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

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

[Lake Klanško in Stormy Weather]

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.

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.