TRANSIT LOUNGE 2008: BERLIN BRISBANE PERTH MELBOURNE SYDNEY

TRANSIT LOUNGE 2008 – BERLIN-BRISBANE-PERTH-MELBOURNE-SYDNEY

In 2008, TRANSIT LOUNGE begins in TRUDE, Calvino’s ubiquitous city of tourism. From the 16th of January, TRUDE will be found between the cities of Berlin, Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, as 15 artists collaborate remotely on the evolution of a complex, emergent structure.

The platform for this trans-disciplinary exchange is the TRANSIT LOUNGE website, powered by open-source, wiki software. An organic structure, the site grows in multiple directions as the content is layered and interlinked, tracing remote interactions and local interventions between artists. The latency of these dialogues across time zones and locations creates feedback loops (local interventions – web – local interventions) opening up spaces for mistranslation resonating between the different cities.

The multitude of inputs, exchanges, and disruptions will be distilled in an exhibition which opens in Berlin at PROGRAM on the 31st January, 2008 to coincide with transmediale.08. Here the variations will continue to multiply as the process is augmented by the actions of visitors to the space.

TRANSIT LOUNGE is a project by Katie Hepworth (Sydney) and Miriam Mlecek (Berlin) and involves the following artists:

Chris Bennie (Brisbane), Bianca Calandra (Berlin), Robert Curgenven (Berlin), Cat Hope (Perth), Tanja Kimme (Melbourne), Govinda Lange (Paris-Berlin), Somaya Langley (Berlin), Sarah Last (Brisbane), Silvia Marzall (Berlin), Ben Milbourne (Melbourne), Michael Prior (Melbourne), Lynda Roberts (Melbourne), Jodi Rose (Berlin), Sumugan Sivanesan (Sydney), Anna Tautfest (Berlin)

EMERGENCES

PROGRAM Gallery
Invalidienstr 115
10115 Berlin

Vernissage: 19:00, 31.01.08
Opening Times: 14-19:00, 01.02.08-06.02.08

(other sites to be announced)

TRANSIT LOUNGE is a partner event of transmediale.08 CONSPIRE…

TRANSIT LOUNGE would like to thank the Australia Council for their support.


This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

TRUDE

“If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the other, with the same little garnish and yellowish houses. Following he same signs we swung around the same flower beds in the same squares. The downtown streets displayed goods, packages, signs that had no changed at all. This was the first time I had come to Trude, but I already know the hotel where I happened to be lodged; I had already heard and spoken my dialogues with the buyers and seller of hardware; I had ended the days identically, looking through the same goblets at the same swaying navels.

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave.

“You can resume your flight whenever you like, “they said to me, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by the sole Trude, which does not begin,nor end. Only the name of the airport changes.”

ITALO CALVINO - INVISIBLE CITIES

DATES

The new website is almost finished + will go live HERE on the 11th of Jan. The 14 artists from Berlin, Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Melbourne will begin their online exchange on the 16th Jan, going through until the 6th Feb. The ensuing collaborations, disruptions, interuptions and evolutions will be distilled in an exhibition to be held in Berlin from the 31st Jan - 6th Feb, to coincide with the Transmediale.

WHERE
Program Gallery
Invalidenstr 115
10115 Berlin
www.programonline.de

WHEN
Vernissage: 7pm, 31st Jan 2008
Opening Times: 2-7pm, 1st - 6th Feb 2008

To receive updates about the project please subscribe to our email list by going to www.transitlounge.org/subscribe.html and filling in your details.

transit lounge 2008

transit lounge will be back in Berlin + across Australia for 3 weeks in 2008. A partner event of transmediale.08, CONSPIRE...transit lounge 2008 will involve 6 artists working together (and separately) in Berlin, responding to the secret instructions and obstructions received from artists in Sydney, Melbourne, London and Paris, in a 4d online and real world game of exquisite corpse of video, sound, images and performance.

transit lounge will run from Jan 15th - Feb 4th, and will be open to the public in Berlin from Jan 31st at Program Gallery, Mitte.

