step 3

step 2

We hope to see all `berlin-bloggers´ tomorrow....

GALLERY DEMOLITION PART 1

PHOTOS OF GALLERY DEMOLITION PART 1

IN TRANSIT

sitting in changi airport, almost back in berlin. Sitting in the transit lounge of the worlds biggest transit lounge, this is the worlds most generic city. full of shopping malls of tourists buying things that aren't really that cheap, longing for some lost tax free day.

In the midst of all of this are moments of intense localness, usually related somehow to food. Places that recall the rest of south east asia. Hawker stalls and plastic chairs, big chilli crabs and steaming bowls of katong laksa. beef kway teow in the redlight district.

I love airports though. After days of trying to work out a strange city, the airport feels like home. Like a decompression chamber getting you ready to enter your old/new world.

time to board.

Greetings from Jasper and Isabelle

This is a project Izzy and I did together in September last year. You might remember these hot pink dinosaurs when they were small wooden toys . This installation was of six works that sat outside Customs House in Sydney for Art and About 06. They are made out of marine plywood, perspex and metal and sit on 280kg steel plates.

First "Hello" from Alma in Berlin

Hello to everybody,

my name is Alma, I live in Berlin and will be one of the blog moderators, though I'm still wondering, what a "blog moderator"really IS - but as we all are more or less dealing with "floating subjects and identities" (and what is THAT?) I'm sure that I will find a way how to generate a floating moderator...

I'm very happy to take part in the Transitlounge 2007 - in 2006 I was a visitor and I liked the way how Miriam and Katie managed it to focus more on processes than on products (everybody is speaking about that - but only a few people are able to realize it).

Apart from my interest in processes I'm also linked with Transitlounge by my research project on tourism and art. In my opinion every artist that takes part in an "artist-in-residence-program" is a kind of tourist - so most of you will soon follow some of the tourist's paths in Berlin. As your steps are led by images and imaginations about Berlin I'm interested in the way how you now create your "mental map" of Berlin (before you go there), how you will realize that map and how you will surely always change and re-create it (when you're here) and last but not least how you'll reconstruct "Berlin" when you're back in Australia.

That's why I don't plan to be your guide - I suggest that it'll be better the other way round: Maybe I could follow you and your steps and you will be my guide. I want to be a kind of shadow - but an active one who speaks to you, who asks some questions, who collects your images and words and who tries to connect them a little bit. So that's my first step in trying to be a moderator: to create a visible and unvisible shadow.
Hope you'll like it.

Happy to see you soon
and best wishes from Berlin

Alma

feet up in the lounge?

After a bit of a warm-up on the winter chill in Japan, a few weeks in Sydney's not-so-summer paves the way for a return to doonas and beanies in Berlin. Got some new sounds from the back of beyond and a yen for collaborating 'round the Transmediale melee and through February's return to the great indoors. Das Kleine Fieldrecording festival should be a hoot and some abstract sound action for the month in the Lounge should rattle the rafters a little.
Was good to get the low-down and put some faces to the virtual identities at the meet-up in Newtown last night and looking forward to discovering the Berlin contingent's ideas.
More words presently when I'm not in a room full of adolescent network wargamers letting one another's avatar-blood. $%@# internet cafes....

first post from hugo

For me Transit Lounge will be the launching point for a travelling scholarship through which I will be learning from informal settlers (people building their own pieces of the city, usually out of desperation and without official recognition) and the urban professionals who are working with them. After Berlin I will spend the next 18 months in Bangkok, Tijuana/San Diego and Caracas (Venezuela) working with and learning from architects, community organisations, artists, urbanists and the communities of informal settlers themselves.

I will be interested in how informal processes are at work in Berlin. Due to the short period of stay and lack of language skills this is bound to be relatively superficial and naive, a situation i am looking forward to exploring...

Kenzee, I am also very excited about the potential for collaboration and cross-pollenation. I always loved Katie and Miriam's idea of taking up where your predecessor left off, drawing the feet from someone elses legs...

