A TOTAL INSTALLATION OF SOUND AND VIDEO ART BY ANDERS WEBERG
IN THE WHITE FACTORY AT NØRREBRO

JUNE 3-7 2015

Swedish artist Anders Weberg (b. 1968 in Landskrona), who lives in the small town of Kölleröd in the south of Sweden, works with video, photography, sound, new media and installation art. He particularly works around issues of identity construction in a contemporary context in a mix of genres and forms of expression.

HERE ALL ALONE is the most comprehensive solo installation by the artist to date and his first in Copenhagen. In this ambitious total installation of sound and video art we recognize Weberg’s characteristic site-specific video exploration of urban textures and layers of meaning. Through the mediating optics of the mobile device, which increasingly reprograms our experience of the world, the artist brings the audience on an aesthetic journey behind the urban surface of the factory and underneath the emotional skin of our condition where we experience an uncanny confrontation with anxiety, fear and alienation.

Weberg has exhibited at numerous galleries, museums and biennials, among these Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Brazil, Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Beijing Contemporary Art Centre. His work has also been exhibited significant international art film festivals, among these File Brazil in Sao Paulo, Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo, SONAR in Barcelona, and European Media Arts Festival in Osnabrück. Since 2013 he has been working on the 720 hour long video work Ambiance, which will premier as the longest art film ever in 2020.

www.recycled.se

The ambient installation of sound and video art in the white factory at Nørrebro finds its grounding in a current condition: A time of growing alienation, social exclusion, insecurity and rising fear of anyone other. A reality in which recent violent events have enhanced the actuality of a fear-focused world. We find ourselves here, in the abandoned enzymes factory, confronted with the feeling of being in an emotionally desolated world — all alone.

Inside the factory, a fragment of the city is transitioned from the world of the concrete, productive and real into the realm of the fictional. The artist Anders Weberg invites us to explore the factory through various aesthetic entry points that confront the dystopian consequences of a fear-focused reality. He takes us behind the material surface of the factory and underneath an emotional skin of our cultural condition. Here, we are confronted with anxiety, fear and alienation, however not without hope that these emotional conditions can be cured. The aura of a factory once producing medicine for curing us physically and psychically mirrors a potentially curative emotional response to our uncanny status quo, which we are invited to explore while immersed in the responsive audiovisual installations.

The exhibition raises the overall question: How do we deal with being actors in a culture of decaying trust and increasing alienation?

Tanya Toft, curator

1. Abandon the screen.

Throughout the history of the moving image, the screen has set the medial format of representation as an ideological instrument, to be reflected upon through strategies of remediation and hypermediation. It has encapsulated the critical potential of the moving image and directed perceptual structures of viewing and experiencing – for example via the screen of the monitor, the projected image, the LED screen, the laptop or the mobile phone. The screen cannot condition the work, nor how the audience is led to experience the work.

2. Let the artwork be a passage.

For decades, video art has relied on intention, illustration and exemplification. Art has set forth to study and respond to the world as we know it, reproducing what is already there in the world, all while providing a scene for experiencing something emotional, speculative or enlightening – individually or as a collective. The work should avoid being presented to be scanned by the eye or subject to a passive gaze, but rather be a passage that encourages awareness and behavior.

3. Make the audience dis-identify with the site.

We understand a place by the things, issues, cultures and people that we identify with it. When we identify with this understanding, we are also delimited to the order, politics and dominance of that identification. To “dis-identify” is to reject one identifiable understanding of a place. The work must situate itself both within and against the various discourses that are called up when the place is “identified”, and it must do so on various levels of “site” – not just understood as the space and time of the physical location of the installation, but also a multi-leveled virtual space, relational to a complex world.

4. Challenge the active audience.

An audience is never passive, but it has been treated as such in humanist discourse in which the passive act of viewing the image has been considered separate from the active capacity to act in lived reality. In artistic discourse today, we may find active participation a condition rather than an option for aesthetic experience, while still navigating between the “don’t touch” convention of the traditional exhibition and the “push the button” expectation associated with interactive art. The artwork should avoid both. It must reconfigure the senses of the audience and stimulate new modes of audience behavior.

5. Inclusion.

The Curators role is to make the artwork accessible for everyone. Since it’s in a space for the public, no one should be excluded. The non-average exhibition goer should have the highest priority.