Project artists include: Bianca Calandra, Robert Curgenven, Benjamin Ducroz, Katie Hepworth, Govinda Lange, Somaya Langley, Silvia Marzall, Kristina Matovic, Michael Prior, Jodi Rose, Sumugan Sivanesan, Anna Tautfest...with more to be announced shortly.

The project website will be launched in early 2008...in the meantime, updates can be found here.

RE-PLACE BERLIN: A NEW PROJECT BY TRANSIT LOUNGE + PROGRAM

Commuting to work
Walking the dog around the block
Going to the open air market on sundays
Visiting a family on the weekend

The rituals of everyday life trace regular paths along streets and through buildings, organising the solids and voids of the built environment into narratives and patterns of association. Complicated by memory and social rituals, our experience of the city is of a dynamic place, a stage for public performances and private tragedies, of significant moments and the incredibly mundane. The habits, rituals, and actions of its population, the lived experiences within the city define it as something that is always current, always in constant, random movement.

RE-PLACE BERLIN is a web-based urban project that aims to reveal and celebrate the everyday rituals of Berlin’s inhabitants. For Phase I of the project, residents of Berlin are invited to map out frequent routes from their day-to-day living, recording the regular patterns and particular moments associated with this journey, offering others the opportunity to retrace the city in a way that directly relates to the lived experience of those who dwell there.

While commercially available tour packages tend to reduce a city to a handful of its most famous monuments, RE-PLACE BERLIN invites everyone to become a tourist of someone else's everyday ritual, to document and share some of their observations and discoveries made along the way. These insights, collected in the form of text and images, will be assembled on the website during Phase II – as points of intersection develop between the routes, the city will be remapped as a network of lived experiences.

Through the various stages of the project, RE-PLACE BERLIN seeks to provide a way to understand the city, not only through its built space, but in the way its residents are interacting with it in their daily lives – the routes we follow and the moments where these routes cross, overlap, run parallel or tangent to each other.

Please email us for more information and/or click here to participate.

RE-PLACE BERLIN was initiated by program and transit lounge in the summer of 2007.

CATALOG DVD OUT NOW!

The DVD presents an overview of all exhibitions from January- June 2007, including videos, photos and sound excerpts. The booklet contains short bios of all participants and a brief intro text. If you would like to order your copy for €5 or $10 AUD please write to: transit@transitlounge.org

THANK YOU

After 5 months the transit lounge 2007 came to an end. We would like to thank all our participants as well as Kristina Matovic, Benjamin Ducroz, Austrade and Manfred Fox for their efforts in helping to make this an extremely successful event.


Berlin, July 2007 Miriam Mlecek+Katie Hepworth

sous les pavés, la plage

from Hugo's blog, Informalism, written somewhere in Bangkok.

"S.L.P.L.P! is designed to give anyone who enters it immediate control of a little piece of the public space. Passers by are given the chance to own a space simply by inhabiting it."




sous les pavés, la plage! in the basement from hugo and Vimeo.

spoken words

Tell me how many languages you speak, and I'll tell you how many people you are"

Armenian proverb. Told to me by a friend that I met in Italy when I used to live there, remembered now because I'm back. Immersed in Italian after the bubble of English that was the Transit Lounge Berlin (a result of my embarrassingly poor German) I've been thinking a lot about the way in which languages change and evolve and the different possibilities for expression - and the concepts that are impossible to express. In the last week I've moved from the place I used to live in the north, where the language keeps traces of the Napoleonic invasion of Europe, turning its grammar back to front to match the French, to Sicily where half my family is from, and where 500 years of Arab invasion have given us sounds that don't exist on the peninsula.

The words that languages miss say a lot about the culture that speaks it. There is no word for privacy in Italian. Slowly, without much conviction, and a degree of amusement, people are beginning to adopt the English word for this most Anglo-Saxon / northern European of concepts. And these thoughts remind me of why I like German, and Chinese, the sticking together of smaller parts (whether characters or words) to express new thoughts. The precision and expression that comes from that. Kathrin - you mentioned longing in your last post Tibetu that is since buried in the blog - I love that one of the German words is the same as addiction. Its so much stronger than the English.

Na?