upgrade-berlin

Wednesday, May 9th 2007 @ Trampoline

Rungestrasse 20
10179 Berlin / Germany
http://www.trampoline-berlin.de/

The Upgrade! meeting at Trampoline has been very special, as we brought people together who did not know each other until then: We were just curious to find out what would happen when we invite two media artists, two curators, a sound artist and the Trampoline team, which were wonderful hosts of our gathering.
And it turned out to be just great: we had a highly interesting conversation about media art.
I will try to give you some impressions about what has been said.

First of all, I want to introduce Anette Schäfer and Miles Chalcraft, who founded Trampoline in 1997. They are having their 10th anniversary this year, like many other media art organisations all over the world.
Trampoline began life in 1997 as Nottingham ’s first ever platform event for new media art. In 2001, founders Anette Schäfer and Miles Chalcraft moved to Berlin and expanded Trampoline to Germany . Co-founder Gareth Howell continued Trampoline Nottingham throughout 2001 and 2002. Since then Trampoline has been left in the capable hands of a series of guest curators including the Nottingham art based collective REACTOR and Emma Lewis.
Trampoline Berlin / Nottingham launched the Radiator New Media Festival www.radiator-festival.org in 2000. At this moment, Anette and Miles are preparing the 4th Radiator Festival, coming up in November 2007 in Nottingham. This festival and symposium will feature a broad array of media artworks, among them a commissioned piece by Heath Bunting, called the Status Project. http://radiator-festival.org/content/news.php?id_artist=59

In 2006, Trampoline organised the FIRST PLAY BERLIN-Festival at HAU Berlin. http://www.trampoline-berlin.de/index.php?page=&docId=2
Here is how Trampoline describes the FIRST PLAY festival in their own words: “Giving media art a human interface, FIRST PLAY BERLIN explores audience interaction beyond a mouse-click with performers who use new technology for their art. With often game-like structures, these works make the viewer into a player and offer a perspective onto our everyday world outside of the mundane. Leaving the stage back at the theatre, they make use of locative media such as mobile phones, PDAs and location aware devices which enable them to get out onto the streets, embedding the work into the real, physical urban environment while simultaneously connecting to remote places and virtual spaces via the networks our cities are pervaded by.”

During our Upgrade! gathering we also touched upon these subjects. For example, we had a discussion about the role of the audience in live media performances. Miles pointed out that festivals like FIRST PLAY enable a shift of paradigms in terms of how the audience is involved in performances. The Trampoline team sees new forms of narratives, where the audience and the performers are able to interact much more, even without being in the same space. They see the traditional notions of ‘audience’ and ‘performer’ just about to dissolve.

Trampoline started with interesting streaming events as early as in 1997. They basically streamed over two telephone lines, which produced an interesting mix of pixelated images - with surprising good sound though. They showed us some of their very first streaming projects and we were amazed of the aesthetics they had sometimes, like artworks by Gerhard Richter.

These days they are pushing much more the locative media, as these interfaces allow for news forms of being free from a particular venue. Furthermore, the audience is also free from a venue and is able to roam a city for instance while they are actually being part of an interactive performance.

What’s the curatorial agenda of Trampoline?
Anette: I would say, our speciality, which we grew into over the course of the last ten years, is the overlap of media art and performance. We call that live media art now. It seems that this is increasingly becoming a new category of the international art world, as more and more media art festivals include performances these days.
As an example, Anette mentioned a piece they showed at the FIRST PLAY festival: Canadian artist Michelle Teran invited the audience on a CCTV tour of Berlin streets sourcing surveillance footage with her mobile video scanner. Revealing hidden layers and forbidden fragments, she pieced together unseen stories from invisible media all around us. All this has a lot to do with new technology and media but the work is presented in a performative way.

Where do you see yourselves in 10 years?
Miles: In the future, I would much more like to be a producer of one big single piece rather than commissioning many small-scale works. This would allow us to explore things a bit more in-depth and work longer with an artist. Also, I hope that we will manage to stabilize our organisation between two countries - which is quite a challenging thing to do.

Anette: What I definitely would like to see in the future is being networked in a better way. This seems to start already now with the Radiator festival for example. We don’t want to be the only ones who push that heavy wagon of a festival every two years. We would appreciate a lot to collaborate with other organisations, so that everybody can bring something into it. I want to work with many different people and get inspired by them.

Work is always selected for Trampoline from an open call for submissions.

Please find more information here:

http://www.trampoline-berlin.de

http://www.trampoline.org.uk

http://www.radiator-festival.org

Many thanks to Anette Schäfer and Miles Chalcraft, our hosts, Melanie Zagrean and Pierre Wolter from Gallery Art Claims Impulse, Wolfgang Kemper, Blaise Bourgeois, Chico Mello.

Ela Kagel, Upgrade! Berlin