The old factory spaces hosting the exhibition, which until 2007 were in use for producing enzymes, belong to what is referred to as ‘Arne Jacobsen’s White Factory’. This was initially built in 1935 at the corner of Nordre Fasanvej and Hillerødgade in an industrial interpretation of functionalism. White facades were also chosen for the expansion of the factory in 1967-69, following the stylistic modern and stringent thesis of Arne Jacobsen.

June 12, 2015
CRITICAL AESTHETICS in Urban Digital Art

After decades critically oriented towards the screen and changing modes of expanded cinema, aesthetic practices with moving image and digital art have developed in a contested domain of public art. In an urban context continuously restructured through the influence of new technologies, how do we practice, negotiate and redefine “critical aesthetics” in urban digital art?

Following the exhibition and curatorial research project HERE ALL ALONE, the symposium continues a conversation on curatorial concerns, critical discourses and the urgent potential of urban digital art.

Festsalen på Kunstakademiet
Kongens Nytorv 1
1050 København

PROGRAM

9:00-12:30 / Critical Curating: Urban Digital Art
Student presentations by Zahra Al Ziheiri, Nina Cramer, Aaron Dishy, Levi Easterbrooks, Helene Gamst, Camilla Jaller, Noémie le Bouder, Pedro Filipe da Silveira, and Mikkel Stig Rørbo.

13:30-16:00 / Talks & panel

Maurice Benayoun, Artist & Curator of Open Sky Gallery, Hong Kong
Anders Weberg, Artist
Kassandra Wellendorf, Assistant Professor at Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies, Copenhagen University

/ moderated by Tanya Toft, Curator and Ph.d. Fellow at Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies, Copenhagen University

BIOS

Maurice Benayoun is a French pioneer in new-media art and theory based in Paris and Hong Kong. His works have been exhibited globally and employ video, immersive virtual reality, the Web, wireless technology, performance, large-scale urban art installations and interactive exhibitions. Benayoun will discuss his work as an artist and curator at the Open Sky Gallery in Hong Kong, the world’s largest LED gallery in black and white on the facade of the ICC Tower, in addition to concerns surrounding new media art in the contemporary globalized world.
www.benayoun.com/opensky/open-sky-gallery/

Kassandra Wellendorf is a Teaching Assistant Professor at Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies, Copenhagen University, and a film and media artist specialized in interactive media art and performance. In her academic research she investigates negotiations of visibility and invisibility in public spaces by the use of video, mobile technology, performance, augmented reality and different forms of participatory art. Wellendorf will discuss her works, curatorial concerns and the potential of urban digital art for community building in Copenhagen in the project INSIDE OUT 2400 from 2013.

Anders Weberg is a Swedish artist and filmmaker who has just embarked on his first solo-exhibition in Denmark with the total installation Here All Alone. The exhibition will showcase his continued exploration into audio-visual, site-specific explorations of urban textures and layers of meaning through his mobile phone. Weberg will share reflections on his recent exhibition and about some of the work and critical concerns that went into producing this.
www.recycled.se/

HERE ALL ALONE is a total installation of sound and video art by Swedish artist Anders Weberg. It takes up the entire 2000m2 area of ‘the white factory’ at Nørrebro, what used to be an enzymes factory but is now closed down.

The installation unfolds through large-scale audio and sound installations, and other visible and invisible installations involving surveillance cameras, push notifications and “old” media devices. Walking through the factory, the audience will experience various intuitive, embodied encounters with the installations that mirror how we engage with the world in a mediated reality increasingly conditioned by surveillance, feedback from invisible computing and overlays of virtual realities.

Here All Alone is curated by Tanya Toft.

Thank you to the students of the graduate course Critical Curating: Urban Digital Art at Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies, Copenhagen University for research and curatorial assistance:

Zahra Al Ziheiri
Nina Cramer
Aaron Dishy
Levi Easterbrooks
Helene Gamst
Camilla Jaller
Noémie le Bouder
Mikkel Stig Rørbo
and Pedro Filipe da Silveira.

