MAiR Graficka kolonija

26/12/2019

https://vimeo.com/380946234/description

Ode to the birch is a collaborative project between Bojana Petkovic bojanapetkovic.com/, Guida Ribeiro digitalmedia-bremen.de/student/guida-ribeiro/, Timo Johannes digitalmedia-bremen.de/student/timo-johannes/ and Max Wolfs (Fakir Fantasi) digitalmedia-bremen.de/student/maximilian-wolfs/, created at MAiR mair-media-artist-in-residency.tumblr.com/ (Media Artist in Residency) in Prolom banja, Serbia. The cultural historicity and uncanny geological formations located nearby was explored during the artist in residency program, especially by the research of the mythologies and narratives that such a place holds.

The installation Ode to the birch intends to relocate the natural reality of Prolom Banja into the gallery space. The birch trees (represented by 2.5 m long silkscreen prints on rice paper) have been present in folkloric tales as a metaphor for the medium between worlds: between the world of men and the world of spirits, between the human and the non-human. The branches carry the messages joining those worlds: the black and white patterns of the tree are scriptures being sent. To interact with these branches is to negotiate in this relation and to become kindred with these planes: human, natural and spiritual.

In the context of the art residency, this installation reflects our pursuit into bridging the gap between our technological experience, the natural environment and the local mythologies. The interaction with these trees is made possible through several patterns which were printed using bare conductive paint. When these areas are touched, sounds and whispers are played. As we wanted to create big and atmospheric textures of sound, we needed the installation to be able to play more than one sound file at a time, and also if possible, to let them fade into each other. As the Touch Board is only monophonic this meant we needed to solve the issue of polyphony.

We decided that instead of using the Touch Board to play the sounds directly, that we would use the inputs of the Touch Board as a Human Interface Device to just use the sensors, and send those inputs to a computer via USB. The computer runs the Software Soundplant, in which we mapped the different sounds to the keyboard keys from the Bare Conductive HID_Keyboard example sketch. The software was set up to start up automatically after the laptop is booted. For this setup we followed the polyphony tutorial on the Bare Conductive Website. We added some fade in and fade out time to every mapped sound, so the transitions are smooth and not too sudden. The sound of the installation is made up of field recordings for the whispers and recordings of a Soma Laboratorys LYRA-8 synthesizer for the organic qualities of its sound.

The installation was on view in Galerie Herold, Bremen, Germany from 18.10. till 3.11.2019

Ode to the birch is a collaborative project between Bojana Petković https://www.bojanapetkovic.com/, Guida Ribeiro http://digitalmedia-bremen.de/student/guida-ribeiro/,…

26/12/2019

https://vimeo.com/380946234

Ode to the birch is a collaborative project between Bojana Petkovic bojanapetkovic.com/, Guida Ribeiro digitalmedia-bremen.de/student/guida-ribeiro/, Timo Johannes digitalmedia-bremen.de/student/timo-johannes/ and Max Wolfs Fakir Fantasi digitalmedia-bremen.de/student/maximilian-wolfs/, created at MAiR mair-media-artist-in-residency.tumblr.com/ (Media Artist in Residency) in Prolom banja, Serbia.

The cultural historicity and uncanny geological formations located nearby was explored during the artist in residency program, especially by the research of the mythologies and narratives that such a place holds.

The installation Ode to the birch intends to relocate the natural reality of Prolom Banja into the gallery space. The birch trees (represented by 2.5 m long silkscreen prints on rice paper) have been present in folkloric tales as a metaphor for the medium between worlds: between the world of men and the world of spirits, between the human and the non-human. The branches carry the messages joining those worlds: the black and white patterns of the tree are scriptures being sent. To interact with these branches is to negotiate in this relation and to become kindred with these planes: human, natural and spiritual.

In the context of the art residency, this installation reflects our pursuit into bridging the gap between our technological experience, the natural environment and the local mythologies. The interaction with these trees is made possible through several patterns which were printed using bare conductive paint. When these areas are touched, sounds and whispers are played. As we wanted to create big and atmospheric textures of sound, we needed the installation to be able to play more than one sound file at a time, and also if possible, to let them fade into each other. As the Touch Board is only monophonic this meant we needed to solve the issue of polyphony.

