Independent Curator
http://mikro.in-berlin.de/abroeck

Dr. Andreas Broeckmann is an art historian and curator who lives in Berlin. Independently curated exhibitions include projects at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam ('Image:Process', 2008), Media Art Biennal Seoul ('media_city_seoul', 2008), Skuc Gallery in Ljubljana ('KRcF - Room for Manoeuvre', 2006), at TENT/Witte de With in Rotterdam ('Tracer / Neuralgic', 2004), and with Kontejner / MaMa in Zagreb ('Runtime Art', 2004). From 2005 till 2007, he was one of three artistic directors of TESLA - Laboratory for Arts and Media in Berlin.

From 2000 to 2007 he was the Artistic Director of transmediale - festival for art and digital culture berlin. From 1995-2000, he worked as a project manager at V2_Organisation Rotterdam, Institute for the Unstable Media. Broeckmann studied art history, sociology, and media studies in Germany and Britain. He holds a PhD in Art History from the University of East Anglia, Norwich/UK. He is a member of the advisory board for Visual Arts of the Goethe Institut, and of the Council for the Arts, Berlin. He co-maintains the Spectre mailing list and is a member of the Berlin-based media association mikro. Co-founder of Les Jardins des Pilotes. In university courses, curatorial projects, and lectures he deals with art, technology, digital culture, and an aesthetics of the machinic. He is currently working on a study about 20th century machine art. 

Day 2: Saturday 4th October, Keynote Address

'Intimate Publics. Memory, Performance, and Spectacle in Urban Environments'

Cities are sites of spectacle. We walk around, looking into faces, checking out shop windows, posters, screens and facades, scanning for the new, the unexpected, the beautiful, and the wicked. The 'screen' of the city is cluttered with surfaces and items, vying for attention. A barely distinguishable mix of mediated messages we either look for - whether as street signs, clues we want to find again, or maybe as oversized TV screens during a popular sports event - while other items we barely notice, or learn to ignore. What does it mean to 'look' in public space? Are we being cheated, or caressed, by the empty billboards whose surface time no advertiser has rented? Do the large video screens testify to the triumph of a post-urban anonymity, or are they mere signs of a failed attempt at competing with the intimate media that vibrate in back pockets, and that cocoon the gaze and the listening mind? What does Josef Robakowski's 1978 video, From My Window, tell us about the multiple layers of public and private observations, about the interlacing of personal curiosity, voyeurism, and state surveillance? Who are the subjects of viewing in public space? And what does it mean to perform the city space, furrowed with surveillance technology, like those people in Noise (1998) who left their anonymous video messages to the recording box that Zoran Todorovic placed in the streets of Belgrade? The view from the window of Berlin's Staatsbibliothek cafeteria in 1998, out onto the wasteland of Potsdamer Platz, before the fall of the Wall, an age before the construction of the Sony Center: a personal memory, shared by many, a lost image reflected in Wim Wenders' movie, Wings of Desire (1987), that has Curt Bois stumbling across what used to be Potsdamer Platz, unable to find a real equivalent for his half-century old memories of the city's face. Each city, wherever people live, is rife with such imaginations, a cultural stage, and a container of mediated memories.

Day 2: Saturday 4th October, Session 1: Art, Art Technology and public space

'Test Cases for the Public Sphere. Recent projects by Knowbotic Research'

The transformation of the public sphere is a continuous process that is intimately linked not only to the development of media technologies, but also to the ways in which different agents perform in urban space. For over ten years, the artist group Knowbotic Research (www.krcf.org) has been exploring the possibilities for agency in translocal spaces. Most recently, they have been investigating the construction of meaning and communication in a series of 'test cases' that raise important questions about the constitution of subjectivity under the conditions of globalisation.