[ISEA2018] Artists Statement: Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath & Stina Hasse — Re-Volution Sampler: A Participatory Archive of Revolutionary Songs

Artists Statement

One challenging issue of cultural institutions such as museums and libraries is offering their audiences access to their often extensive materials in engaging ways. This is specifically the case with time-based media such as audio recordings. The Re-Volution Sampler installation aims to mitigate the challenge. It is an open, participatory, multi-layered assemblage of personal memories, associations, and performances of political revolutionary sonic texts. The installation integrates playback and recording of revolutionary sonic texts such as protest songs, political speeches or poems and personal stories. Visitors are not only able to listen and receive but also to add, extent and comment. The installation builds an archive of sonic documents and audience responses to it, thereby creating a network of meaningful relations  accumulating during the time of the installation period. Re-Volution Sampler becomes a lively, meaningful, ongoing collection of the multiple personal and collective experiences of revolution people have and share across countries and cultures. This approach can be seen as a move away from top-down, one-way mediation; it empowers and offers cultural agency to visitors, in playful, performative, critical ways based on individual and collective personal recollections,  perspectives, associations and memories.

  • Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath is Associate Professor at the ITU, Copenhagen, Denmark, and member of the Center for Computer Games Research and the Pervasive Interaction Technology Lab (PitLab). Daniel writes, composes, codes, builds, performs and plays. He is interested in artistic, analytic, explorative, critical and subversive approaches to and practices of play. Discourses he is specifically interested in, are play and materiality, play and learning, and critical play. He runs the University’s monthly workshop series which is about electronics, mechanics, alchemy, interface devices and dangerous things. In his own practice, he makes interactive works which are shown at art exhibitions, academic conferences and popular events.  dace.de   game.itu.dk   pitlab.itu.dk
  • Stina Hasse Jørgensen is a research assistant at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Stina has published articles on contemporary art, design, technology, sound, collective practices and feminism in international magazines and journals. Stina is also a practitioner and curator of design and art with a focus on sound, technology, feminism and collective practices. She has presented her projects at places such as Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, NLHspace, Kunsthal Aarhus, DIAS – Digital Interactive Art Space, Roskilde Festival, Tech Festival, Wundergrund Festival, Atelier Hotel Pro Forma, MIX Copenhagen, LAK festival, and BEAM festival (UK). https://pure.itu.dk/portal/da/persons/stina-hasse-joergensen(37bca555-da4e-4bb3-9575-8b19a2fd7188).html