We decided that instead of using the Touch Board to play the sounds directly, that we would use the inputs of the Touch Board as a Human Interface Device to just use the sensors, and send those inputs to a computer via USB. The computer runs the Software Soundplant, in which we mapped the different sounds to the keyboard keys from the Bare Conductive HID_Keyboard example sketch. The software was set up to start up automatically after the laptop is booted. For this setup we followed the polyphony tutorial on the Bare Conductive Website. We added some fade in and fade out time to every mapped sound, so the transitions are smooth and not too sudden. The sound of the installation is made up of field recordings for the whispers and recordings of a Soma Laboratorys LYRA-8 synthesizer for the organic qualities of its sound.

Ode to the birch is a collaborative project between Bojana Petković https://www.bojanapetkovic.com/, Guida Ribeiro http://digitalmedia-bremen.de/student/guida-ribeiro/,…

28/10/2019

Participants: Svetlana Maraš, Timo Johannes, Bojana Petković, Deana Petrović, Guida Ribeiro and Max Wolfs

Photo credit: Franziska von den Driesch

From 18.10. till 3.11.2019 at Galerie Herold

17/10/2019

We’re ready for the opening tomorrow at 8pm at Galerie herold! If you happen to be in Bremen come and see what we (Bojana Petkovic Guida Ribeiro Timo Johannes Fakir Fantasi Svetlana Maras and Deki From D Blok did on the last artist in residency!

Poster design X88

17/10/2019

We’re ready for the opening tomorrow at 8pm at Galerie herold! If you happen to be in Bremen come and see what we (Bojana Petkovic Guida Ribeiro Timo Johannes Fakir Fantasi Svetlana Maras and Deki From D Blok did on the last artist in residency!

Poster design X88

15/10/2019

Getting ready for our exhibition opening at Galerie Herold on Friday 18.10.2019 at 8pm! Bojana Petkovic, Guida Ribeiro, Timo Johannes, Fakir Fantasi, Deki From D Blok, Svetlana Maras

14/11/2018

photo credit: Bojana Petkovic

(UN)NATURAL ENCOUNTERS

6.7. - 14.7.2018 / Galerie Herold, Bremen, Germany

This year’s exhibition of Graphic Youth Colony (located in Prolom Banja) gathered an international group of artists and designers who in a new way, through art installations, explored the relations between contemporary art/ design and nature, using new media and technology to realize their work. Withdrawing from the classical approach to graphic art is reflected in distancing from the exclusively visual and representative character of an artistic work. Most of the works realized at the colony are some type of machines and constructions of processes which in some cases, with the help of new print technologies, examine new possibilities of relating silk screen printing, digital media and electronics. The graphics realized in silkscreen, in this context, represent more of a sketch of the concept and a verbal and artistic explanation. However, they are just a part of a larger conceptual work that has a performative character. The performative aspect that has been realized by the participants of the colony Mariana Basso, Irena Kukrić, Julian Hespenheide, Luiz Zanotello and Bojana Petković corresponds with the dynamics of the processes found in nature. Artists and designers are exploring the principles of the physical world, recognizing the cycles, natural phenomenon and, in this setting, build their artistic installations that deal with the relations between humans and nature outside of a representational field. Still this relationship is understood with an established conscious of the artificiality of our idea of nature, weather scientific or artistic which is indicated in the vary title of the exhibition (Un)natural encounters.
The specificity of the encounter of the individual and nature in this case is contextualized within the region of Prolom Banja with its characteristics and its geographical location, culture, local history and myths that are interwoven in the works of the participants of the colony. In this way Mariana Basso, inspired by the old tales of ghostly entities in nature in Prolom Banja creates The SalTale Maker, a mechanism that generates a new kind of salt out of two differently based healing waters, while Bojana Petković with her work titled Sound of Memory constructs a machine – installation out of a waterproof contact microphone (hydrophone), a speaker and small servo motors, evoking the sound of the Prolom river that flows through the residential house the colony takes place in. The large flow of modern technologies into the natural surroundings was taken into account as well when creating the works. Julian Hespenheide through his work Viserosion deals with the pollution of nature by the digital technologies through signals or waves, creating the machine that explores the process of erosion, while Luiz Zanotello in his videos and installation titled The Deamon and Other Discrete Pieces, is concerned with the natural material that is the core of the contemporary technology: copper. Irena Kukrić, with her work titled Staging nature reflects on the experience of artistic creation in a natural environment, the questions of performativity in art and nature, as well as the status that the works created at the colony have once they are placed in a gallery space as objects: Their movement in the gallery space brings out nostalgic nature of the objects as they seem to go on with the repetition even though the play has ended.(1)
(1) taken from the artistic statement of Irena Kukrić, from the work Staging nature

Text: Maida Gruden

*Translation: Irena Kukrić

Photos: Julian Hespenheide