PRODUCTION

Software artist duo: NULEINN, Rine Rodin & Magga Ploder.
Installation web developer: Michael Hansen
Audiowalk: Benedicte Gui de Thurah Huang
Technical production: Jorma Saarikko
Graphic design: Josephine Jensen
Communications assistant: Emily Jacobi

The white factory is made available for this exhibition through collaboration with GivRum, which will present the exhibition project in the same space at the City Link Conference, October 30, 2015.

ABOUT

The total installation is developed on the basis of an academic research project at Copenhagen University in the graduate course Critical Curating: Urban Digital Art. Five obstructions were formulated as critical premises for the becoming of the exhibition, based on research into aesthetic and curatorial discourses that have informed the domain of urban digital art since the 1960s.

The research project is organized by Tanya Toft, Ph.d. Fellow at Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies, Copenhagen University, and conducted by the students of the graduate course Critical Curating: Urban Digital Art in spring 2015:

Zahra Al Ziheiri, Nina Cramer, Aaron Dishy, Levi Easterbrooks, Helene Gamst, Camilla Jaller, Noémie le Bouder, Pedro Filipe da Silveira, and Mikkel Stig Rørbo.

METHODOLOGY

The curatorial research project emerged from the underlying question: What are the real challenges and roles of contemporary art – in particular art that is conditioned by the emergence of digital technologies?

Our aim was to develop an exhibition project based on theoretical experimentation. Our research departed not from a problem but from an emerging new territory of practice, an observation of a particular enthusiasm in the art world and its related territories: the territory of urban digital art. This territory, phenomena or discourse is yet without a developed scholarly framework. We would explore what is not yet an established subject in the world, an expanded discourse and exhibition scheme for curating digital art and the digitally based moving image for public space. In particular, we would consider new modes of audience engagement that might reflect our engagement with material and virtual worlds in a reality constantly changing due to technological developments.

We wanted to “assess a different mode of inhabitation,” as Irit Rogoff proposes, and design this project to pursue something else than the usual way/practice. This required that we “know” what the usual way/practice is: We considered the historical precedents, the politics and aesthetics, the accessibility and flexibility, the built-in ideologies and epistemologies of the artistic “material” of digitally produced art, video and sound, and its position in relation to artistic discourse and urban spatial discourses and matters.

As curatorial researchers we situated ourselves in the site of art and curatorial practice as a method for knowledge production. Rather than setting up limitations or criteria, we shaped our methods through the phenomena we investigated. Beyond a theoretical grounding in the discussion of some of the writings that have been influential to the emergence of urban digital art, including Simmel, Benjamin, Bishop, Bourriaud, Rancière, Graham & Cook, Broeckmann, Jay, Kwon, Schreuder, Manovich, McQuire, O’Neill and Weibel, we framed our research context by looking at the relational departures for a large number of significant examples of expanded cinema and urban digital art. We studied these from the anchor points of their visual and medial idioms, artistic premise, site and urban context, audience, and the curatorial position, methodology and ethics reflected in their mode of exhibition. From these examples we synthesized some of the influential, critical and significant orientations and discourses that have shaped a territory of practice for producing and curating digitally based art forms in the urban domain.

We strived to “push” the conceptualization of the practical exhibition we were going to produce, beyond conventional modes of practice – and push our understanding of its role as a phenomenon through which we may be offered a new way of seeing or apprehending a new aspect of our world. Therefore we formulated five obstructions, based on our research in the genealogy of expanded cinema and urban digital art, and developed specifically for our concrete exhibition project. One of these obstructions, number five, is the artist Anders Weberg’s challenge to us as curators.

Among the topics of our discussions were how the total installation would be “here” in space and time – in the factory, in Copenhagen, in our modes of subjectivity in 2015; how it would make certain experiences possible while foreclosing others; how it would propose and embody a certain order, a certain model for perception, and how it might reconfigure the senses.

HERE ALL ALONE is the result of curatorial research in close collaboration with the artist Anders Weberg in open dialogue and constant bouncing between theory, practicality, and critical inquiry.

Course description
Curriculum

Abandon the screen.

Throughout the history of the moving image, the screen has set the medial format of representation as an ideological instrument, to be reflected upon through strategies of remediation and hypermediation. It has encapsulated the critical potential of the moving image and directed perceptual structures of viewing and experiencing – for example via the screen of the monitor, the projected image, the LED screen, the laptop or the mobile phone. The screen cannot condition the work, nor how the audience is led to experience the work.

