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.