A performance, installation and intervention-based seminar to develop concepts and art works in a wide variety of media.
We address "control" in two ways: a) in its cybernetic sense, meaning not domination but interdependence, with the role of the artist as one actor among many, who can take a shot at affecting processes out of anyone's sole authority, managing connections, encounters, relationships, and b) following the idea first articulated by Deleuze in his "control societies"; a fluid regime of mutual surveillance and continuous behavior modulation.
The ctrl-space seminar focuses on the moments and sites where these processes are being played out. Its aim is to open up spaces for things to happen, in interventions and performances, constantly networked and entangled in a multitude of relationships. At its heart this is a performance seminar, addressing the uniqueness of the present moment.
We will continue to develop KHM's first start-up access.wtf, a corporate spin-off of this seminar, dedicated to opening up personal approaches to art. The summer semester will conclude with the official product launch. For further information see access.wtf
The seminar practices reading contemporary phenomena through the lens of the term "access" and querying them for their potential as raw material for art. How do you provide access to your art? To yourself? Under which conditions? Who do you exclude? How is the work defined by the way it is being accessed by / the way it positions itself to the audience?
We'll discuss your concepts-in-progress in a free colloquium. New students from all backgrounds are welcome to join this ongoing process. The aim is to develop new methods and approaches, especially those that cross diverse media in a performative way.
Workshops:
CryptoParty @ Glasmoog, 3 May 2022
Mid Term Review @ Motel One Waidmarkt, 31 May – 1 June 2022
Guests:
Petra Tabeling, Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, talking about how to how to safely work with psychologically distressing imagery / stories / events, 14 June, 2022. Open to everyone at KHM.
Working language is English. To join please email Christian.
We'll continue to read contemporary phenomena through the lens of "access", and query them for their potential as raw material for art.
How do you provide access to your art? To yourself? Under which conditions? Who do you exclude? How is the work defined by the way it is being accessed by / the way it positions itself to the audience?
We'll discuss your concepts-in-progress in a free colloquium. New students from all backgrounds are welcome to join this ongoing process. The aim is to develop new methods and approaches, especially those that cross diverse media in a performative way.
Workshops:
Mid Term Review
CryptoParty / surveillance self-defence
Guests:
Stefanie Klingemann
Lauren Lee McCarthy (public lecture on January 6, 2022)
Andy Kassier
Working language is English. To join please email Christian
After working on the specifics of showing art in public space for three terms, this term we took a different approach to address an audience. Whereas previously we used commercial advertising infrastructure to show art to an idealised public "everybody", we researched the possibilities of using Facebook's and Instagram's notorious microtargeting advertising infrastructure to tailor art only to a highly select audience.
The seminar resulted in the founding of KHM's first commercial start-up spin-off, access.wtf. Below are some photo impressions from the office opening celebrations, coinciding with the February 2022 Rundgang, which gave visitors the exclusive opportunity to preview the start-up's services and register for early bird access.
Focusing on the term "access", we'll look at phenomena relating to the climate and corona crises, and query those for their potential as raw material for art. These include:
access control
gatekeeping policies and subversions
public, private and privileged space
open access and secret knowledge
security breaches
(networked) control technologies, and the associated jargon
We'll pay special attention towards different ways to facilitate interaction and exchange with people (the "audience"). This can be within as well as outside of established art contexts.
How do you provide access to your art?
Should it be free-for-all? Can you deny people access, or should it be linked to certain obligations/conditions? How would that change the art? How to include people with disabilities, with a different level of media access/proficiency/practice?
It (again) leads back to the question of the relationship to the audience that is articulated by the work.
We'll work towards a public demonstration of any resulting works towards the end of the summer term, regardless of whether the Rundgang will take place.
Artist and activist guests include Mischa Leinkauf, Joanie Lemercier and ꒝լuც Ꮥᕱꊰꂅ ᏕᎵᕱ꒝ꂅ.
On-site visit/workshop at Hambach/Garzweiler (if hygiene measures allow).
additionally feel invited to join us at
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freies
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Freies Rumhängen is a virtual space which opens up the possibility - even in times of remote teaching - to have unexpected encounters with one another.
Co-catalysed by Christian Sievers and Sam Hopkins.
Since the beginning of the Corona crisis, the usage and understanding of space has changed radically. In this seminar we'll look at how our relationship to private and public, inside and outside space is continuing to be redefined. We'll query these "new normal" ideas of space for their potential for artistic intervention.
