Mentoring #BeyondDigital

A conspiratorial and scene-connecting mentoring program with Lauren Lee McCarthy, Angela Washko, Alla Popp and Jeremy Bailey, September - November 2021

The mentoring #BeyondDigital connects Hamburg (emerging) artists with international media artists. In this first prototype of the mentoring program, four tandems work together to exchange ideas on poetics and discourses of net performance art.

Attention: meet our mentors during the lecture event “Practice BeyondDigital” on Thursday 26th, 2021 at 6pm!

 

 
 

While digitization in the performing arts has exploded in the last year, many media artists* have long used digital space as a stage and material for their art. Since the emergence of the Internet, aesthetics have evolved, social spaces and arrangements have been interrogated and subverted, and questions of liveness and the role of the audience or user* have been considered.

The mentoring begins with a practical workshop in August 2021. Afterwards, the participants are invited to develop a net-artistic sketch or prototype in the company of a tech-savvy mentor from the media art scene. The results can be presented in the context of our partner festival Hauptsache Frei 2022.

Thus, instead of reinventing media art and unilaterally searching for translation possibilities from the stage to the screen, the mentees will get to know existing media artistic discourses and aesthetics in order to research interfaces and productive differences of theater and media art. The #BeyondDigital Mentoring sees itself as a networking tool and catalyst for interdisciplinary artistic research and the creation of new complicities between net art and theater creators.

 

What you can take away and what we offer you:

  • Networking with internationally renowned media artists* and the net and media art scene.
  • Networking with the Hamburg scene
  • Presentation opportunities in the context of Hauptsache Frei #7 and in the context of another event.
  • A honorarium or production budget in the amount of € 2,000 per person.

Mentoring will primarily take place remotely and online. However, the four-day introductory workshop will take place IRL, on-site at the Lichthof Theater, not online.

Application:

We are looking for four participants or mentees. The application form can be found here! The deadline for applications is August 10, 2021 and the selection of participants will be made by the mentors in consultation with the curator Jeanne Charlotte Vogt until August 15. For questions, email us at jeanne.charlotte.vogt@hauptsachefrei.de

Apply!

What you should bring to participate in mentoring:

  • You can apply as an artist with a focus on performance or theatre work. Furthermore, you should:
  • Ideally, have time from August 23-26, 2021 to participate in the workshop as well as for individual and group talks in the period September – November 2021. We will coordinate dates together
  • English language skills for discussions in the group and with the mentors
  • Openness to new questions, artistic perspectives & methods
  • Interest in practical work with technology
  • Willingness to work in a team and share knowledge
  • Have access to a laptop that you can use to implement video teleconferences and participate in the hands-on workshop. If you need assistance or do not have your own computer, this should not preclude you from participating. Please contact us!
  • Bring questions, artistic ideas and methods that you would like to try out or discuss
  • Unfortunately, the offer cannot be offered completely barrier-free (especially language barriers)

Participation will mainly take place via video conferencing and working on your own computer. We are happy to accommodate your technical requirements, please contact us actively! For an upcoming edition we are looking for ways to reduce the program in its barriers.

 
 

Your Mentors

Angela Washko

angelawashko.com

As feminist media artist, Angela Washko (she/her) tells complex and unconventional stories about the media we consume from unusual perspectives. She is the founder of the Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, a long-term intervention within the popular online video game. She was recently awarded the Creative Capital Award, Indiecade’s Impact Award, and the Franklin Furnace Performance Fund. Washko’s work has been published in The New Yorker, Frieze Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian, ArtForum, The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, The New York Times, Rhizome, and many other journals. Her projects have been presented internationally at the Museum of the Moving Image (New York), the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milan Design Triennale, the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), the Hamburg PLAY Festival, and the Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, among others. Angela Washko is an associate professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University.

allapopp

Berlin, Germany

http://allapopp.com/

Alla Popp (no pronoun) is a digital media and performance artist from Kazan, Russia with a Diploma in State Administration and a Master in Transition Studies at JLU Giessen. Afterwards, Alla studied digital media and performance at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach, Tongji University and Athens School of Fine Arts. For Alla’s academic and artistic work, Alla won various grants including Frankfurter Künstlerhilfe, Mosbach Stiftung, DAAD and STIBET, residencies in China, Greece, Japan and Rwanda. In 2015, together with Alexander Traka, they founded the technologically advanced interdisciplinary music and performance project BBB_.

Gloria Schulz

Hamburg, Germany

unendlichemoeglichkeiten.de

Gloria Schulz is a digital artist from Hamburg. Gloria is a co-founder of Studio für unendliche Möglichkeiten. Gloria feels most at home in gray windows and, as a visual hacker, explores immersive illusory spaces.

Gloria’s artworks as a creative coder and performing artist are shown throughout various festivals and theatres in Germany and abroad.

 

Jeremy Bailey

Toronto, Canada

jeremybailey.net

Since the early noughties Bailey (CA) has ploughed a compelling, and often hilarious, road through the various developments of digital communications technologies. Ostensibly a satire on, and parody of, the practices and language of “new media,” the jocose surface of Bailey’s work hides an incisive exploration of the critical intersection between video, computing, performance, and the body.” (Morgan Quaintance, Rhizome) Recent projects include performances for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven in New York, The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Tate Liverpool.

His work has been shown widely including recent solo shows at Transmediale in Berlin, and group shows Mediamatic in Amsterdam, Museums Quartier in Vienna and Balice Hertling in Paris. Recent commissions include projects for the Southbank Centre in London, FACT in Liverpool, Turner Contemporary in Margate UK, and The New Museum in New York. Bailey is represented by Pari Nadimi Gallery in Toronto.

Lauren McCarthy

Brooklyn, NY

lauren-mccarthy.com

Lauren McCarthy is an artist, programmer and social engineer based in Los Angeles and Brooklyn. In her work she examines the potential of technologies like social media to create positive social interaction. She makes software, performances, videos, and other things on the internet.

Lauren has exhibited at Ars Electronica, Conflux Festival, SIGGRAPH, LACMA, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, and the Japan Media Arts Festival, and worked on installations for the London Eye, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BS Computer Science and BS Art and Design from MIT.

She is an Assistant Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. She was previously a resident at CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Eyebeam, NYU ITP, and Ars Electronica / QUT TRANSMIT.