// Sunday November 22, 2009
// General Public, Schönhauser Allee 167c, 10435 Berlin
// Public Transport: U2 U-BHF Senefelderplatz
// Entrance free
// organized by DISK/CTM
17:00 Lecture
THE TRICKY LIAISON OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC (NEUE MUSIK) AND EXPERIMENTAL POP
by Dahlia Borsche (DE)
The grey zone between Contemporary Music and experimental Pop is an ideological minefield, on which both sides are armed to the teeth with prejudice and defensive attitudes and yet, for quite some time already, mutual exchange in terms of music and content has been fruitful and fun. This on-off love-hate relationship is a longstanding tradition of knee-jerk responses that put more ingenuous rapprochement on hold. But, with a little insight into the roots of these traditions, one can not only dislodge tired prejudice and diminish mistrust but also open the door to more profitable forms of cooperation, with which the grey zone could at last leave its shadowy existence behind.
18:30 Panel Discussion
SOUND AND MEDIA IN BERLIN
With Honor Harger (guest curator transmediale, UK), Robert Henke (Musician/artist/developer, DE, requested), Farahnaz Hatam (NK, Berlin), Gregor Hotz (Ausland, DE), Jan Rohlf (DISK/CTM, DE) and others.
Chaired by: Pit Schultz (Herbstradio, DE)
When people talk about 'media arts', they not infrequently mean music and artistic work with sounds. Yet what exactly is this 'music with media'? Why does it play such a major role in media arts discourse? Where does it take place? Why is never really named as such? Are the available terminologies, venues and initiatives adequate?
20:00 Screening
COLORFIELD VARIATIONS
2009, 80 min.
Colorfield Variations is a collection of audio/visual works reinterpreting the Color Field movement by an international array of critically acclaimed sound and new media artists and assembled by curator and sound artist Richard Chartier.
Color Field painting, an abstract style that emerged as a new direction in American painting in the 1950s following Abstract Expressionism, is characterized by canvases painted primarily with stripes, washes and fields of solid color. An
alternate but less frequently encountered term for this style is chromatic abstraction. As the first critically acclaimed art movement to originate in the United States’s capital, the Washington Color School was key to the larger Color Field movement. As a reaction to the emotional energy and gestural surfaces of Abstract Expressionists, the Color Field artists broke away from the individual mark in favor of pure color itself becoming the main content of the work. By breaking painting down to its formal and fundamental elements, the Color Field artists created pure, simplified, large-format, color-dominated fields on often monumental scale utilizing the full psychological power of color. Artists such as Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Larry Poons, Gene Davis, Jules Olitski, and others eliminated recognizable imagery from their canvas and presented abstraction as an end in itself with each work being a cohesive image. The Color Field movement can be seen as a precursor to the themes and aesthetics of the subsequent Minimalist movement.
With Works by: Steve Roden (US), Alan Callander (US), Frank Bretschneider (DE), Stephan Mathieu (DE), Sue Costabile (US) + Beequeen (NL), Tina Frank + General Magic (AT), Bas Van Koolwijk (NL), Chris Carter + Cosey Fanni Tutti (UK), Ryoichi Kurokawa (JP), Sawako (JP), E. Domnitch + D. Gelfand (RU/US), Ernest Edmonds (AU) + Mark Fell (UK).
