Experimental Tour, Mobile Formats
Three-day experimental tour in the Swiss mountains: Schmitten – Martrüel – Ramozhütte.
This project aims to develop a form of mobile/moving experiment with artistic formats and practices with media.
Media Donkeys, Mobile Formats deals with unstable ways of working and living and their effects on forms of our lives in a reality permeated by media technologies. Donkeys are equipped with a laptop, loudspeakers, webcam, mini-projector and rear projection screen. This transforms the donkeys into a mobile media station. With this mobile installation, a journey is undertaken as a performance and experiment.
Background
The donkey is one of the oldest pack and draught animals that has been used by many cultures since ancient times and has had a decisive influence on them. The donkey made nomadic, independent living possible and was also used by Arab caravan leaders as a navigation and guide animal due to its well-known ability to memorise routes that had already been travelled. Today, the donkey symbolises a backward, slow, pre-modern and religious life in cultures where progress has come to a halt. At the same time, and in contradiction to this, the donkey also stands for self-determination and independence from energy, oil, location, sedentarisation and fixed infrastructures in rough terrain. It enables nomadic cultures to lead a self-determined, independent life.
In contrast, in our Western civilisations we associate the flexible and the nomadic. In many industrialised societies, the nomadic is positively associated with the need to adapt and flexibilise. Changing places of work and residence, living a mobile life, is part of an everyday reality (‘rental nomads’ or ‘job nomads’) that is demanded by many employers today. New communication media offer ubiquitous presence and accessibility for working and communicating from anywhere. Facebook friends offer nomadic cohesion. However, more and more people also feel exposed to ever greater omnipresent control and functionalisation, which encompasses all areas of life – professional, social and private. At the same time, the nomadic also contains the potential for resistance, a withdrawal from fixed forms of living and working in a wide variety of new communities and life plans.
In this project, we are interested in the field of tension between networked media communication and control technologies and their possible withdrawal. The focus is on aspects such as resistance, the ambivalent ‘backwardness’ and self-determination of these nomadic practices in the form of artistic strategies.
Material per donkey
A webcam for audio and video recording with integrated light is attached to the front foot of the donkey. The webcam transmits the signal to the laptop. The laptop sends the signal to the speakers and the mini-projector. The mini-projector projects the image onto the rear projection screen.