18.07.02 20:30
Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 11
2. Terrassengeschoss
Zugang über den Treppenturm bei McDonalds und Jopp.
Eine Veranstaltung von HIT-IN, Verstärker und Simon Werrett.
Hiding Behind Technology
Let's Play Media ...
Theory . Performance . Video . Music . Drinks
Behind the Curtain
Olaf Arndt "Trojanische Vehikel"
Elle Janssen, Dani Sperling, Margarete Vöhringer "SMS - SOS"
Harun Maye "Switching Adorno. Kulturindustrie auf Knopfdruck"
Birgit Schneider "Camouflage"
Joulia Strauss, Philipp v. Hilgers "Die Heimsuchung des blinden Flecks"
Birk Weiberg "Portrait of Darth Vader as a Fragile Human Being"
Simon Werrett "Hiding behind Technology"
Behind the Music Anne Luft
Behind the Bar Future7
Technology is often hailed as a panacea for the global future. Through smart new
media technologies like the internet, mobile phones, and cable TV we are all communicating
at a rate never seen before, liberated by information and empowered by globally
accessible knowledge. Ever more sophsticated surveillance systems will bring in
new intelligence of threats and curb crime and violence on the streets. In war,
the age of robots will bring an end to human casualties in battle. And medical
and genetic technologies will help us transform our bodies and our selves, doing
away with old identities to reconstruct new cyborg subjectivities. Great. Then
there are those who see behind all this a more sinister conspiracy of machines.
Writers like Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard follow Marx in seeing the new technologies
as an alienated "society of the spectacle". The individual, locked behind
a computer screen, TV, and telephone never surfaces into the social world and
is disempowered just as he or she imagines the opposite. Michel Foucault identified
surveillance with a new distributed system of "carceral" power, a society
founded on the techniques of the prison. Even business pundits fear that the alienation
from human contact and community that new technology can bring might damage profits
- we are all "hiding behind technology" and losing our real ability
to communicate.
Whether or not technology is a panacea or a pandora's box is of less interest to a third approach to technology which this evening will address. For many, the fuss is exaggerated and not that interesting anyway. More important is what you can do with this technology - that is, alienating or not, what happens when we play at hiding behind technology? This is not play in the trivial sense but more in the sense of Huizinga, "Play is a serious business" - when hiding behind technology, the human behind the machine, becomes play, as it increasingly does in broad arenas of music, art, fashion, politics, activism and business, it subverts both the utopian and apocalyptic visions of media gurus. Think of surveillance in Big Brother or the art of Jane and Louise Wilson; of the ubiquitous vocoder in Daft Punk, Basement Jaxx or Madonna; graffiti and pamphlet-distributing robots amongst anti-globalizers; cyberbras and mechanical clothing by Massimo Osti. As it turns out, perhaps the enduring consequence of hiding behind technology will not be some grand transformation of the human race for good or bad, but an aesthetics both seductive and productive. We want to know more about this aesthetics of hiding behind technology. Where is it visible? What's new about it? Why do people do it? Is it important, consequential, or just a fad? Is it just the superficial gloss of a deeper process? Or has the whole technology explosion already imploded, in a post-September 11th world where westerners have been brought back down to earth, in need of real politics, real interaction, and the need to get out from behind the technology?