Analysis
The screen has long been the dominant format for engagement with media-­based art in public space. Building on and challenging avant-­garde approaches to the screen, a myriad of curatorial and artistic conventions have emerged at the intersection of architecture, digital art, and society. Following early experimentation with video art in the 1960s, endeavors to extend film beyond the white cube of the fine art exhibition and the black box of cinema developed in multiple directions. One of these is the movement of expanded cinema that is associated with immaterial and performative video art. Another advanced in the public realm, often making use of electronic displays in urban architecture or projections that imitate the visual idiom of the screen.

Since the emergence of LED screens as ubiquitous components of the visual ecology of many contemporary cities in the 1990s, these have provided a platform for digital art -­ both as a medium and as a point of critical departure. The artistic use of urban LED screens often centers on a medium-­specific critique of the screen as the privileged venue for one-­way mass communication through the interventionist strategies of remediation and hypermediation. This is associated with the visual strategy of “perfect moments” that seek to make the spectator aware of processes of signification in regard to site and urban context by focusing on the content of the visual. In recent years, technological advancement has enabled new modes of screen-­based interactivity and a break with the rectangular frame.

However, the screen’s definitional power over perceptual structures continues to prevent the attainment of new ways of perceiving. Therefore, instead of revealing ideological power structures associated with the screen there should be an exploration of aesthetics beyond the screened image that mirrors the ways human experience is affected by the hypermediation of lived reality. This must consider how moving image artworks not bound to the screen can activate audiences’ awareness of, and participation in, processes of signification.

Let the artwork be a passage.

For decades, video art has relied on intention, illustration and exemplification, which are reproducing what is already there in the world. Art has set forth to study and respond to the world as we know it and provided a scene for experiencing something emotional, speculative or enlightening – individually or as a collective. The work should avoid being presented to be scanned by the eye, but rather be a passage that encourages awareness and behavior, while constructing something human, pointing towards an active change in the world.

Analysis
In order to escape the alienation arising from spectacular mediations characteristic of increasingly digitalized urban spaces, artworks should serve as a passage that engages the viewer in dialogue, rather than promoting a distanced contemplation. Work that functions as a passage produces awareness of the structures of the artwork, the viewing process, and related spaces, simultaneously creating new modes of behavior that reflect this awareness.

Though this logic is taken to validate work that frequently physicalizes these relations through interactive/participative methods, artworks may function as a passage through other immersive strategies – physical or not – such as open narratives or medial interplay that expose the underlying discourses and the extended spatiality of the artwork, engaging the viewer in the production of meaning. This can be observed in work such as Adrian Piper’s “Cornered” (1988) which confronts the audience with racialized realities that they may not be aware of, yet are complicit in. A new mode of audience behavior is produced spatially (rather than discursively) in Pipilotti Rist’s “Pour Your Body Out” (2008): scale, perspective, and comfortability are used to produce an immersive environment, in which the viewers can inhabit the work.

Both of theses modes of engagement mark attempts for the work to serve as a passage for the viewer. Acting as both a discursive and a spatial passage, the artwork should orient the spectator in these multiplicities of meaning with their social/aesthetic implications, their covert economic processes, and their relational structures, all while inviting him/her to take a part in their transformation.

Make the audience dis-identify with the site.

We understand a place by the things, issues, cultures and people that we identify with it. When we identify with this understanding, we are also delimited to the order, politics and dominance of that identification. To dis-identify is to reject one identifiable understanding of a place. The work must situate itself both within and against the various discourses that are called when the place is “identified”, and it must do so on various levels of “site” – not just understood as the space and time of the physical location of the installation, but also a multi-leveled virtual space, relational to a complex world.

Analysis
A dis-identification with the site for the art-viewing audience seeking to complicate a uncritical complicity in viewing should begin to explore of site-specificity and place-making through the logic of in-betweenness . To complicate dominant narratives on the understanding of specific sites, a binary logic that considers the site as either a place or non-place should be foregone, opting instead for the transitional position between these conceptions. It is in this liminal condition that counter-identifications to familiar narratives of the city are nurtured.

