Starting out with some news from Stuttgarter Filmwinter, a wonderful Film and Media Festival, community-based and now in its 33rd year! In its core its a Shortfilmfestival – the Bonus is the Expanded Media Programme.
Funny enough, again we meet “Operation Jane Walk” , this excellent hack/installation of a shootergame turned into a guided socio-architectural tour through Manhattan., which we have seen at last years Amaze Festival. (By the way – you can still submit til 2cd of February here). But this time OJW morphes into a live performance with the creators and two players. Gronkh live, sort of, but with a socio-political background. Cool idea!
Another impressive work was Gordon Winiemkos (USA) stereoskopic Video „They Came Together to Perform Heroic Gestures (in the manner that was meaningful to them)“ : He observes with his camera a furious mass of demonstrators against Donald Trump and, at the same time, people at a cosplay convention who pose for cameras dressed as Iron Man, fairy or Statue of Liberty – embodying heroic ideals.
If you want to try this at home, simply wear 3D Glasses and (if you have those at home by chance, leftover from your last Cinemavisit, when you endend up accidentally in the 3D-Version of Harry Potter), I do not like the Cinema 3D experience personally – but here, whoaaa. Cosplayers jumping out of the screen right into your face. Amazing how those similar “heroic gestures” in cosplay and in activist demonstration open up a space in your head. Love it or hate it. And do try it at home.
Reason to be in Stuttgart was our Tour of Arne Vogelgesangs performance “Flammende Köpfe”, even after the 15th time for me a disturbing memento of rather sick right-wing thought in contemporary Germany. After the show somebody pointed us to the movie “Kleine Germanen”, a documentary about the education of children in right-wing families, using animation and game aesthetics, trailer here. Find here the whole onlinepresentation of the “Expanded Media Programme” plus: the curation is based on an open call 😉
Last but not least, Künstlerische Forschung was present in a live performance by our dear Co-students of the Figurentheaterstudiengang at the Stuttgarter Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst (HMDK)
Sfumato is a work of Videoart by Robert Seidel that shifts the boundaries of abstract painting in the digital age. The original material is based on the bundle of Robert Seidel’s abstract paintings and drawings, which are dissolved with a self-developed video synthesizer – and merged into a continuous visual stream of prismatic color volumes. (see in this Video the mentioned technique). At the Stuttgart Film Winter, the artist and the students met to re-perform Sfumato in an improvised performance: Videoart meets contemporary material theatre Artistic research process as live performance. Brave Students!