DIGITALIZATION of Vasulka Kitchen's program
Digital platform for art and education
autumn 2020
In autumn 2020, we have focused on creating a digital platform to make the artistic inderdisciplinary program and VKB’s own activities accessible. It should serve as foundations to build on in the near future. Up to now, on the platform we have offered performances and art presentations, lectures and workshops for both professionals and the public. Everything was online.
Since Vasulka Kitchen Brno as Centre for New Media Art aims at supporting and developing new media forms of art work and its production, we will foster the project of digitalization and research of the Internet art and art production in the future regardless of factors associated with the Covid-19 pandemy.
With the financial help of the Ministery of Culture of Czech Republic.
The main effort of VKB is to support the creative activities of the intergenerational community of audiovisual artists focused on electronic and new media or new technologies. We want to make their creation accessible through online platforms and, in addition, we hope to raise public awareness of new media art and the possibilities of the digital space. The members of VKB themselves have been dealing with digital culture since the early 1990s, and the presentation of works of art and work in the online environment is thus a natural format for them either.
The initial impulse for the creation of the online program was the impossibility to organize an artistic residency in the spring of 2020 because of the Covid-19. Artist Haraldur Karlsson replaced his planned April stay in Vašulka Kitchen Brno with a virtual residence. It took the form of ten workshops via video conferencing, in which Karlsson presented his current work and gave an insight under the cover of the creative process. The workshops were attended by nineteen participants from more than 10 countries, from university students to experienced artists.
Realized projects
In autumn 2020, we offered several presentations and exhibitons. See below the interactive listing.
Merzbau Revisited
exhibition based on Helena Lukasova's workshop
For Brno Art Week, which must have been online in 2020, Helena Lukasova in cooperation with Vašulka Kitchen prepared a unique virtual exhibition in public space. The virtual exhibition Merzbau Revisited presented a collective art realization created during an online workshop led by digital sculptor Helena Lukášová. The content of the workshop was freely inspired by the work of Merzbau by German avant-garde artist Kurt Schwitters: The radical, constantly changing and growing installation / sculpture / object / architecture transformed the artist's apartment into a work of art during the 1920s. In the four-part workshop, collective digital sculptural works were created following the ideas of Merzbau. The digital environment provided the background for an endless array of possibilities and models, work with virtual space and at the same time offered space for communication around the world.
***
Data Orchestra
Jiri Suchanek's lecture on history and possibilities of sonification in the arts
Jiří Suchánek is a Czech audiovisual artist, musician, and experimenter with multimedia, whose work focuses on audio-light, interactive installations set in natural and public spaces - such as caves, observatories or bridges. He is interested in the relationship between nature, technology and the resilience of electronic media in wild climates. The process of his creation is synthetic: in a given space he explores the possibilities and limits of sound, light, sculptural objects and electronics, with the key being the sound itself, often expanded and shaped by other media and unexpected social situations. Jiří Suchánek currently cooperates with the Institute of Sonology in The Hague. Since 2009 he has been working as an assistant at the Department of Audiovisual Technologies of FAVU, where he teaches about audio technologies and the history of sound art. He is studying for a doctorate at the Janáček Academy in Brno.
***
Matthew Ostrowski
exhibiton of a new media artist from New York in the gallery of Vasulka Kitchen Brno
Matthew Ostrowski is a composer, improviser and installation artist. His work includes digital solo and ensemble improvisation, multi-channel electronic compositions with solid media, and algorithmically generated installation pieces for videos, multi-channel sounds, and robotically controlled objects. In his latest works, he deals with the relationship between the object producing sound and the computer algorithm that this act enables, all in terms of theoretical, aesthetic and cultural-social research.
***
Noise Kitchen
sound design workshop for beginners
The series of workshops offered the basics of sound design and the creation of musical and non-musical compositions. Participants constructed simple sound sources and composed a sound work on free topic. The workshops were organized by lecturer and musician Nikol Štrobachová, who collaborates with the Synth Library Prague, co-founded the Pink Noise team of musicians, presents tutorials Patching with Nikol, organizes educational workshops or experiments with connecting live plants and synthesizers.
***
The live work of artist duo STRWÜÜ was defined by the authors themselves as "34.3% of the real-time performance combined from 71.9% with the live presentation and later from 93.7% with the online documentation." STRWÜÜ most often works with the diversity of sound. They let objects that used to be inaudible speak, such as living and inanimate parts of nature - trees and stones.
***
The authors of the online gallery of contemporary digital art using the form of a screen saver - ScreenSaverGallery –presented the concept of the exhibition platform unusual in the Czech conditions and its current functioning. They discussed the possible disadvantages or unconvincingness of the project. The gallery has been run by the art duo & (Barbora Trnková, Tomáš Javůrek) since 2013 in cooperation with curator Maria Maixnerová.
The workshop of an audiovisual artist and a researcher Derek Holzer let its participants worked with a direct relationship between image and sound and was inspired by the workflow and aesthetics of famous video art artists: Mary Ellen Bute, Nam June Paik, Vašulka or Gary Hill. The participants worked with media archeology of computer graphics, cathode-ray-tube screens, video synthesizers and laser display techniques. The workshop was designed for musicians, sound artists, animators and visual artists that want to work with an oscillator and laser image.
***
The artistic sister duo WIDT (Antonina Nowacka, Bogumila Pietrowska) presented the latest concept of their audiovisual performance in Vašulka Kitchen. In their performance, the artists worked with the concept of abstract opera - with a nonverbal narrative that oscillates between concert, performance, installation and video art.
foto: Barbora Trnková
Projekt se uskutečnil s finanční podporou Ministerstva kultury České republiky.
