Open Workshop / Discussion
At Foyer Hub 1

We will present a brief overview of the concept of “toxic enclosures”, citing examples from contemporary history in which invisible linkages between sites and objects of contamination have succeeded in creating a “toxic commons”.

The growth of these areas throughout the world has formed a porous barrier through which people may pass, but not without taking a bit of contamination with them as it penetrates their corporeal encasement, thus shortening life expectancy (while potentially enriching the quality of their lives). It is the ultimate toll for crossing a barrier.

Ancient Greek mystery cults and technology will be paralleled to contemporary religious and industrial practice. The long lineage of Gods and mortals from antiquity to present will be explored, tracing chthonic and often mirroring personas such as Plouto (Underworld) and Ploutos (Wealth) or Demeter (de-meter / mother earth) and her daughter Persephone (pherein-phonon / to bring death). Participants will explore (hands-on) some of the benefits and ill effects of confrontations between inactivity/radioactivity, mortality/divinity, remedy/poison.

Tales of toxicity will be interwoven with mythology and possible ancient anti-solutions which are now being used to combat the toxicity and will influence our future civilisations.

The Enclosures of New Athens workshop, which took place in November 2014, illuminated the subsumptuous tunnels of exploration down which we’ll journey in the relative safety of our TBM (tunnel boring machine) during this session.

Requirements: Bring your geiger counters.

With Jeffrey Andreoni and James Lane

Jeffrey Andreoni: At the age of three Jeffrey Andreoni received his first memory. He was being chased. He saw it was his brother chasing him. He jumped under a table for safety but hit his eye on the leg of the table because he was no longer small enough to slide gracefully under it as he had at an earlier age. It was his birthday. Everyone at the party stared in horror as the birthday boy got up crying from under the table with a massive black eye. He blew out the candles in tears.

James Lane: James Lane is a Greek-born visual artist based in Athens, Greece currently utilizing transmedia, photography, video and performance. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions including the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece, Freud’s Dreams Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, ACG Gallery at the American College of Greece, DESTE Foundation, Athens, Greece, Megaron Music Hall Athens, Beton7, Athens, Greece, Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center, Athens, Greece. At the core of the artist’s interests is the investigation of new strategies to draw parallels between current and past territories, fusing the mundane to the unearthly or the trivial to the orphic.

unMonastery, a place-based social innovation, addresses the interlinked needs of empty space, unemployment and depleting social services by embedding committed, skilled individuals within communities that could benefit from their presence. unMonastery is a non-profit project that aims to challenge existing dependency chains and economic fictions, developed in collaboration with EdgeRyders, a distributed think-tank wielding collective intelligence.

At transmediale:
Helen Kaplinsky, Maurice Carlin, Jay Springett, Vinay Gupta, Arthur Doohan, Noel Hatch, Mathew Trivett, Elina Makri, James Lane, Bembo Davies, Ben Vickers, elf Pavlik, Dorotea Mar, James Lewis, Juliana Maria van Hemelryck, Katalin Hausel, Kei Kreutler, Lauren Lapidge, Lucia Caistor, Luisa Lapacciana, Maria Byck, Muhammad Khaleel Jaffer, Nadia EL-Imam, Brian Degger, Jeff Andreoni, Noemi Salantiu, Anna Zett, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Annika Kuhlmann, Ola Moller

> unmonastery.org/transmediale/
> unmonastery.org/bios

(Please note that this is an adults only event. Visitors must be 18 years or older to attend.)

The Pirate Cinema
The hidden activity and geography of real-time peer-to-peer file sharing via BitTorrent is revealed in The Pirate Cinema, a live performance by Nicolas Maigret and Brendan Howell. In their monitoring room, omnipresent telecommunications surveillance gains a global face, as the artists plunder the core of restless activity online, revealing how visual media is consumed and disseminated across the globe. Each act of this live work produces an arbitrary mash-up of the BitTorrent files being exchanged, in real time, in a specific media category, including music, audio books, movies, porn, documentaries, video games and more. These fragmentary contents in transit are browsed by the artist, transforming BitTorrent network users (unknown to them) into contributors to the audio-visual composition that is The Pirate Cinema.
Nicolas Maigret (Conception and live performance) & Brendan Howell (Software development and voice over)
The Pirate Cinema performance at transmediale 2015 is presented in parallel to a series of Pirate Cinema events commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices (uk), Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art (si) and Kunsthal Aarhus (dk).
> thepiratecinema.com
> aksioma.org/pirate.cinema

Citation City
A world premiere of the new audovisual performance of renowned collage artist People Like Us (Vicki Bennett). The project is a further development of the artist’s database approach to cinema, deconstructing cinematic clichés and representations into unique associative and playful narratives. Citation City sources, collage and edits 300 major feature films where content is either filmed or set in London – creating a story within a story, of the film world, living its life, through extraordinary times of change, to see what happens when these multiple narratives are combined… what will the story tell us that one story alone could never tell?

Inspired by The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, this audiovisual performance is created from 1000s of clippings of text and visual media, collaged using a system of “convolutes”, collated around subjects of key motifs, historical figures, social types, cultural objects from the time. By gathering and assembling such groups of similar yet unrelated, he revealed a hidden, magical encyclopaedia of affinities, a massive and labyrinthine architecture of a collective dream city. In the live performance a series of story lines (convolutes) sit side by side with a soundtrack sourced both from the movie content, as well as new sample compositions thematically related to the visual content.
> http://peoplelikeus.org/citationcity

Nicolas Maigret (fr)

The artist Nicolas Maigret exposes the internal workings of media, through a reflection on their errors, dysfunctions, limitations or failure thresholds. As a curator, he initiated the disnovation.net research, a critique of the innovation propaganda. After completing studies in intermedia art, Maigret joined the LocusSonus lab in France, where he explored networks as a creative tool. He teaches at Parsons Paris and co-founded the Art of Failure collective in 2006.

Presentation / Discussion
At Foyer Hub 3

Would a collective “Glossary of Subsumption” be a meaningful way for registering enclosures and subsumptions in our hypermodern present? The originally marxist term of (real) subsumption is currently circulating anew as it allows for descriptions of capitalist power and ‚enclosure’ beyond simplistic ideas of coercion, corruption or exploitation. Its idea of capitalism capturing all that is outside existing capitalist valorization and of internalising it by different and historically specific means seems immensely helpful at a time where new post-digital and post-democratic grids of power enclose us anew – and sometimes in new ways. As a term also open to non-marxist semantics – see the notion of ‘subsumption architecture’ describing frameworks for distributed post-cybernetic control – it can prove to be especially helpful when collating different types, formats and layers of power, including current digital re-articulations thereof.

The project will kick off with a presentation under the heading Glossary of Subsumption: Enclosed Athens Disclosed. It will be given by a group of researchers, artists and architects that by now have formed an open-ended working-group. This first assembled in Athens last November during a workshop initiated by Oliver Lerone Schultz as part of New Babylon Revisited, a project by Goethe-Institut Athen. The aim was to trace old and new subsumptions of urban space. The initial concept, their goals and follow-up projects will unfold while outlining the fate of an avatar named Andrea/s, a semi-fictitious figure whose  lifetime is related to fundamental elements of our general metropolitan ‚story‘ of subsumption such as energy, time, sleep, sounds, landscapes, the extended mind, or the ‚public/private bi-polar‘.

These elements will also inform the second event, the Glossary of Subsumption: Collective Edition workshop. Taking into consideration the findings of the first workshop, a new workgroup will cluster those with other existing ideas and keywords and aim to set up some fleeting ‘methodological devices’ set that will capture conceptual noise and enlist circulating issues and terms throughout the festival. Using analog and digital tools, the goal would ultimately be to collectively build a Glossary of Subsumption and reflect on the possibilities, stakes and potential (social) formats of such an endeavour related to social theory building and the ‘knowledge commons’  to mediate different experiences and concepts of enclosure.

The audience is invited to join the workgroup discussions and participate in the overall process.

Athens Enclosure workgroup:  Ismini Epitropou, Maria Trogada, Maria Tzioka, Konstantinos Venis, Anthia Verykiou, Jeff Andreoni, Maria Byck

The ‘Glossary of Subsumption’ was first born in the Post-Media Lab in 2012 and was further developed -as a “Collective Edition”- in the context of the Common Media Lab (Center of Digital Cultures, University of Leuphana).

– Further information for both events, additional activities and the overall trajectory of The Glossary of Subsumption – Collective Edition will be listed at:  http://subsumption.xyz

Workgroup Discussion
At the Foyer Hub 2

These elements will also inform the second event, the Glossary of Subsumption: Collective Edition workshop. Taking into consideration the findings of the first workshop, a new workgroup will cluster those with other existing ideas and keywords. There will also be some fleeting ‘methodological devices’ (like the Hybrid Letterbox) that will capture conceptual noise and enlist circulating issues and terms throughout the festival.

The goal would ultimately be to collectively build a Glossary of Subsumption and reflect on the possibilities, stakes and potential (social) formats of such an endeavour. This is also to ask: what is a social way of constructing theory and the ‘knowledge commons’ – one that mediates different experiences and concepts of enclosure.

The audience is invited to join the workgroup discussions and participate in the overall process.

see also: http://unmonastery.org/transmediale/

Workshop
At Foyer Hub 3