Booksa, Martićeva 14d, Zagreb
Alexandra Reill – Presentation of the book written entirely on FB platform:
7th june 2013 at 7 pm at Booksa book club, Martićeva 14d, Zagreb
“WB: quoting Walter Benjamin”
A print compilation and real-time performance reflecting the contemporary relevance of the media theorist and philosopher Walter Benjamin. The structure of facebook as a social networking tool and magazine with decentralized notes, essays and media publications, in a mixture of private and public statements coming from all kinds of content fields, enhanced the concept of short daily updating and interactive communication to collectively create an associative publication on life and oeuvre of Walter Benjamin. The book serves as the central requisite of the audiovisual real-time performance. People raise their voice as well as media stations, and there is an interplay between media and human voices. In a mixture of reading, discussion and interactive performance correlations between relevant factors and opportunities for development of democracy in the context of the information age, globalization, Capitalism and Marxism are reflected together – on the basis of the work of Walter Benjamin. Wo/man learns options and limits of self-determination, options and limits of scopes of action. Technology serves wo/man, and only a framework, only a context is given, in which each moment is designed differently – a moment which Walter Benjamin described as the Angelus Novus: the space where past and future coincide and where not ideas shape presence but where presence emerges.
More info on:
http://www.kanonmedia.com/portfolio/publications/benjamin_paris.html
In the years 2010-2012, Alexandra Reill developed a trilogy of interactive media enactmens reflecting the contemporary relevance of life and oeuvre of Walter Benjamin, Hans Richter and Bertolt Brecht in an information age digitizing itself in manifold ways and at the same time struggling with turbulent economic difficulties. Besides Tribute to WB, Alexandra Reill will present also two more pieces from her interactive trilogy: Tribute to Hans Richter and Blessed Simonida.
Alexandra Reill, born in Vienna, is a conceptual and media artist and works as a filmmaker in documentary film; she invests her work with socio-cultural themes, examining the societal and sociological repercussions of digitalization and the information age for human identities. Her experimental visual worlds and live compositions as much as her performances are often participative and characterized by rhythmic and cineastic dramaturgies and the conscious employment of associative formal language, combining interactive technologies and participative communicational approaches in off- and online settings.
Selection of projects:
2008 / 2012 / 2013 – Nelkengasse: a documentary film and portrait of Heinz Moldau who was forced to flee with his family from Nelkengasse in Vienna in 1938.
2012 – Tribute to Hans Richter: interactive real-time media performance honouring life and work of one of the first filmmakers.
2012 Blessed Simonida from the Brilliant Grounds: interactive real-time performance, following Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards.
2009-2010 / 2011 – #WB: quoting Walter Benjamin: publication and participative media performance reflecting the relevance of the media theorist and philosopher Walter Benjamin today.
2008 / 2009 / 2010 – Would We Say No?: communication project in the streets of Vienna reflecting attitudes toward work in fascist times and today.
2008 Home Sweet Home: documentary film on [auto]biographic tracking of fascist traces in four post-war generations of a “majority society” in Vienna.
2006-2008 – Art Following the Trend? Artists′ Voices: interviews, publication and a study on the functions of artists in society.
2004 – founding of THARA, first competence center for Roma and Sinti in Vienna. Several experimental short films and interactive installations on time and space.
2001 – S.P.I.N.Y., an interactive feature film on CD, first production of this kind funded by MEDIA in Austria.
2000-2003 – save / safe: post-wiki and publication on borderlining as a symptom of contemporary conditioning, Deserts & Backbones: documentary film on religion and free will.
1985-1995 set and costume design for stage and film.
http://www.kanonmedia.com
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kanonmedia/176764872365994