> Dramatic Reading: Zdenka Becker
> Wittgenstein's Voice
> Kurt Hentschläger’s ZEE
> 1989: Austria and the End of the Cold War
- Zdenka Becker
FRIDAY OCTOBER 2, 8:00 PM
DRAMATIC READING
BEHIND DARKNESS (HINTER DER DUNKELHEIT) BY ZDENKA BECKER
ACFNY
Directed by Melanie Sutherland
Actors – TBA
In a small town in the former East Germany, Linda, a white German, lives with her mixed-race son, Patrik. The play traces their obsessions and prejudices over several weeks, culminating in a surprise ending. Behind Darkness, a fictional exploration inspired by a true event, deals with racial tensions in a reunited Germany. The play was originally written in German by Zdenka Becker (Hinter der Dunkelheit), and translated into English by Sonja Lehmann. Behind Darkness will be workshopped in New York with American actors and an American director and presented in a public performance followed by a reception with the artists.
Zdenka Becker (born in 1951 in former Czechoslovakia) is a prize-winning fiction writer, playwright, and theater director who has lived and worked in Austria for over thirty years. Her recent writings include Goodbye, Galina (a monologue for 5 voices) and a play, Boogie & Blues.
> Event Information
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 12, 2009
WITTGENSTEIN’S VOICE
ACFNY
Wittgenstein’s Voice, a conversation among eminent American and Austrian writers, artists, and thinkers, ventures to illuminate a poignant and influential philosophy that has inspired a substantial number of creative practitioners in fields like literature, non-language, and art. The conversation will focus on the direct and indirect impact of Wittgenstein’s aesthetics on modernity as well as on the search for his imprints, traces, interpretations, and modifications. With his theory of language (“linguistic turn”), Wittgenstein, one of the most important thinkers in modern philosophy, has influenced an entire generation of American and Austrian writers and poets, but also composers and visual artists.
Participants include: Marjorie Perloff (Los Angeles), Tom Pepper (Minneapolis), Sissi Tax (Berlin), Rosemarie Waldrop and Thomas Raab.
Jean-Michel Rabaté will moderate this event.
This event is presented in conjunction with the Dietrich W. Botstiber Foundation and the Slought Foundation.
> Event Information
- ZEE
Kurt Hentschläger’s ZEE: A Hallucinatory Architecture of Pure Light
by Wayne Ashley, Founding Artistic Director, FuturePerfect
Kurt Hentschläger is a Chicago-based Austrian media artist and interdisciplinary performance maker with a unique audiovisual sensibility. For over a decade, Hentschläger has been exploring ways of enhancing and intensifying perception, by temporarily removing individuals from their taken-for-granted surroundings and subjecting them to the otherworldly effects of stroboscopic lighting and shifting color fields, intense soundscapes and sub-bass, often amidst enormous multi-screen surround environments, or inside of special enclosures built specifically for the work.
Dissatisfied with the two-dimensionality of video and film projection and the limitations of adapting his work to a given architectural space, Hentschläger has constructed his own alternative worlds through live performance, installations, and video. From the large-scale audiovisual events produced as part of the Austrian duo Granular Synthesis, to collaborations with French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj and vocalist Diamanda Galas, to his solo immersive installations, Hentschläger finds ways of collapsing the gap between viewer and work, image and reality, inside and outside. Offering a compelling contemporary version of the aesthetic of the sublime, Hentschläger’s work insists that we not merely “watch” and “listen” to images and sounds at a safe distance, but that they penetrate, confront, and overwhelm us by their sense of limitless power and complexity.
The New York City premiere of ZEE extends Hentschläger’s intensity and technique into an abstract world of pulsing light and spatial disorientation that is at once exhilarating and meditative. An enclosed space is filled with a dense, odorless fog that completely obscures the walls, floor, and ceiling. All the usual cues that contribute to depth perception - texture, shadow, overlap, size, perspective - are erased, returning each spectator, as it were, to a state of “tabula rasa,” where one’s perceptual framework is reset and then recalibrated. Individuals freely roam this environment, safely guided by ropes, while flickering light filters through the haze, inducing hallucinations and sensory distortions within each viewer. A droning soundscape intensifies this full-immersion experience, shifting dynamically according to changes in color, frequency, intensity, and mood.
ZEE succeeds without a narrative or reproducible imagery, since what is seen is not captured through the eyes, but rather first produced in the brain. ZEE is a rigorous mindscape, a dream machine.
Kurt Hentschläger
Chicago-based Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger creates audiovisual compositions that lie somewhere between performance and installation. The immersive nature of his work reflects on the metaphor of the sublime. Trained as a fine artist, in 1983 he began as a sculptor by building surreal machine objects, followed by works with video, computer animation, and sound. Between 1992 and 2003 he worked collaboratively as part of the duo Granular Synthesis. His most recent solo work is more poetic and further researches the nature of human perception and the accelerated impact of new technologies on individual consciousness. http://www.hentschlager.info/
About FuturePerfect
FuturePerfect is a citywide interdisciplinary initiative that researches and presents hybrid performance practices, media forms, and artistic ideas that continue to emerge as computer technologies and electronic networks mature and become inseparable from contemporary culture. Its particular focus is the future of live performance and related visual culture. FuturePerfect 2011, a performance festival and exhibition, is slated for New York City during Spring 2011. Wayne Ashley is FuturePerfect’s founding artistic director and the former Director of Arts in Multimedia at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, BAM.
3LD Art & Technology Center
80 Greenwich Street, New York, New York
October 28 - November 15, 2009
Wed, Oct 28: Opening Reception
Wed-Fri 5-10 pm
Sat 2-10 pm
Sun 12-6 pm
Shows begin on the hour and half hour; approx. running time 20 minutes; space is limited to 30 people at a time.
Tickets:
$5 Wed, Thu, Sun
$10 Fri, Sat
Tickets available at http://3ldnyc.org/ and by phone at 212-352-3101
- Alois Mock, left, Gyula Horn, right
SEPTEMBER 2009 – JANUARY 2010
1989: Austria and the End of the Cold War
Columbia University New York, Austrian Embassy, Washington, D.C., National World War II Museum, New Orleans; Michigan State University, East Lansing
(Exact dates TBA)
For both Austria and the United States, the year 1989 marked the end of a political and cultural era: the Cold War. The revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe swept away communist regimes and had a colossal and lasting impact on these regions. While the United States soon came to be seen as the sole superpower in the international system, Austria was catapulted from the marginalized backwaters alongside the Iron Curtain into a privileged position in the center of a newly unified Europe.
The exhibition 1989: Austria and the End of the Cold War is meant to provide a thorough examination of Austria’s pivotal role in this historic moment, and position it within the larger context of the historic relationship between Austria and the United States.
The three central themes of the exhibition include the rise and fall of the “Second Cold War” (Reagan/Bush and Gorbachev), Austria as a venue for negotiations during the Cold War (summit talks and negotiations on disarmament), and the rise and fall of the Iron Curtain, with a focus on Austria and two of its neighbors during the Cold War: Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
Curators: Günter Bischof and Lorenz Mikoletzky (Austrian State Archives)Image:
June 27, 1989: The foreign ministers of Austria (Alois Mock, left) and Hungary (Gyula Horn) cut through the Iron Curtain at the border between Austria and Hungary near Klingenbach, making it possible for hundreds of thousands of East Germans to escape from the GDR to Austria via Hungary.