Significantly, spatial and psycho-social relationships between the city’s inhabitants characterized by exclusion can be interrupted through exaggerated isolation and detachment. In other words, if relational aesthetics requires unified subjects in projects designed to heighten social harmony, exhibitions seeking a dis-identification with the site are more in line with a relational antagonism that polemically taps into conflicts and divisions in urban subjectivities.

The strategy of estrangement may also be deployed at the level of interactivity so that typically static content within an installation escapes the viewer due to its movement in the space. Thus, the audience is confronted with a bodily ‘thereness’ that is never quite fulfilled. They are only given access to half the tools required to fully insert themselves into a mutually experienced whole. In this way an exhibition can illustrate an in-betweenness experienced through the individual’s own physicality while co-opting the (il)logics of alienation and estrangement often aimed more exclusively at the collective and applies them to the frames of the site, individual, relational, and interactive mediality.

Challenge the active audience.

An audience is never passive, but it has been treated as such in humanist discourse in which the passive act of viewing the image has been considered separate from the active capacity to act in lived reality. In artistic discourse today, we may find active participation a condition rather than an option for aesthetic experience, while still navigating between the “don’t touch” convention of the traditional exhibition and the “push the button” expectation associated with interactive art. The artwork should avoid both. It must reconfigure the senses of the audience and stimulate new modes of audience behavior.

Analysis
The participation of audiences of urban digital art negotiates concerns within the confines of the art world as well as outside it, with respect to the pre-existing conditions of urban public space. Within the art-specific discourse, participation as a situation of scopic negotiation and the “don’t touch” convention of the traditional exhibition are assessed and frequently subverted. The role of the digital in public space and its relation to art is questioned through modes of participation centered around issues of art as a participative system, techno-cultural behavior, and the “push the button” expectation associated with interactive art.

Preceding the prevalence of digital interactivity, artists attempting to make apparent the viewer’s implication in the creation of signification made these relations visible through early participative methods. Dan Graham’s “Time-Delay Room” (1974) and Bruce Nauman’s “Live-Taped Video Corridor” (1970) both serve to expose the role of the viewer within the art space and the artwork itself, thus revealing previously hidden relations through a manipulation of video to participatory ends.

Currently, active participation may appear as a condition rather than an option for aesthetic experience. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s “Vectorial Elevation” (1999) is exemplary of the manifestation of this turn in urban digital art. It physicalizes online participation, hinting towards the democratic potential in less politically restrictive digital spaces and attempts to reconcile the alienation of the late capitalist subject through involvement in the process of art making and viewing. However, it is necessary to remain critical of such modes of participatory art to avoid a mere illusion of inclusion and political power, as well as the spectacularization of urban public art.

Inclusion.

The Curators role is to make the artwork accessible for everyone. Since it’s in a space for the public, no one should be excluded. The non-average exhibition goer should have the highest priority.

Analysis
Contemporary Danish society is being confronted with a dual problematic regarding both growing internal diversity and the forced standardization of the lifestyles and cultures that exist in Denmark. It is vital to ensure that the wealth of cultural and linguistic expression held within Danish borders does not dissolve under the hegemony of political and economic disputes and dominant cultural models. To combat this, as is suggested by Nicolas Bourriaud, an altermodernity must be constructed. Public space can no longer be reduced to a cultural and social reality constricted by western formats. Complicity with colonialism and Eurocentrism strangles the art process and its ability to create a space of equality and mutually beneficial experience. In order to achieve this equality, public art must produce a simultaneously interactive and inclusive platform for productive intercultural dialogue (Simona Bodo). This inclusion will take shape in a multifaceted ethical mode of linguistic and cultural translation. In the case of new communities in Copenhagen, cultural languages are a means of communication. They are a potential link, allowing for equality in the comprehension of public spaces, while opening up participative roles within the public space and providing each individual with access to interact with the exhibited public digital art.

Among many interesting examples on the website www.digitalmeetscuture.net we have found one suitable example to the above, which is “Mind mirror”, a digital art installation at the Copenhagen re-new 2013 art Festival. ”Mind mirror’ is a successful example on digital art that made such inclusion possible. Not only did the audience interact clearly with the art object, but they were also provided with an opportunity to reflect on their experience of stress and the consequent clouding of their thought. Since exhibiting inclusive digital art on a large scale in public requires a consideration of various discourses on inclusion and art, looking to or drawing inspiration from simplified digital art works like this one might be very effective.