literal may be the most abstract concept we know.

This class if for all artists, working in any media or style, regardless if they work abstractly or not. With assignments and discussion that (perhaps, falsely) divide abstraction and realism, this class projects 1) to assist each student artist to a further understanding of their own presumptions about definitions and movements in art, 2) to offer students a new visual and creative language for their work, and 3) to develop a better understanding of globalism and it’s affects on visual language and artists. idea.

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Seminars
are intensive explorations into current topics related to media studies, philosophy, theory and art history. Students gain experience developing and articulating their own theoretical positions, engage in dialogues and discussions, making connections to their own work and it's place in the world. Seminars provide an opportunity to be guided through a topic or area of research before students initiate their own research in the semesters ahead.

Geoff Cox
Software as Metaphor
In the 1970s, and in parallel to the increasing visibility of computer technologies in culture, the term software was employed as a cultural metaphor to indicate a shift away from an emphasis on the (hardware) object of art. In a similar way, contemporary software art practice places emphasis on source code (as well as its execution), just as conceptual art's articulation of the 'dematerialisation' of the art object previously threw emphasis on the ideas and process of the artwork.
Nowadays, technical, cultural and political processes increasingly utilise software but also can be seen to 'act' like software. The seminar investigates this line of thinking through an engagement with systems theory, software art and culture, creative/machinic labour and action - to emphasise the possibilities of a transformative (art) praxis.

To introduce historical concepts and examples that relate to an understanding of contemporary interdisciplinary arts practice (software operates as a case study). To develop strategies to support a critical framework for research and future development of creative production informed by historical and
theoretical references. movements.

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Claire Daigle
Documenta XII: A User’s Guide
Since Transart’s summer session falls within in the 100-day period of Documenta XII (16 June to 23 September, 2007), an art world event occurring every five years, this seminar will take the opportunity to discuss the history, theory and politics of this large-scale global exhibition. Morning sessions will be used primarily for image-focused lectures with discussions unfolding in the afternoon sessions. The first two lecture sessions will trace the origins and development of Documenta. The next two sessions will involve case studies of Documenta X (curated by Catherine David in 1997 with an overarching theme "politics/poetics" and focused on a series of historical watershed dates: 1945, 1967, 1978, and 1989) and Documenta XI (curated by a team assembled under Okwui Enwezor in 2002 and involving a controversial series of international platforms marking Documenta’s shift beyond a European focus toward global comprehensiveness). Documenta XI received both high praise and critique. The latter came, in part, in the form of a web-based discussion led by curator Jens Hoffmann titled "The next Documenta should be curated by an artist," available on-line and ripe with possibilities for discussion. The final session will involve an overview of the current Documenta under the artistic direction of Austrian curator Roger Buergel and of the exhibition's reception (hot off the presses). Documenta XII sets out by posing a series of interlinked questions that will serve as our basis for discussion at our final meeting: “Is humanity able to recognize a common horizon beyond all differences? Is art the medium for this knowledge? What is to be done, what do we have to learn in order to cope intellectually and spiritually with globalization? Is that a question of aesthetic education and cultivation? What constitutes life when everything is subtracted which does not belong essentially to life? Does art help us out to get through to what is essential?” (Documenta XII website).

Although the focus on a single exhibition may seem to be a fairly specifically-located
topic for a seminar, it affords the possibility of posing our own inquiries involving negotiations between the local and global and of the politics of exhibitions. We will also try to determine what such a large-scale, cyclically occurring art world event like Documenta XII can tell us about current trends in contemporary culture.

Students are strongly encouraged to see Documenta XII in Kassel, Germany (approximately 5 hours from Linz by train) before or after the summer session.

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Aaron Levy
Uncurating: Discursivity and Drift Politics in Contemporary Curatorial Practice
The seminar will address potential modes of curatorial production, with a specific focus on discursive, interventionist, and participatory practices.   Departing from conventional introductions that emphasize traditional museological concerns such as collections planning, research, management, and exhibition development, this course instead explores new and exciting interdisciplinary approaches that reflect the ever-changing status and function of the cultural artifact in contemporary discourse.
 
