Tuesday, 8 January 2019, 7.30 pm, diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery
Book launch | lecture | performance with
Bryana Fritz | Tilman Richter | warehouse
en plein air – Ethnographies of the Digital
En plein air – literally painting outdoors – was a polemic against the white walls of the studio. The same exercise of leaving the atelier in order to observe was formulated by Bronisław Malinowski as the most fundamental requirement of ethnology: The ethnologist was supposed to face the conditions of the field and the problems of a practice of gaze.
Engaging with the digital en plein air, the book unites essays outlining the authors’ experiences, interviews and recordings, poems, collages working on semi-fiction and scientific texts. Thereby, disparate definitions, forms, and fields of the digital collide.
The book is published at the occasion of http://warehouse.industries. Together with two of the authors we invite you to launch en plein air with us: Tilman Richter will speak about the soon-to-be digital self and Bryana Fritz will perform Indispensible Blue.
Tilman Richter: She KNOWS no Hatred
Despite its ceaseless efforts to disguise its own nature: the internet is text-based. It’s a diagram, a list of lists, a form of book-keeping that distinguishes between order and noise, now and then, the self and its possessions. The form in which the internet rearranges the networks and relationships we live by can be found in writing and reading long before social networks came to life as billion dollar companies. Reading the diaries of Merve publisher Heidi Paris and author Rainald Goetz, Tilman Richter attempts an ethnography of the soon-to-be digital self.
Bryana Fritz: Indispensible Blue
Indispensible Blue is a laptop performance. Folders are opened and closed, lines appear, boxes light up, colors and sounds plop up – a poem unfolds. If software exerts a choreographic force on its users, how can dance be a way to escape the pre-programmed patterns? With Indispensible Blue and the various forms it takes, Bryana Fritz continues to explore the uncanny valley between poetry and dance on the everyday user surfaces. Everything looks and sounds extra generic, but then the gloss of exactly that comes up, entangled in the glitch of the cursor movement.
Bryana Fritz is a dancer, choreographer, and writer based in Brussels. Her work situates itself at the intersection between poetry and performance and most recently does so in duet with the user interface of OS X. Besides working as performer for Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Xavier le Roy, and Michiel Vandevelde she collaborates with Henry Andersen under the moniker Slow Reading Club.
Tilman Richter studied philosophy and cultural studies in Witten and Berlin and writes on media and the capitalization of individuality.
With the generous support of the Federal Cultural Foundation, the European Center for Creative Economy (ecce), the Individuelle Förderung von Künstlerinnen, Künstlern und Kreativen (IKF), and the Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen.