Creative Subversion
Sprawling multimedia fest showcases the best in techno art
By Evan Rail
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
May 5, 2005
What do most contemporary artists do to pay the bills? Tend bar? Weld girders? Wait tables?
"I'm writing data visualization actuaries," says Jason Van Anden, reached at his office in New York. "I'm a professional programmer. And I studied fine arts."
Like many of his contemporaries, Van Anden fuses high-tech and creativity in his life and his art. His work and dozens of similar creations will be on display at Prague's Enter Multimediale, a festival in which the artists' principal tools are not brushes, canvases and oils, but programming languages, touch screens and video games.
The sprawling four-day multimedia extravaganza includes installations, performances, games and conferences at Zizkov's Vitkov Monument, TV Tower and Palac Akropolis, with further events at New Town's French Institute. There will be a total of 74 projects from 20 countries, all of which include technology -- though the varied collection defies easy description.
"It's hard for me to summarize," says Pavel Sedlak of the International Center for Art and New Technologies, one of the festival's organizers. "There is no one word which would be enough."
"Subversion" certainly does not suffice, although many of the works include familiar technologies that have been subverted in some way.
On all four days, the French Institute will show machinima movies, a form of rough-hewn animation created with the "engine" of a video game. In one, I.A. Foot by Vincent Cogne, the ultra-violent Doom was used to make a soccer ("football") game, a significant change for those who remember Doom's zombies, shotguns and chain saws.
"He took the game's artificial intelligence and used it to make the monsters from Doom play football," says Denisa Kera, a professor of new media art and a co-organizer of the festival. "For people who know the original, it's very funny."
Similarly, Enter will present a concert from the Gameboyzz Orchestra, a Polish ensemble that plays music using Nintendo Gameboy devices (Akropolis, Monday, May 9, 9 p.m.).
"We want people to understand that art is connected to contemporary culture," says Kera. "This festival tries to cross the border between the scientific and the purely artistic."
In many of the creations, the line between art, artist and viewer is erased. Over all four days, visitors to the TV Tower can play Van Anden's creation Farklempt!, a computer game in which contestants attempt to control their emotions.
"The game is loosly based on the software I developed for my robots," Van Anden says. "For quite a while I was working on software which would allow probabilistically defined emotional behavior for the robots to act out."
The participatory theme is continued with RGB 2.0, a creation from the Ema Tomatucha project, a group of local artists including Floex, aka Tomas Dvorak. Both a daylong installation and evening concert, RGB 2.0 allows audience members to create sounds by directing the colored beams of special flashlights. (Akropolis, Monday, May 9, 2 p.m.-6 p.m., 7 p.m.)
In addition, panel discussions will address such topics as "Games and Game Modifications: From Art to Political Subversions and Vice-Versa" (Akropolis, Wednesday, May 11, 2:30 p.m.). Many, though not all, are in English.
The festival is meant to remedy the low profile of new media art. Courses in the field are taught at the Fine Arts Academy and at Charles University in Prague, yet few venues here display the works.
"You go to Linz or Berlin and you see all this new art," Kera says. "And then you come back to Prague and all we have is theater. It looks like we live in the 19th century."
Expect a decidedly different look for at least four days. Contingent on permission from aviation authorities, the organizers plan an unusual sight: a triangle of lasers connecting Old Town Square, Vitkov and the TV Tower.
"People will think that aliens landed in Prague, like in Independence Day," Kera says. "It's our independence from traditional culture."