Panel Statement

Panel: Work

The Present continues, as a time of transitions. Time that smears over the Past and the Future, blending them in the present moment. No need for nostalgic yearning for the chronicles of the past colonial museum in flames. Culture in transition has its own aesthetic forms: eatable books in networked performances, data-tattooing of avatars, poetic enactments of terroristic graffiti, Freytag pyramid devoured by hypertext-viruses, formulaic episodes rising as architectural patterns, interwoven M00-textures: in digital storyScapes traditional dichotomies converge. Digital and physical realities merge together into hybrid forms of social and aesthetical contacts. When virtuality becomes tangible, even stable grounds of the physical world seem to be fleeting and unreliable. Vision is blurred by the inestimable focus, linear time exploded into a web of space-time linkages, authority and hierarchy loosing control over their credibility. This instability and frictions between the two worlds might be the strange attractors for contacts between remote concepts and communities. The question is how do we weave the fabric of a language in transition, while the fibre still rips open randomly, through system crashes, censorships, copyrights and incompatibilities? What impulse can tie a knot and bridge the ruptures? The answer could be: Touch.

• Maja Kuzmanovic (Hungary/Netherlands), Media Artist, Utrecht