Of central interest will be the question of proximity vs. distance. We'll use it as subject matter and artistic strategy.
This is a praxis seminar to discuss and develop concepts and art works in a wide variety of media. It is ideally taking place as a meeting of bodies and minds in room 2, but can migrate to the net, if necessary.
Towards the end of the seminar resulting short works produced in the context of the seminar were shown on a large advertising screen in the main train station of Cologne: https://www.khm.de/termine/news.5077.public-space-video-im-hbf-koln/
This seminar took the then just unfolding Coronavirus crisis, and its consequences in form of extreme social/physical distancing and the restriction of our human rights, in order to query closed, isolated and intimate spaces for their potential for artistic intervention.
The question was: What happens to art in a situation in which the other, each and every other on the street, in the supermarket, or in the park, must be seen as a potential threat? Where and what are the raw materials now for: adventure, risk, unpredictability, proximity, intimacy and presence? We tried to use this rare moment of limitation to explore new ways of working, and treated the limited availability of tools, devices and labs as an advantage, in that it freed us from expectations, constraints, and all kinds of conventions and norms.
The seminar worked towards a presentation of works in a semi-public space. We used commercial video screens in the Cologne underground train platforms to display very short video works: https://www.khm.de/public_space_video/
Guest: Mike Cooter, London
Surveillant Architectures was a discussion and production seminar, geared to critically engage contemporary surveillance and control measures in artistic practice.
The seminar dealt with how public and private space is created, used and controlled through surveillance and security measures, and how room for play and action is being established. We negotiated issues of visibility and invisibility, hiding and reconnaissance.
The focus was on the development of new methodologies, identities, and narratives, especially those that cross diverse media in a performative way.
See the Surveillant Architectures Blog for news.
The sky’s an unusual colour
The weather is doing unusual things
And our leaders aren’t even pretending not to be demons
So where is the good heart to go but inwards?
Why not lock all the doors and bolt all the windows?
All I am are my doubts and suspicions
I against you against we against them
(Kate Tempest, 2019)
Continuing from last semester's live situative set-ups, we'll look at space and its potentials for
> adventure, risk, unpredictability, proximity, intimacy and presence.
Taking into account the various understandings of the concept of distance that were brought about by worldwide realtime communication over the last 160 years, we'll foreground central issues like accessibility, safety and security, and how to (re-)establish room for trust, play and maneuver.
What are the possible ways to query space, taking the role of the observer or the associate, the insider?
The seminar will explore the unique potential of live situative set ups. We will open a way into the creation of real-time art work like live performance, intervention, installation and other real time experiences. Topics covered include adventure, risk, unpredictability, proximity, intimacy and presence.
Cryptoparty @ Glasmoog: 26 November 2019
Mid Term Review: 3/4 December 2019
Workshop: archival strategies
Guests:
Dominique Gonzales-Foerster
Building on the subject matter covered in Surveillance 101, we take Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” as a starting point to address contemporary modes of surveillance: algorithmic, fluid, social, multifocal, networked. We’ll look at the different forms that systematic observation takes today and how it can be used towards artistic ends.
Hands-on Surveillance & Counter-Surveillance techniques
Archival practices
Prison field trip (TBC - seems hard to get in)
Mid Term Review: 4. June 2019
More info and readings see our blog
This semester will begin with a historical survey of the field of surveillance studies, including its beginnings, art, engineering and theory. Selections of key historical and theoretical texts, samples of empirical research and an introduction to the debates about privacy, networks and power will be explored. Readings in philosophical positions include Foucault, David Lyon, Steve Mann, Ken Goldberg and David Murakami Wood. A study of film, art, and scientific treatments of the theme help map the differences and tensions in urban space today.
Surveillance 101 will be followed by Surveillance 102 in cooperation with Department of Sound in summer 2019.
The seminar will consider voice and sound and its techno-political implications in the context of social control today. Speculation is considered a raw material.
Artists covered this semester use voice to connect separate objects and spaces, to disorient and create doubt.
Artists covered include: Ale Bachlechner, Judith Barry, Francis Ford Coppola, Jill Magid, Kerstin Ergenzinger, Stephanie Glauber, Vito Acconci.
