Monday, January 30, 2017
Nuts & Bolts exhibition: January 26–February 4
Het Atelier (former CBK)
Nieuwe Binnenweg 77
Rotterdam
Each year, the Department of Media Design & Communication at the Piet Zwart Institute co-operates with The International Film Festival Rotterdam in organising an intensive day of mini-masterclasses around one of the IFFR theme programs.
This year some of the most distinguished thinkers and practitioners in the field of film, visual art and media archaeology will articulate their personal viewpoints on the interaction between media and the human mind.
As Friedrich Kittler once remarked: “We knew nothing of our senses until media provided models and metaphors.” But to what extent do we actually acknowledge this metaphorical implication of the media that control our daily lives?
The conference is part of the IFFR exhibition and film programme Nuts & Bolts. With its trans-historical focus on image technology this programme deals with the ways in which artists have dismantled and reassembled the conventions of cinema—screen, projection, darkness—to reactivate the debate regarding the apparatus in the age of new media.
Working against the rhetoric of technology as progress and promise, the artists in Nuts & Bolts recalibrate technology and its effect on mediation. They modify obsolete cinematic techniques to develop alternative interfaces that produce moving images. Their media archaeology is in many ways a follow-up to the critical attitude of filmmakers from the 70s who, inspired by Foucault’s notions of the apparatus and the dispositif, questioned and deconstructed both the technological and ideological constellation that we submit ourselves to, while watching a film.
The artists in Nuts & Bolts enter into a dialogue with the history of media, paradoxically through the design of new technological dispositifs. Each prototypical contraption engages the amazed viewer in a specific way. Their installations and performances are laboratories for self-reflexive research on our cultural responses to an image.
Programme
(doors open at 10am)
10:15–11am: introduction by Simon Pummell (Piet Zwart) & Edwin Carels (IFFR)
11am–noon: Patrick Bokanowski on the mindset behind his methods of image making
noon–12:45pm: Siegfried Zielinski on Arab automata
12:45–1:30pm: lunch break
1:30–2:15pm: Andrew Lampert on his projectDon’t Loose the manual
2:15–3pm: Patricia Pisters: on her new research project on cinema, metallurgy, alchemy
3–3:30pm: coffee break + screening Projektor
3:30–4:15pm: Wim Janssen and Dušica Dražić on their Projektor project
4:15–5:30pm: Peter Kubelka–Bread, Butter and other Metaphors
5:30–6:30pm: concluding drinks
Nuts & Bolts exhibition
Artists: Guillaume Bijl, Jason Dee, Wim Janssen & Dušica Dražić, Honoré d’0, Peter Kubelka, Andrew Lampert, Guy Maddin, Julien Maire, Serge Onnen, Mathijs van Oosterhoudt, Brothers Quay, Joost Rekveld, Teatro Dondolo, Sarah Vanagt, Floris Vanhoof
The exhibition runs from Thursday, January 26 until Saturday, February 4: open daily from 11am–8pm.
For the full Nuts & Bolts programme, see iffr.com.
