Programme:

9:00h Departure from Bus station Dortmund

12:00h
Welcome and introduction to the activities and objectives of the Edith-Russ-Site for Media Art; afterwards guided tour through the exhibition My War. Participation in an Age of Conflict

14:00h - 15:00h Lunch Break

15:00h
Visitation of the audio installation Rain Dance in the inner city of Oldenburg
Afterwards contingent guided tour through the city of Oldenburg or time for your disposal

17:00h Return from Oldenburg

The Edith-Russ-Site for Media Art

With its focus on Media Art the Edith Russ Site for Media Art holds an outstanding position within German art institutions. It is a space for the presentation of and communication about media in contemporary art as well as the world´s increasing digitalization and virtualization and the influence New Media have on our lifes.
In a continually changing exhibition programme we show innovative and experimental positions of contemporary art, often with international cooperation partners. With its international stipend programme the Edith Russ Site for Media Art is also known as place of art production. The stipend programme for Media Art, supported by the Foundation of Lower Saxony enables every year the realisation of three new projects.
The Edith Russ Site for Media Art was founded in the name of the lecturer Edith Maria Ruß who left the city of Oldenburg her estate under the condition to create a house “for the art at the passage to the new millenium”.

My War. Participation in an Age of Conflict

Blog!, participate! and share! are the battle cries of a media culture in which the boundaries between private and public, between personal and political have been decisively eroded. The exhibition MyWar: Identity and Appropriation Under War Condition pinpoints the moral implications of wars when they are experienced through media. This intervention is delineated by a media landscape where web 2.0 tools are consistently altering the way that audiences and users both consume, and exchange information.
The exhibition follows two separate threads. In the first of these, the artists adopt a radically individualistic approach to war. Renzo Martens turns the camera, amidst a war zone, onto himself. Sarah Vanagt and Phil Collins highlight the activities of young people, revealing the mundane aspects of everyday life that blogging culture is obsessed with. Harrell Fletcher makes children renarrate adults´ war memories. With the documentation of her own re-enactments of scenes and sites of the 1940s partisan war Milica Tomic asks whether the appropriation of such events is possible. SWAMB constructed a device that inflicts pain on its wearer with every soldier’s death in Iraq. Dunne & Raby´s (ironic) plush version of the mushroom cloud is conceived to be a therapeutic object for people with special fears of a nuclear war.
In the second thread of the exhibition, artists directly engage with the way in which web technologies have infiltrated and influenced global wars. Joseph DeLappe uses an online recruiting game of the American army to write down the names of killed American soldiers in Iraq. Thompson & Craighead construct a global narrative of an ubiquitous war from blog information. Oliver Laric shows airbrush variations of a manipulated Iranian image of rocket launches which was widely faked and ridiculed on the internet. Knowbotic Research offer a fictional ending to a moving YouTube-circulated news story, where a young Palestinian boy turns into a Transformer-like robot. Harun Farocki addresses the question of computer-aided trauma therapy for war veterans.

Participating artists:
Phil Collins, Joseph DeLappe, Dunne & Raby, Harun Farocki, Harroll Fletcher, Knowbotic Research, Oliver Laric, Renzo Martens, SWAMB, Thomson & Craighead, Milica Tomic, Sarah Vanagt

Paul DeMarinis: RainDance

The audio installation "RainDance" uses falling water droplets to create an interactive and literally immersive sound environment that people can explore musical water streams with umbrellas. Streams of ordinary water are passed through special nozzles that impose the vibrations of audio frequencies, so that the stream is broken up into a precise number of droplets. When these streams fall on a resonant surface, such as an umbrella, a tone is reproduced. In this way, various familiar melodies can be reproduced.
A custom modulating nozzle uses precisely controlled electromagnetic pulses to affect a laminar stream of water, that when intercepted by an umbrella, reproduces familiar musical melodies.

Afterwards contingent guided tour through the city of Oldenburg or time for your disposal
Discover the picturesque alleyways and sights of the former capital of the free state Oldenburg by a guided tour or enjoy a placid shopping expedition through Oldenburg's attractive inner city.