hello andreas,
yes, in the light of war the intended irony becomes cynical.
its quite a while since i decided for the title (and stuck with it).
though back then there were wars going on as well, but maybe not new
enough to be served 24/7 like the latest conflict.
sometimes awareness slips away and painfully kicks in again.
about politics: the political aspects of the tools and media are part of
the workshop. its simply not possible to do such a workshop without
the political context.
regards
erich
---------------------
http://randomseed.org
On Tue, 8 Aug 2006, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
hi erich,
i fail to see the irony in your title and find it, in fact, rather cynical,
because i cannot believe that you are that naive.
the 'artistic' tools that this workshop will deal with are the very
communication tools that, at this very moment, armies and mercenaries in
iraq, lebanon, chechnya, afghanistan and elsewhere, in cities, jungles and
deserts are using in their military business. not to speak of all different
types of organised crimes, real piracy, etc.
this is not an argument about how artists should be aware of the economic,
military, political or whatever context from which the technologies they use
derive. it is an argument about the distastefulness of calling such a
workshop that pretends to be utterly unpolitical 'mobile troops', esp. at a
time when everyone is watching mobile troops on NTV, CNN, Phoenix, or
whatever channel you are following the current wars on. - personally, i also
think that you cannot escape from these military usages in artistic
'locative' work, so whenever you switch on you GPS 'for fun' today, you
already enter, let's say, southern lebanon. (there are gps applications that
are more utilitarian, of course, but we are talking about artistic
experimentation in the digital age, aren't we?) but then that might be
pushing it a bit.
regards,
-a
"Mobile troops" ironically points to the fact that we tend to
increasingly equip us with all kinds of necessary interfaces
for surviving the urban jungle. The electronic car key is as
important as mobile phone and credit card. Mobile troops
is a workshop about media art which is mobile,
(possibly) networked, and experimenting with new ideas
and artistic concepts.
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