D E E P _ E U R O P E @ H Y B R I D W O R K S P A C E

Deep Europe

'Deep Europe' took place at the Hybrid WorkSpace of Documenta X in Kassel, where the V2_East/Syndicate workshop ran from Mon, 28.7 to Wed, 6.8.97. The agenda is online, as are a list of participants and some Deep Europe logos. A report of the deep europe Visa Department is also available.

Take the title 'deep europe' with a pinch of salt. The V2_East/Syndicate is a network of people and institutions who are involved in media culture and media art in Europe and who want to create contacts and an infrastructure for projects and cooperations. The network started out as an 'East-West initiative' almost two years ago, but has since reached a stage where those symbolically laden terms mean less and less. With its mailing list, website http://www.v2.nl/east and regular meetings, the Syndicate is becoming an important tool for fostering ties within the media art community and a platform for discussing the changing role of media culture in the 'new Europe'.

Kassel is both a former outpost of the pseudo-Western world and a hallmark of a post-war modernism. Even eight years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the cultural maps of Europe are shifting heavily. There are still many things to see, learn and do, and conversations to be had, before we will be able to make sense of the new distances between Berlin and Warsaw, Paris and Moscow, Vienna and Belgrade, Kassel and Eisenach.

The new lines that run through Europe are historical, political, cultural, artistic, technological, military. The role of the EU and its institutions, the notion of Mitteleuropa, old and new ideologies, messianic NGOs and late-capitalist profiteers contribute to a cultural environment in which we have to define new strategies and new tools, whether as artists, activists, writers or organisers.

'Deep Europe' will offer an opportunity to further develop ideas which have emerged around the V2_East/Syndicate initiative over the last 18 months, to discuss them among the Syndicalists and with the dX public. There will be ample opportunity to represent in video, slide and WWW presentations what we have in mind when we say 'European media art and culture', and to concentrate on some of these issues in texts and audio-visual productions.

Programme elements

Keywords: building networks, forgetting pseudo-East/West, questioning ideologies, shifting borders, critique of the 'Western gaze', culture in a 'New Europe', the disappearance of Europe in the new global economic context, and in light of the local federalist/isolationnist efforts, culture-and-money, culture-and-power, the analog networks as a new form of "cult" activism, NGOs and PGOs, catching up (with technology, ideology, economy etc) versus keeping one's own identity

Production - Deep Document - Alexandar Davic produces the Deep Document, a video documentation of the Deep Europe workshop.

Production - Lisa Haskel (and Inke Arns) are also thinking about a video production (the Syndicate Video), maybe these two teams can work together, or split the two projects conceptually (e.g. Deep Europe diary vs. general Syndicate interviews and report).

Production - Letters Home - we regularly (daily?) produce short reports about the workshop and dX and write them each in our own languages; they can be put up on the website and possibly be read as little linguistic performances. I imagine that it will be an interesting demonstration of diversity and particularity if, in the middle of all our Euro-English, we from time to time listen to Raitis speaking Latvian, Inke speaking German, Calin speaking Romanian, Branka speaking Serbian, or whatever her language is called these days. Maybe we can connect this to Luchezar's language-project, and to the Muntadas project about translation.

Production - Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits will do radio and net-radio productions.

Performance - Language - Dimitry Pilikin and Valery Savchuk, who is the Professor of philosophy in Spb University propose a theoretical performance, devoted to the problems of communication in contemporary Europe, where everybody speaks "Bad English".

Performance - Dima Pilikin plans to read original abstracts from Russian literature (Dostoevsky, Tolstoi, Chekhov...) for the public in front of Orangerie every day during the week.

Performance - The Institute of Affordable Lunacy (IBW) will come upon us and do a performance, possibly on Sunday, 3.8.

Presentation - Marta and Michiel van der Hagen present the results of their recent WWW workshops with artists in Warsaw.

Presentation - Calin Dan does a 'briefing' on his current project "Happy Doomsday!" and talks about the liquification of European borders.

Presentation - Nina Czegledy, Branka Milicic and Iliyana Nedkova intend to develop the Cyberknitting concept and conduct Web-research on the topic as well as amongst Invited Cyberknittersl.

Presentation - Video screenings.

Debate - Villö Huszai (huszai@slash.ch), a friend and curious journalist from Switserland, wants to come and do an interview /discussion with us about the Syndicate, V2_East, East-West-questions, etc.

Publishing - We conduct a planning discussion for the (future) Syndicate Publication Series.

 

THE TEXTS about Deep_Europe, published in:
Inke Arns / Andreas Broeckmann (eds.), Deep_Europe: The 1996 - 97 edition.
Selected texts from the V2_East / Syndicate mailing list (143 pp.), Berlin,
October 1997, 100 copies

 

For more information, please contact abroeck@v2.nl.