TRANSIT LOUNGE 2009 : MOVING WHILE STANDING STILL

TRANSIT LOUNGE 2009 is a series of multiple overlapping online conversations, between artists located in Berlin and artists located in Australia. Dialogue includes textual conversation, while focusing on the exchange of audiovisual media in its variety of forms. With participants drawn from diverse backgrounds, issues of translation and miscommunication naturally emerge. Magnified by the nature of digital communication, nuances of gesture and body language are lost, while time differences undermine the utopia of instant global communication.

TRANSITLOUNGE.09 artists address these two considerations:

• What happens when inter-continental movement becomes difficult?
• What then, when escape from (or to) home becomes impossible?

PROJECT BACKGROUND

The TRANSIT LOUNGE is the archetypal transit space, the point where the hyper-global + hyper-local coincide; a location which blurs traditional conceptions of geo-political boundaries, creating pockets of international space within the borders of individual nation-states. An in-between space, it exists relative to a fixed departure and arrival point, not to the area that surrounds it.
An ongoing, experimental project the TRANSIT LOUNGE has, since 2006, evolved through many different formats to continually explore the potentials of interdisciplinary collaboration. Originally developed to offer Australian artists the opportunity to work abroad in a challenging yet supportive environment, since 2007 the project has included artists from across Europe in order to stimulate transnational artistic exchange across a variety of contexts. Initially based in Berlin, in 2008 the project was extended to Sydney and Melbourne. Challenging the preconceptions of collaborative practice, artists were expected to work simultaneously at a local and international level.
Since its inception, TRANSIT LOUNGE has been a partner event of transmediale – festival for art and digital culture, one of Europe’s largest and longest running festivals of New-media art. This association will continue in 2009, with the new project structure developed in direct response to the 2009 festival theme DEEP NORTH. A detailed description of TRANSIT LOUNGE 09: MOVING WHILE STANDING STILL is provided in the project outline below.
In addition to their annual residency programs, TRANSIT LOUNGE was also responsible for coordinating a series of talks on contemporary Australian art and architecture at the Deutsche Architektur Zentrum to coincide with their exhibition Living the Modern. TRANSIT LOUNGE is also collaborating with PROGRAM (www.programonline.de) on an online, urban mapping project RE-PLACE BERLIN (www.re-place.info), which aims to reveal and celebrate the everyday rituals of Berlin’s inhabitants.
TRANSIT LOUNGE was conceived of and developed by Katie Hepworth and Miriam Mlecek. In 2009, they are joined by Somaya Langley as a co-curator.

TRANSIT LOUNGE 09: MOVING WHILE STANDING STILL

TRANSIT LOUNGE returns to Berlin in 2009 as a partner event of transmediale.09 DEEP NORTH, in the unique position, as artists from the south, to comment on the festival’s themes. Inspired by these theme, the curators question what has been the underlying theme of the project since its inception – transit – asking:

What happens when movement becomes difficult?
When escape from (or to) home becomes impossible?

It is on this intimate level that the implications of the reconfigured global relationships brought about by climate change become the inspiration for TRANSIT LOUNGE 09. Here the limitations on global travel that will come about due to the change in availability of resources, subsequent shifts in the political and social environment and rising costs become the inspiration for the development of a series of rules restricting the interaction between participating artists; TRANSIT LOUNGE 09 becomes a transnational residency project where everyone stays home, an intense exploration of local contexts directed through communication with distant collaborators.

TRANSIT LOUNGE 09 is a series of 4 overlapping online conversations, between artists in Berlin and others from cities in Australia. Here, dialogue is not restricted to verbal communication but includes the exchange of images, sounds and video media. With participants drawn diverse backgrounds issues of translation and mistranslation obviously emerge, magnified by the nature of digital communication, as the nuances of body language are lost, and time differences undermine the utopia of instant global communication.

Launching from Nov 08- Jan 09, the conversations begin with the particular reflections on the conference and project themes of each curator, who will actively participate in the conversation for 4 weeks before passing on their role to a new artist. Each of the artists involved will participate in the conversation for 4 weeks, with new artists starting every 2 weeks while being limited to a certain medium (sound, text, image, video). The artists will have to develop a set of rules and develop a translation of their work into real space at the transmediale.

As in 2008, the TRANSIT LOUNGE 09 will utilise open-source, proprietary software as the forum for dialogues across continents and time-zones. Whereas the focus in the 2008 was on the emergent possibilities enabled by wiki software, in 2009 the TRANSIT LOUNGE returns to the linear technology of the blog. Whereas the wiki is tangential and multi-directional, the linearity of the blog allows for a dialogue between collaborating artists to emerge. In choosing the blog over the wiki, the collective’s reflections on the conference themes are foregrounded, removing the focus from the particular technology selected.