
From interrogating Nicolas Bourriaud’s ideas of a new age of the altermodern to the daily life of a political actitivist in the World Bank-backed last dictatorship in Europe -Belarus, You Are Here goes a way to offering a sort of field book for contemporary Europe. A continent where young artists and activists blend forms and travel in their work, living in one country while all the while subtly interrogating their home countries’ traditions and expectations. A generation has come of age in a post- Wall Europe who no longer feel obligated to answer the national questions, but instead answer to their unique personal experience, one of borderless work and travel, mediated by translation and the Internet. Such instances of artistic, intellectual and activist projects are given space in You Are Here, offering the chance to see whether such young practitioners really are writing from a freedom and plurality born in 1989 back into a new, wider and pan-European tradition in 2009.
Edited by Line Madsen Simenstad and John Holten
Texts and artwork by Ann Cotton (AUS), Anna Bro (DK), Agnieszka Drotkiewicz (POL),
Martin John Callanan (UK), Volha Martynenka (BEL), Francesca Musiani (IT), Christophe Van
Gerrewey (BE), Urszula Wozniak (GER)
9 November, 2009
English (with Polish, German, Belarussian, Danish)
ISBN 978-3-00-028868-5
Book Release Party @ Basso Berlin (Köpenickerstr 187, Berlin-Kreuzberg) 21 Uhr, Mittwoch, 11. November
Location of I text published in Migrating Reality

Migrating Reality
ISBN 978-9955-834-01-4
Electronic and digital systems generate completely new forms of migration. In the creative arts, new phenomena related to migration and the synergies of disparate systems are emerging. Artistic products evolve from traditional forms into hybrid digital forms. Analog products are being digitized; data spaces are trans-located from one data storage system to another; existing sounds, images, and texts are remixed and fused into new datasets.
The book is based on international conference and exhibition Migrating Reality which took place on April 4-5, 2008 in Galerie der Künste, Berlin, Germany, and on material submitted to the online magazine balsas.cc. As with the conference, the exhibition, and the on-line projects, the book is an overview of the migration topic from various perspectives, not excluding the use of a variety of languages. For example, we offer the reader an interview with Žilvinas Lilas “Bastymasis man būtų daug priimtinesnis žodis” conducted by Vytautas Michelkevičius in Lithuanian and the text “Kulturtransfer in der Frühen Neuzeit – eine andere Realität der Migration” by Philipp Zitzlsperger – an essay on migration from a historians perspective. The ideas presented textually in the book shift back and forth from essays and articles to projects and back to essays. The territories shift from social space to virtual space and eventually land us back in a realm of physical, political, economical, and historical reality.
Publisher
KHM – Kunsthochschule für Medien
>top – Verein zur Förderung kultureller Praxis e.V.
VšĮ Mene / Balsas.cc
www.migrating-reality.com | info@migrating-reality.com
Editorial board
Mindaugas Gapševičius, John Hopkins, Žilvinas Lilas, Vytautas Michelkevičius

Photographs from Slovenia now on itakephotos









For the rest of the week I’m back in Ljubljana to help with ArtNetLab at the Academy of Fine Art.

Nova Gorica is a new town, built in 1948, when the Paris Peace Treaty
established a new border between Yugoslavia and Italy
, leaving nearby Gorizia outside the borders of Yugoslavia and thus decapitating the area of the lower Vipava Valley from its regional center.

Looking across the boarder from Italy to Slovenia, and the city soon to be united by the removal of the boarder fence.



The cut across the rock face is taller than a person.

Škocjan Caves were entered on UNESCO’s list of natural and cultural world heritage sites in 1986 [more
]; the lower-right plaque is dedicated to this, the others to deaths.




Piran (Pirano) is a town and municipality in southwestern Slovenia
on the Adriatic coast along the Gulf of Piran.








…attended the opening.









Did a couple of interviews for Slovenian TV etc, not yet seen any of the tapes; hope my Slovenian was up to scratch.


The air is fragrant with burning log fires…

Sonification of You (Sonifikacija tebe / Sonificazione di te) will be at 8th Pixxelpoint Festival
, Nova Gorica
, Slovenia, in December 2007. I shall also be giving an artist’s talk. [PDF: Festival Program
, includes translation of Sonification of You into both Slovenian and Italian]
I’ve been invited to stay in Slovenia 5-15 December 2007.
Pixxelpoint is one of the most successful and renowned festivals of new media art in Slovenia and also abroad. Its purpose is firstly, to bring the information technology and new media art closer to the general public, and secondly, to raise awareness about a different potential to use computer among the young. In previous editions the festival had a big media response and over 3000 visitors visited it every year, so this is a challenge for the organizers to further expand it and trespass the boundaries of the gallery space which has become too small for all the projects which are to be carried out. The exhibition of new media art projects, as the central event of the festival will be mounted at City Gallery Nova Gorica but will include also other locations (Mostovna, Kulturni dom Gorica (Italy) and DAMS (Italy)), besides we will also include a symposium on the given topic, as well as workshops run by guest-lecturers. Accompanying activities will include numerous concerts by well-known music performers.
Curated by Narvika Bovcon and Aleš Vaupotič
, organized by the city of Nova Gorica.


Insidesmusic (USA), release 070317 Audio:
Reaction to spending three months in the former Soviet Republic of Latvia as artist-in-residence. Not speaking either official language of Latvian or Russian made life confusing. Complied using: mobile phone field recordings from both my home city, London, and Riga; output from experiments using and combining speech translation software with BBC digital radio broadcasts received in Riga, from the UK, via the Internet.

A selection of photographs from my residency in Latvia here

I enjoy airports greatly. Another flight from Riga; this time aboard a hired Turkish airline. Interesting to fly from Riga to London with Turkish crew and aircraft.
Next Page »
This blog was originally created with support from At Home in Europe, to document residency time at Riga Centre for New Media Culture RIXC, Latvia. Full details here.
© 2007-08 Martin John Callanan, All Rights Reserved.
