Mobile Studios hit the road again.
photo: Courtesy of Multiplace
PERHAPS you've been wondering what the three white booths on Bratislava's SNP Square were last week. You may have overheard some computer sounds, seen projections on the wall or eavesdropped on artists getting high-tech, but restrained from getting closer, sure that art that has anything to do with computers is not for you.
The booths were Mobile Studios, a project organised by the Berlin Public Art Lab that presents artworks and holds discussions to monitor public reaction. The project has been travelling through several countries and will present its results at the international Documenta 12 (2007) art show in Kassel, Germany.
In Slovakia, the Mobile Studios were part of the annual Multiplace festival on new media, a week-long event that closed last Saturday after running in Slovakia, the neighbouring Czech Republic, Austria, Great Britain, the USA and Egypt.
Now in its fifth year, the festival has introduced dozens of international projects that use the newest technologies. It opened with electronic dance music and continued with video-art projections, digital animations and interactive installations. This year, the organizers also encouraged artists to explain their exhibits.
The results of some projects can be found online. Those co-produced by Mobile Studio partners throughout Europe, for example, are available at www.mobile-studios.org.
One Multiplace project still going strong is Konekšn, which connects the Prague c2c gallery and Bratislava HIT (Hviezdoslavovo námestie 18) into one exhibition, where visitors to both places can take part in a virtual interconnection.
Konekšn's main feature is MirrorSite, a chat experiment by American computer artist Kevin Hamilton, through which visitors to the two galleries mutually communicate by writing on dry-erase boards that are scanned with a camera and projected together onto a wall. Two other projects induce nostalgia for the united Czechoslovakia through polyphonic ring tones and videoconferencing.
- Zuzana Habšudová
