Sommerschule Beeskow

Spatialization – Cultural Sciences – The Arts

The Art Archive Beeskow in the Context of a Globalized Culture

July 9 to July 11, 2010

Kunstarchiv Beeskow / Castle of Beeskow

 

The global character of culture intensifies, on a local level, the rapid reformation of the specific cultural forms of expression of human beings. Globalization of culture leads to abstraction, ambiguity and an accelerated circulation of the global system of symbols. Increasing availability of information and the present’s complexity challenge individuals as well as societies to find their identity.

The opening of Germany’s borders in 1989 exemplifies this development and the need to integrate the local archive into a global archive of knowledge. The Kunstarchiv Beeskow is testimony to this integration: It is in this art archive where in 1990 the last Ministry of Culture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Treuhandanstalt (an East German privatizing agency and enterprise) collected art pieces that had formerly been owned by the GDR’s parties and public organizations. The archive holds artworks ranging from conformist art to the forms of art that demonstrate the destabilization of the GDR’s official cultural policy.

Nowadays, after a phase of cultural decline, the Kunstarchiv Beeskow is finding itself in a peripheral situation, in which the expansion of information has just begun. The Kunstarchiv Beeskow is dynamic in its development as compared to the typically highly structured cultural centers. At this stage, the archive is restructuring and repositioning itself within the European cultural field. This is not only due to the reconstruction of the archive’s buildings or the German-Polish art exchange that is now taking place in Beeskow, it can also be seen as a consequence of the recently initiated pictorial- and image-scientific interpretation of the archive’s corpus.

The Summer School will discuss the new challenges for the function of the archive in the global culture and the discrepancy between an accelerated gain of information and cultural decline. The discussion will focus on Spatialization, Cultural Sciences and the Arts trying to concretely approach solutions.

The increased significance of the theoretical and practical engagement of the archive for contemporary artists is not a coincidence. As a generator of world models not only of the present, but especially of the future, artistic practice, too, is facing the world’s growing complexity and the discrepancy between the accelerated gain of information and cultural decline. Which kind of assumptions about the archive in the context of global culture can therefore be educed from artistic works?

Along with the discussions concerning the above-mentioned fields the interdisciplinary nature of these fields as well as the exchange with experts shall offer scientific insights and knowledge. The Summer School will be addressing young scientists and artists who are intensively engaging with the cultural archive and/or working at the intersections between the arts and the archive.

The Summer School is organized by

 

Prof. Dr. Elize Bisanz (Leuphana University Institute for Studies in Art and Music))

Dr. Ilona Weser (Director of Kunstarchiv Beeskow)

Content and concept in collaboration with: Sophie Dabbert, Kaya De Wolff, Kristin Drechsler,

Lena Felde, Frederike Gülzow, Lena Jöhnk, Franziska Linke and Elena Malzew

Project Coordination: Marlene Heidel, M.A.

Contact: sommerschulebeeskow@yahoo.de

http://www.sommerschulebeeskow.wordpress.com

Symposium: Meaning in the arts, an interdisciplinary conversation

Interdisciplinarity, widely admired as a stimulating and uniquely fertile approach to inquiry, can be rather an ilusive phenomenon in the real world. Yet even a casual interdisciplinary conversation often gives off exciting sparks. Therefore this symposium will feature opportunities for both formal and informal exchanges.  All the presenters, and we hope all the attendees, share the belief that artistic activity communicates an important and irreplaceable sort of meaning, but how, and why? What is the nature of this meaning? Does it vary from art form to art form, or even within a given art form? These and similar questions will serve to focus our dialogue, which although pluralistic, will not sacrifice disciplinary rigor in order to achieve interdisciplinary goals. Live musical performance and visual-art examples will be incorporated in the presentations. A wide variety of views on the nature of meaning from diverse philosophical and semeiotic points of view will be discussed, including the sweeping contributions of Charles Sanders Peirce  both to philosophy and semeiotic.

read more…

http://www.depts.ttu.edu/pragmaticism/symposium/Meaning_in_the_Arts/Welcome.html