Intersection
The medium is the message: perhaps no term sums up the basis of transmediale quite like Marshall McLuhan’s infamous statement about technology, which has been applied to fields such as media, art and science.
Tonight, artist and inventor Graeme Smith presents a lecture exploring the Canadian theorist’s notion that artists are the first to signify or predict future uses of new technologies (one of his many DEW or Distant Early Warning theories). Postulating that artists are one of the few groups to think of the future in the present sense, McLuhan’s theories and work often made clear parallels between science and art, supporting his idea that art is prime ground for testing how any new medium or technology might impact on society.
Throughout transmediale.10, Smith reverses this notion with his video installation Intersection, located at Potsdamer Platz S-Bahnhof and within the Marshall McLuhan Salon. Running just below the former “Death Strip”, Smith collates images of the past and transforms them into snapshots of the present, while the video pieces in the Salon reveal insights into people’s lives during the apprehensive, optimistic and unrestful time between November 1989 (when the Wall came down) and October 1990 (when Germany was reunified).
Through his use of technology, Smith reimagines the biggest (and most tangible) signifier of the Cold War, at once analyzing the symbolism of the Wall against a narrative of the state of the city it once divided.
transmediale Marshall McLuhan Lecture – with Graham Smith
Marshall McLuhan Salon, Botschaft von Kanada, Ebertstrasse 14
Start: 18:00
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