[ISEA2011] Panel: Sabine Fabo – Hy­brid Re­al­ity on the Couch

Panel Statement

Panel: Hybrid Cultures

This talk will take a crit­i­cal view on the blur­ring of bound­aries be­tween vir­tual worlds and real life ex­pe­ri­ence. The focus will con­cen­trate on a con­cept of re­al­ity that en­cour­ages the re-en­act­ment of highly trau­matic mem­o­ries within the vi­sual frame­work of 3D-vir­tu­al­i­sa­tions as sug­gested by the ther­a­peu­tic sim­u­la­tion pro­gram Vir­tual Iraq.  Here the com­plex process of mem­ory, imag­i­na­tion and sup­pres­sion is con­fronted with its trans­la­tion into the aes­thet­ics of a com­puter game.  In an­other work, Harun Farocki’s an­a­lytic video in­stal­la­tion Im­mer­sion, 2009, the merg­ing of im­ages be­tween vir­tual worlds and real life ex­pe­ri­ence is ques­tioned by de­lib­er­ately sep­a­rat­ing the vir­tual and the real.

  • Sabine Fabo stud­ied His­tory of Art, Media The­ory and Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture in Duis­burg, Essen and Siegen, Germany. Her Ph.D the­sis was on the in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary and me­dial re­la­tions be­tween James Joyce and Joseph Beuys.  In 1991 she was en­gaged as free­lance col­lab­o­ra­tor at the Kun­st­samm­lung Nor­drhein-West­falen in Dus­sel­dorf.  In 1991-1997 she was Aca­d­e­mic As­sis­tant in the field of Media Cul­ture at the Acad­emy of Media Arts Cologne. In 1998 , she was a Ful­bright Re­search Vis­i­tor to New York Uni­ver­sity/Amer­i­can Stud­ies de­part­ment, guest lec­turer at the In­sti­tute for Eu­ro­pean Cul­tures, Russ­ian State Uni­ver­sity for Human Sci­ences, Moskow and guest lec­turer at the Acad­emy of Fine Arts, Venice. Since 1998 she has been Pro­fes­sor of His­tory and The­ory of Art and Media at the Uni­ver­sity of Ap­plied Sci­ences Aachen. She is a mem­ber of the Ad­vi­sory Com­mit­tee of Sound Stud­ies, Berlin. Her fields of study are cul­tural as­pects of mul­ti­me­dia, con­cepts of the total work of art and sub­ver­sive artis­tic prac­tices. Her writ­ing, Par­a­sit­i­cal Strate­gies, was pub­lished by Kun­st­fo­rum In­ter­na­tional in 2007.