In the next two weeks before The Mobile City Conference starts on February 27th, we will feature a number of art works, research projects and (commercial) applications created and carried out by some of the participants of The Mobile City.
Today we start this series with Stalkshow, an art project by Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat in collaboration with V2_Institute for Unstable Media.
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AM I SAFE WITH YOU?
StalkShow deals with the threat of insecurity and isolation in public space. It invites the audience to give this threat a personal face and space; to show both its horror and its beauty.
TOUCH ME
A performer carries an interactive wearable billboard containing a laptop with a touch screen around these spaces. People are invited to touch the touch screen and to navigate through texts about the threat of insecurity and isolation.
The StalkShow’s texts derive from agora-phobia-digitalis.org where Lancel and Maat invite people living isolated, like a prisoner, a nun, an asylum seeker, a digi-persona, to make statements about: ‘personal strategies to deal with social spaces’. By navigating through the StalkShow texts, the audience is invited to generate their own montage of these social strategies.
With the aid of a webcam and wireless internet connection, live video portraits of members of the audience appear together with the statements on a large projection screen in the same public space. The user sees himself ‘watching’ through a text-window. His ‘observing’ face gazes down, meeting the eye of the observing audience.
MEDIA & PUBLIC SPACE
The StalkShow shows statements referring to slogans used in media-communication. They expose experiences and feelings of insecurity which are dominant in mainstream media, like on television and in newspapers. Through the Stalkshow Lancel and Maat aim to amplify these feelings to an extreme to be re-experienced and re-interpreted in the urban public space.
STALKER
StalkShow is a response to the desire to control situations and eliminate violence:
‘What is rejected and refused in the symbolic order reappears in reality. Specters, ghosts and phantoms haunt the world.’ ( From:‘ ‘CTRL SPACE’, Peter Weibel).
In the StalkShow the other is absent, replaced by projections. Both cherished and threatening projections represent fear and desire for the other, they haunt the mind like a stalker.
MEETING PLACES
Stalkshow is a project by Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat. Lancel and Maat create ‘meeting places’ in public spaces. In those ‘meeting places’ they use a combination of online and offline media, such as mobile control and communication devices and networks like internet, mobile phone, RFID; newspaper, billboards, live-tv, video- and urban screens; locative media. In their performances and installations, Lancel and Maat create both social and technological based networks in which they invite their audience to experiment and play while reflecting on their own perception of identity, community and alienation. It is a research into social systems in a mediated networked society. The ‘meeting places’ show a contemporary form of creating portraits.
PRESENTATIONS:
V2_Institute for Unstable media, NL
E- Culture Fair / Virtueel Platform, NL
ISEA 04 and Kiasma Museum Helsinki, Finland
NABI Artcenter Seoul, South-Korea
Second new media Art Exhibition – Symposium Millennium Art Museum Beijing, China
Urban Screens 08 Melbourne, Australia
The Second Art @ Science International Exhibition/Symposium Beijing, China
Shanghai International Science and Art Expo, China
Smart Project Space Amsterdam, NL
ArtInPro Moscow, Russia
Gemeente museum Gorcum, NL
Foundation DasArts, NL
Hong Kong Arts center / VideoTage, China
Festival ‘City as Movie’ Schiedam, NL
Second new media Art Exhibition – Symposium Millennium Art Museum Beijing, China
The Second Art @ Science International Exhibition/Symposium Beijing, China
Shanghai International Science and Art Expo, China
SUPPORTED BY:
Fund for Visual Art, design and Architecture,
Mondriaan Foundation,
Amsterdam Fund for the Art, Fund for Performance Art, Kiasma Museum,
[Nes]theaters Amsterdam, Foundation DasArts,
Dutch Ambassy in Helsinki, Hong Kong, Moscow, Shanghai, Beijing.
THANKS TO:
Alex Adriaansens, Josephine Bosma, Mart van Bree, Günther Heeg, Rob van Kranenburg, Anne Nigten, Jellichje Reijnders, Alice Smits, Robert Steijn, Jason Wilson.