Good luck to those starting off, can't wait to see all that you do.

h

Trained both as an architect (graduated from Architecture University of Lisbon, 2000) and as an artist (finished MA Fine Arts, Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, 2006) the works I produce are investigations on the possibility of enhancing hidden dimensions of space.

This means to acknowledge the relation between the potential embedded in physical space to arouse different/multiple/infinite perceptions of the same space, and our inbuilt mechanisms of perception and assessment of reality; the intricate interaction between both is, in my view, responsible for the emergence of those recondite territories. In other words, I work with the principles of intuition and discourses, which act upon the body in actual space.

Within this framework I have developed the notion of constructive paintings to investigate the potential of painterly representations to challenge architecture, by mobilizing its strength to construct and deconstruct space, both physical space and represented space. Painting has the power to alter/subvert the properties of the built environment: a wall, which is known to be a solid element can be liquefied by means of painting. I work with both painting and constructive materials as media that allow from embodied, to fluid, to barely visible existences; from explicit presence to invisibility.

At the same time I approach painting as a constructive process similar to building architecture, from a two-dimensional design to an object. I explore this issue by defining a process of building images by layering. The layering process starts by defining representations of space (computer 3D images, topographic maps, etc.), developing further until it becomes tactile (painterly surfaces), achieving the character of substance (objecthood).

Painting, more then a form of mimicking reality, renders visible potential realities. It does so in a logic of its own but not disconnected from reality. I see painting as a form of legitimizing the existence of spaces beyond the physical spatiality we might inhabit. The surface of the picture plane works as an independent ontological territory that attests for the credibility of the places I ‘build’.

BIOGRAPHY: KRISTINA MATOVIC

Perpetually seduced by the 4 dimensional and captivated by light; immersive environments have evolved. Concerned with the conception and representation of the future - projects investigate the social and psychological ramifications of the evolution of technology and aspire to assist in the positive reconstruction there of. Environments exist and are experienced in the threshold between the external and internal, real and virtual.

Having studied as a graphic designer at Monash University Melbourne, Kristina Matovic devoted her 4^th year to the research and development of META_ME, or later know as ISTGAMN (inflatable seat that glows and makes noise). This project was concerned with the negotiation of duel realities and manifest as a seating ‘device’ that utilized methods of physical isolation. META_ME was shown at Technikunst: Flesh vs Machine and further exhibitions and collaborations developed including: Two Point Two, Nextwave – Containers Project and the opening of Liquid Architecture 7.

Color Change

first step: to be continued ......

In Between

This is my official start into the transitlounge season. I quit Tzannes Associates last Friday to start concentrating on ideas and organizing the move. Interestingly I had to give a short talk at my firm before I left focussing on what inspires me- I chose the topic of the in-between and showed images of works by Rachel Whiteread(negation of space-see image above), Rebecca Horn(installation between art and space), Zaha Hadid(translating painting into architecture), Peter Zumthor(combining sensuality and spaces), Daniel Libeskind(in between the lines), Sydney(in between sea and land) and Berlin(the perfect space, environment and frame for everyone in-between). These inspirations are vital for my works and I gain my energy from being in between two places and disciplines and a constant change. Exploring this situation further will hopefully lead me to a more specific theme for next year.....

The lead-up to Transit Lounge

With this first post, I would like to give a bit of a background to who I am, and what I am looking forward to most about being involved in Transit Lounge.
I'll start with where I am at the moment. I'm currently living in Sydney, Redfern to be exact, and working four days a week to earn enough money to get a plane ticket and live overseas for a few months next year.
With the rest of my time I try to work on my art. It's not an ideal set-up, which makes the incentive of next year's residency even more enticing.
I have deferred a Master's degree in visual arts so I have the possibility of working, thinking and writing in my own time.
I am looking forward to the learning experience that I expect working on Transit Lounge will provide me. What interests me most about this, is the collaborative process, and working with people who might have a totally different approach to thinking about and creating art.
I think that Berlin is the perfect backdrop for a project looking at transit in a virtual and physical sense: its itinerant population has transformed it into one big transit lounge.

INTRODUCTION

Tickets booked, final grant applications in, all artists confirmed. Looks like we are all set to go for Transit Lounge Berlin 2007. A few changes from last year - we now have 16 participants, including 8 Germans. And this year, half the participants are architects.