Voice can be an object of study or a mode of inquiry inside or outside “other” forms and media. The interwoven worlds of computational, social, architectural, aural and observational surveillance may be used as a base.
Projects can include those developing a single voice, reclaiming a found voice, or a new exchanging of different voices.
It’s possible to be heard without vocalizing. Further elements toward production of projects can include: Installation, scenography, writing, walking in the city, film, television, mobile devices, musical instruments, telepresence, remote sensing data collection, 3D modeling etc.
Guests:
Ale Bechlecher
Kerstin Ergenzinger
John Miller and Aura Rosenberg
Field trips:
German Courtroom
Individual Artificial Intelligence audio museum tour
Corporate towers
Local Prison
Following on from "the Body and the Network", we explore historical and contemporary discourses and productions of "real" and "fake", as well as and their development into various cultural movements and commodities. Starting from personal observation, we focus on the slide from real to fake, and back. What new relationships are there to be had with the fake?
Wednesdays 10-13h @ room2
First day of seminar: 18 October 2017 (see the calendar here)
Mid Term Review: 5/6 December 2017
Gäste / invited speakers:
Artist Kerstin Ergenzinger
Journalist Petra Tabeling
Sociologist Dirk Baecker
Artist Tetjus Blendermann
Building on the winter term's „Systematic Observation and Recall“ the seminar will look at body extensions in societies of control and how they manifest in networked media. This includes art works, network activity, performances or videos that reconfigure, refocuse and recontextualize current technologies of connection and display.
We will investigate new transient cultures of extending and marking the body for security, surveillance, pleasure and storytelling, and contemporary platforms for live display including the theatre, the databank and the MAX Patch.
Workshops:
Raspberry Pi Basics
A practical workshop with help from Martin Nawrath to configure and install network devices with the Raspberry Pi as a basis. Aimed at all experience levels, the workshop will introduce the basics of networking technology, the command line, scripting and automation, as well as working with external sensors.
Media for Live Events
Building on this, there will later on in the term be the opportunity to work with Prof. Larry Shea, from School of Drama, Carnegie Mellon University. In this several-weeks long workshop we‘ll use the new skills to imagine and build new networked and sensor-based set-ups for installations, performances and open scenarios, working towards Rundgang.
Mid Term Review: 9 &10 May 2017
Excursion to opening days of documenta 14
Required reading:
- Flesh and Stone, The Body and the City in Western Civilization, Richard Sennett, New York, 1994
- Nervous Systems, HKW Berlin, 2016, introduction by Anselm Franke, Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski (online)
- Out of Body, Skulptur Projekte Münster, 2016: The Body of the Web (online)
- Surveillance, Performance, Self-Surveillance. Interview with Jill Magid by Geert Lovink (online)
Gäste / invited speakers
Geert Lovink: Medienkatastrophe, 20.4., 19 h, Aula || video
Simon Denny: Medienkatastrophe, 26.4., 19 h, Aula
Mark Bain
Prof. Larry Shea (June-July)
A discussion and production seminar, geared to critically engage contemporary surveillance and control measures in artistic practice.
The seminar deals with how room for play, action and critique is being established by artists and filmmakers today. Using public and private space as examples, issues of “controlled states” under surveillance and security will be examined.
The focus is on the development of new methodologies, identities, and narratives, especially those that cross diverse media in a performative way.
Required reading includes Foucault‘s ‚Discipline and Punish‘, Deleuze‘s ‚Postscript on the Societies of Control‘ and the introductory essay to HKW's "Nervous Systems" catalogue.
Drone workshop
Mid Term Review: 6. & 7. December 2016
Continuing the previous seminar, we will look at the role of women in the development of techno culture, leading up to the current state of ubiquitous surveillance.
Ada Lovelace
Cornelia Sollfrank
Hito Steyerl
Joan Jonas
Kristin Lucas
Laura Poitras
Martha Rosler
Sophie Calle
Suzanne Treister
Event:
15. to 17. May 2015, Chaos Cologne: „Edge of Control“
The first Chaos Cologne conference, a cooperation of KHM and Chaos Computer Club Köln:
Workshops and talks, exchange and networking,
keynotes by the artist Cornelia Sollfrank
Reading:
Zielinski, Siegfried, Deep Time of the Media. Towards an Archeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technica Means. / Archäologie der Medien: zur Tiefenzeit des technischen Hörens und Sehens
Signatur MED B.1 - 18