Test_Lab:
Urban Screen Savers

http://www.v2.nl/events/test_lab-urban-screen-savers

Thursday May 20 | 20:00 to 23:00
V2_, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam

Featuring: Michelle Teran, Ubermatic (CA) | Gunnar Green,
TheGreenEyl (DE) | Matthias Oostrik (NL) | Toine Horvers and Paul Cox
(NL) | Rui Guerra, I?TK (PT)

A screen is a powerful medium in an artist’s hands, and public space is
an appealing domain for encounters between an artist and his or her
audience. Urban screens can therefore be seen as an ideal tool for
artistic public interventions as well as an exciting new exhibition
format. Despite an ongoing increase in the number of digital urban
screens in metropolitan spaces, their potential for artistic
intervention and exhibition is however only seldom exploited. Not only
do the commercial motives behind many urban screens compete with their
artistic potential, when artists do get a chance to use them as a
platform, the medium itself often appears to fall short of its
promises. Some artists nowadays even reject the urban screen as an
artistic medium and decide to go guerrilla, treating any part of the
city surface as a potential projection screen. What does this say about
the urban screen’s artistic agenda? Will artists end up merely
designing urban screen savers, or can a thorough look at the artists’
current demands contribute to defining a stronger artistic agenda for
the urban screen, thereby ‘saving’ the urban screen as an artistic
medium?

Rather than debating the medium’s hypothetical possibilities, Test_Lab:
Urban Screen Savers will critically reflect on the urban screen as an
artistic medium on the basis of live demonstrations. Which shortcomings
of the urban screen can be distilled from present-day urban hacker
culture? How do artists that make use of urban screens cope with our
media-dense urban environments? And which topics do these artists
aspire to address through urban screenings? As is customary at V2_’s
Test_Lab, the audience will form a hands-on critical test panel for the
demonstrated artworks.

This event will be streamed live at
http://www.v2.nl

Admission: free