Like last year, the blog is the virtual lounge; a place for all of us participants to discuss the themes, record observations and develop work in public. Its here that we can exchange words and images with the people we'll eventually be working with. But we're keen to take the blog beyond this - delving into topics somehow related to the theme Transit Lounge. To help us with that, Sarah Thompson + Alma-Elisa Kittner will take over the moderation of the blog for a month each. Sarah is keen to focus on the process of collaboration, while Alma will delve into issues of tourism, and in between , I want to develop my current obsession: transnational identities, migrations and nomadic lives.

BIOGRAPHY: GOVINDA LANGE

Govinda Lange is a composer, producer, DJ and audiovisual artist based in Canberra, Australia, who works under the pseudonym of Defunkt. His projects have included soundtracks for short films, animations, contemporary dance pieces, and live audiovisual performances. He is frequently found carting AV equipment into unusual spaces at odd times.

Govinda incorporates a mixture of organic rhythms, coupled with snatches of live field recordings, creating evolving soundscapes that conspire to bring listeners into a nostalgic and evocative headspace.

He has performed at many festivals and events in Australia, including Loud Is Boring, Canberra in 2006; Electrofringe, Newcastle in 2005; Canberra Fringe Festival in 2004; eXXentricity, Canberra in 2003; St Kilda Festival, Melbourne in 2002; going as far back as the Panopticon Conspiracy, Canberra in 1995. As an event supervisor, he has assisted in the coordination of the Collabrador space at Electrofringe in 2005; and the Melbourne Big Day Out, since 2002.

Recent work includes Gnostalgia, a collaborative improvised AV performance with the RTFM visual artists, presented at The Front Gallery in Canberra, as part of Loud Is Boring; field recordings of, and synthesis of, insect sounds for an animation work by Neville Black; and the development of a networked audiovisual piece with Tim O'Loghlin, incorporating live video feeds from around the globe.

BIOGRAPHY: BEN MILBOURNE

ben is an urbanist, and for better or worse a globalist. he is not convinced it is a good idea, but he masterplans large and small parts of cities for cultures not his own, quite often for people he has never met and places he has never been.

the ever expanding international design competition system, a decade or more of foreign architect urban experimentation in china and increasingly the middle-east, local urban design for larger projects has been superseded in favor of google-earth urbanism.

ben has worked in europe and australia on projects in beijing, moscow, st petersberg, chang-sha, dubai, paris, jeddah, the hague, nanjing, hamburg, lausanne, the cape verde islands, goa, london, sydney and claims no definitive approach for intervening in contemporary urban conditions, rather argues for urban design strategy rich with programmatic complexity and juxtaposition, flexibility for organic growth, change and local invention during implementation.

ben is currently employed at lab architecture studio as a design architect working on a variety of projects in china, india and the middle east. prior to joining lab ben worked for the office for metropolitan architecture/rem koolhaas in rotterdam. ben graduated from sydney university's bachelor of architecture program with first class honors in 2002 and has been working in architectural practice since 2000.

BIOGRAPHY: ANNA TAUFEST

Anna is a young architect from Berlin. She began studies at the Technical University of Munich in 1998 and was part of the curators and directors team for the multimedia project Kino24 from 1999 - 2001 at the Gloria Filmpalast at Stachus in Munich. Her studies were continued at the Berlin University of the Arts and the ETSAV in Barcelona. Anna graduated in 2005 with a project called `Conexiòn –Barcelonas connection to the sea´ aiming to re-establish the connection between city and sea at a historical site through an urban intervention. Anna worked for varions architecture firms in Germany as well as for the archplus magazine in Berlin. She co-founded the studio workshop Atelier Ohlauerstr.36. in 2006.

BIOGRAPHY: JODI ROSE

Jodi Rose is a nomadic sound artist, writer and freelance cultural commentator originally from Australia, who works producing audiovisual performance, sound installations, experimental music, radio programs and sonic art events around the world. Jodi trained in Sculpture, Performance and Installation at Sydney College of the Arts, and was the fourth Bridge Guard at the Art and Science Bridge Guard residential centre in Sturovo, Slovakia 2005-2006; and Australia Council New Media Arts - ABC Radio: Radiophonic Artist in Residence at ABC Radio National, Sydney in 2004.