The course is designed to intensify our attentiveness to the various curatorial approaches that have emerged in response to the perceived instrumentalization of contemporary art.  The practices and theories explored in this seminar attempt a “rethinking” of existing museological and art historical discourses at a time when conceptual artists such as Arakawa+Gins have boycotted the exhibition format altogether, viewing it as a defeatist approach to cultural creation and public engagement, and Roger Buergel, Artistic Director of Documenta 12, wonders whether “the time of the vitrine is now over” and “exhibitions are no longer desirable formats for encapsulating or conveying the spirit of art.”  Comments and gestures such as these remind us of the impassioned rhetoric and concern with which many artists, critics, and curators are actively contesting past approaches and in turn proposing new methodologies for displaying and conversing about contemporary art.
 
In the 1960s, artists such as Yves Klein, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Barry called into question the artifactual nature of contemporary art by staging exhibitions of empty or closed galleries that were often entirely devoid of art objects, so as to analyze and foreground the gallery space itself.  What lessons can be learned from these early experiments in innovative cultural production and display?  Likewise, what sorts of experiments are taking place today, and what claims do they make on the artist, spectator, or curator?  Is an exhibition, as Buergel suggests, a machine for producing new forms of organization and public engagement?  Is it a machine for producing social and political solidarity, or perhaps dissent?  Should an exhibition generate new forms of art, or should it primarily commemorate, interrogate, and educate us about the past?  Does an art exhibition operate in a closed circuit, relevant first and foremost to those who work with or in the fine arts?  These are just a few of the tensions and questions that this seminar seeks to engage and explore.

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Wolfgang Sützl
Art of War, Art of Peace
This seminar explores positions of art vis-à-vis the historical experience of war and peace.
Ever since Sun Tzu's ancient Art of War, many have viewed war as an art: a concrete, historical activity that has shaped the very understanding of human history and the legitimacy of political institutions. Peace, by contrast, has remained an elusive concept, and has often been understood as vague and abstract, a distant hope more than an art. Its principal historical manifestation has been a negative one - the termination of war.

In today's world, where war has transcended its previous institutional and conceptual boundaries, is art becoming more political? And can art open creative spaces in society that allow a radical critique of violence?

The seminar is conducted in a jargon-free fashion and aimed to strengthen participants' awareness of the politicaldimension of their own artwork against a background of violent conflict.

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Thomas Zummer
Archive/Database/Interface: Between Artworks and Institutions
What is an archive? One of the defining characteristics of the modern era has been the increasing significance given to the archive as a privileged means by which historical knowledge and forms of remembrance are collected, accumulated, stored, and recovered. Archives, distinct from libraries, museums or collections, constitute an ordered system of documents and records, which may be verbal, visual, textual or technically reproducible, and often serve as a basis or foundation from which history is written, stabilized, modified and reproduced. This seminar provides a contextual introduction to the various ways in which the archive has been defined, examined, contested, and reinvented by philosophers, engineers, historians, artists, cultural and literary critics, spectators and users. It also constitutes an inquiry into the contemporaneity of the archive, its current forms, deployments, and transformations. We will begin with notions of the technical inscription and preservation of memory, moving from the historical (from the artificial memory-systems of the ancients to contemporary reference systems) to theoretical (Sigmund Freud, Frances Yates Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Friedrich Kittler, Norbert Boltz, Anne Friedberg, Lisa Gittelman), to pragmatic and aesthetic (Cicero, Quintillian, the works of Otlet, Warburg, and artists such as Ilya Kabakov, Christian Boltanski, Robert Smithson, Allan Sekula, Gerhard Richter, Jalal Toufic, Jayce Salloum, and Walid Ra’ad/The Atlas Group).

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Summer Residency Program

2007 Summer Residency Program Linz
July 11-28, 2007

July 11: Opening day
July 12 - 16: Session 1
July 18 - 22: Session 2
July 24 - 28: Session 3
July 28: Graduation

Opening Day
11:00 Current project reports
18:00 Public vernissage, live performances and screenings
20:00 Group dinner

Session 1 and 3 (workshops)
09:30 Daily meetings with directors
10:00 Workshop and studio time
17:00 Project planning sessions and individual meetings
18:00 Critiques or Lecture 
19:30 Flexible after hours: Time-based nights, Graduate artist talks, Workshop outcome presentations, Peer-lead sessions and critiques

Session 2 (seminars)
09:30 Daily meetings with directors
10:00 Seminar and research time
17:00 Project planning sessions and individual meetings
18:00 Critiques or Lecture
19:30 Flexible after hours