[TIMESCAPES CONCEPT]

[CORRIDOR X ]
    - Introduction Corridor X
    - Story Corridor X
        + Balkan non verbal
        + Monastiraki square
        + Videotopos
        + Salonica/EC conference

[ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT]
    - linear
    - non-linear
    - performative

[LINKS]

[BIOGRAPHY]

Timescapes is a collective video project based in South-East Europe that explores collective memory in video imagery and new forms of filmic representation through the possibilities non-linear editing via the Internet. (Pre)individual modes of subjective appropriation during post-production are examined for a video event with performative elements.

The technological and artistic potential of the project derives from the consideration that the video image does not document the real, but acts as a mnemonic agent or a visual memory. The project is based on the idea that video technology simulates the functions of human memory and intercerebral communications.
(For more information see www.timescapes.info)

Timescapes’ basis is a collective video-database built by five video artists/activists from Cologne (Angela Melitopoulos), Berlin (Hito Steyerl), Belgrade (Dragana Zarevac), Athens (Freddy Viannelis) and Ankara (Videa: media collective) who shaped different subject matters on the theme of mobility and migration in so-called “B-Zone territories” in South-East Europe and Turkey after 1991.

 

 

The authors apply the term “B-Zone” for a still fictitious yet emerging state of the EC. This particular transnational post-war territory is perceived as a field of “political experimentation.
New structures of political domination arises through the building of infrastructure. Natural resources are exploited against local economic interests. The B-Zone’s geopolitical uncertainty is a preliminary condition for the investment of socalled “Pan-European” projects focusing on infrastructure and industrial projects realized by international corporations.

In the B-Zone the disintegration of local interest towards global economic developments is deeply felt. The constitution of local resistance became a chimera. Documentaries producing “counter-information” or media art projects on digital video have nevertheless notably increased but in opposition to television networks, artistic networks hardly dare to unlock the potentials of their collective mnemonic agencies.

 

 

The project aims to set up a dislocated, non-institutionalised group of video artist/activists and to unfold the internal dynamics of the same collective database through the creation of a narrative. The artists are offered the use of a non-linear editing platform via the Internet and to communicate through filmic dialogues, allowing for the possibility for images and sounds to communicate directly.

 

Fake prophets, fake Jesuses, fake Christs

Multiple micro-relations, in-between images and sounds, a generative/generational development of narration, and the connectivity or disruptivity of perception beg to be explored from different geographical viewpoints before functions of representation narrow the potential of narration. The possibility to have a dislocated group of authors inscribing their individual artistic method and their radical subjective view of the material while being simultaneously related to each other, promotes an essential form of story telling within video: a collective mnemonic narrative that shatters the limits of documentaries that describe the “other” from another place and reinforce a singular view point as truth or reality. Radical subjectivities interconnected through systems of non-linearity with a medium that ontologically simulates cerebral functions of memory, will open up the agency of imagery, its multiple signification and consciousness.