Jodi's major work and reason for traversing the globe so thoroughly in recent years is Singing Bridges, a worldwide networked performance and series of compositions based on the sound of vibrations in bridge cables. Jodi released Singing Bridges: Vibrations and Variations, a CD of bridge compositions with remixes by widely renowned international and local artists working in experimental sound and electronic music; and won ‘Best Australian Blog’ for Singing Bridges Travel Diary in 2005. Her work featured in Pixelache Electronic Arts Festival in 2004 & 2005; Overgaden Sound Art Festival - Copenhagen; Sound States Uncertain Destinations, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art; and Sound in Space Audiotheque, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

Jodi’s radio projects include Radiophonic Features: Bridge Songs and Stories, a Trip Across Australia broadcast on ABC Radio National Radio Eye in 2004; Archipelago, a 90 minute sonic seascape about ISEA International Symposium of Electronic Arts; and Bridge Guard Radio Diary from her experience in Slovakia, broadcast on ABC Radio National The Night Air; a series on Musique Concrete for Classic FM, and recently hosting a nightly program on TiN Radio for the National Young Writers Festival, she developed the idea for an ongoing series of conversations starting in the Transit Lounge.

BIOGRAPHY: DETLEF JUNKERS, KATHRIN ZöLLER THOMAS BRÜGGEMANN

Detlef Junkers and Kathrin Zöller are both involved in different roles with Junkers & Partners Architects, Berlin since 2003. Their Prices and projects include: State Court, Frankfurt (Oder) 2005, School in Eschbachtal, Bad Homburg v.d. Höhe 2004, Legal Center Magdeburg, in planning, State Consulate of Brbg/ Meckl.-Vorpommern, Berlin commendation, Museum for Fine Arts, Leipzig 2.Price, Holocaust-Memorial Site, Aspang-Wien 2.Price, 1. Price „archi-europe Facade design 2005“, Special commendation „Bauen im Bestand, Hessen 2005“.Thomas Brüggemann was born 1959 in Münster, lives and works in Berlin. Thomas studied at the Kunstakademie Münster with professors Jochen Zellmann and Ulrich Erben, he graduated with his masters in 2006. Examples of solo exhibitions: “in situ“, Stadsgalerij Heerlen, Glaspaleis –“Luz mala“, 2002 Galerie Juliane Wellerdiek, Berlin, 2001 Kunst- und Kulturkreis Berkelkraftwerk, Vreden – “Kulturlandschaft“, Geologisch-Paläontologisches Museum, Münster – “ Von on oben gesehen“

BIOGRAPHY: LARA O'REILLY

Lara O’Reilly’s marked predilection for the sublime and the paradoxical is expressed in a very diverse body of work that has its roots in performance but emphasizes the sculptural and everyday environments of architecture and landscape. Her achievements as a young artist include winning the 2005 National Marten Bequest Travel Scholarship, the 2004 Basil and Muriel Hooper Scholarship from the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the recent 2006 National Australian Visual Art emerging artist award.

O’Reilly’s interests in landscape and architecture inform an experience-oriented oeuvre that is cause for reconsidering our relationship with nature. Her work encompasses sculpture, photography, performance, architecture, sound and video. Through her experience both of the places she has seen and the people she has met, and her aim to unearth common ground between extremely diverse groups lies at the base of much of her projects.

O’Reilly’s work is interesting as she dissolves the mediums of art, architecture and film into something that is difficult to title. The cities, places, sceneries that she subjects the viewer to are layered with her body, a ghostly movement through a timeless, slowed stilled landscape of abstracted and layered fragments of dissolved experiences of the body and of architecture. Her works are beautiful, evocative, timeless and interactive in the way they are composed. They resonate spatial qualities of slowed, filmic, moving installations of translucent layered veils suspended within the interiors of galleries or site-specific sites.