Day Three of Emergensee is about to start, the team has already gathered in the Babylon and eagerly awaits the guests.

Most of the speakers are also already here and the whole day promises to be full of exciting talks and movies. So if you so far didn’t have the time to drop by, take the chance to come today.

“Yet Another Media Conference“  will focus today on the subject of animation, reaching from Japanese practices to questions of how the digital transforms animation.

After discussing media it is time to have a closer look at what is being produced in the segment of moving images in the Emergeandsee Competition with its two showreels Empty Mirror at 7 pm and Timeline Leaps at 9.15.
Don’t miss some of the most thrilling movies made by students all over the world!

To close this year’s event, join in on the party at the Grüner Salon right next to the Babylon where two DJs (DJ Pozorr! and DJ Red Cat) will add some audio to the visual!

See you at Emergeandsee!

If that ain’t great news!
Berlin Press called EMERGEANDSEE the “warm-up to the Berlinale” (TAZ) and an “etablished festival between the Transmediale and Berlinale, showing innovative films from all over the world and impressive media-installations” (Berliner Morgenpost).

Well, the first day of the festival ended with great music, a friendly atmosphere and a good feeling thinking of the next day. Indeed, the second day of the “Yet another media conference” started with even more visitors then yesterday.

The second day started with a report by Konstantinos Vassiliou talking about Avant-Gardism and the relation between art and new media in the 21st century. Wondering what the term “new media” actually means - which media are involved and what kind of effort is used - Vassiliou analysed in how far new media can be called fundamentally different from contemporary art. To him, what has been labelled as new media art has oscillated between a diversity of media techniques and a unity of an artistic movement. Making a parallelization with cinema, he observed that it developed as a new art form as a kind of syncretism between art, literature and imaging techniques. In his concluding words Vassiliou questioned if new media art can conceive its own language and define its own artistic forms specific to the respective medium.

Vassiliou’s paper was followed by an impressive report by Semi Ryu showing some of her experimental works on the combination of traditional shadow puppetry and virtual puppets. After giving some information about the tradition of “Wayang Kulit” she spoke about the process of storytelling and how it is perceived within traditional shadow-theatre and her works. In her paper, Semi Ryu also dealt with the relationship between puppet and puppeteer.
She presented the video documentation of an experiment where a traditional, “physical” stick-puppet played by a puppeteer in the “classical” way interacted with a “virtual” puppet controlled by the same puppeteer via a Wii remote control. This presentation pointed towards many questions about - especially digital - media such as the question of space or interactivity.
The report gave deep insights into a rather foreign form of theatre, a form that has great similarities to animation, too.

After a short break Jan Distelmeyer, currently working at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, talked about specific aesthetic aspects of the DVD, claiming that the DVD cannot be ignored in its econimical and especially cultural significance.
Introduced on the market in 1996/97 the DVD has pushed aside the video cassette and the cinema-evaluation of films - economically. In this context, where the film in the cinema is described as having distinct aesthetics, Distelmeyer lined out specifications characterizing the DVD as a medium and especially as a film-medium.
At this point, the terms of interactivity and the promise of increase in value become greatly important as well as allusions to video-games and the web, since DVD menus increasingly try to imitate “interactive multimedia” products by e. g. presenting a “navigatable space” to be explored via the DVD remote control.

The last but not the least one to speak was Falk Rößler, student at Universität Potsdam, discussing structures and signs in music videos posing the question “What can we learn from that?”.
According to him, music videos unite different contemporary audio-visual strategies ranging from separation/recombination of audio and video tracks to specific rhythmic schemes on both levels with effects on the sensual as well as the somatic reception.
Often being the first platform to try out new ways of artistic configuration modes, Rößler depicted music videos as the experimental field of film’s aesthetic and therefore tried to take a closer look at them, going beyond from their economical functions in the music industry to fructify their “anomalies” for other AV products such as short-film for example.

Now at the end of the day - a long and interesting one - we’re simply looking forward to tomorrow, feeling excited about having another day of interesting reports, discussions and not to forget: the short film competition followed by a party in the Grüner Salon!

Emergeandsee 2008 has just started in the Babylon Mitte in the heart of Berlin.

Another year of future moving ideas - this time with the “Yet another media conference“. Christine Hanke and Dieter Mersch, both of the University of Potsdam and the course of studies “European Media Studies“, spoke the opening words of the conference introducing the topic that will be discussed by several junior and senior academics in the days to come.

Dieter Mersch emphasized that “Yet Another Media Conference” is actually a necessity considering the fact that we still do not know much about how media work and how they are perceived. He thus claimed that “we can’t have enough media conferences“.

The first report was given by Michaela Ott, who was talking about essayistic films by Angela Melitopoulos, Susan Korda, Hito Steyerl and Trin T. Min-ha. According to her, these women use images and sounds as means of research to reclaim memory and moreover to modify self-conceptions of communities of minorities. After she presented her ideas, of course, there were some questions left for the audience. Christine Hanke, for example, wondered about the effect the femininity of the filmmakers has on their movies.

Michaela Ott’s report was followed by Stefan Kluge and Markus Beckedahl giving a talk about the Creative Commons Initiative.
The first part, done by Markus Beckedahl who blogs on netzpolitik.org, focused on the background of the initiative with respect to copyright history. Using the picture of how old practices of reworking media products into new forms, e. g. paper collages using tabloids, try to find their new form with young people recutting and pasting digital works, Markus elaborated on how the “media industry” tries to suppress this expression of creativity of “prosumers”, i. e. consumers & producers at the same time, in the digital age using restrictive technologies as well as law enforcement.

Creative Commons tries to overcome this gap of potential, e. g. due to the vast amount of media material available via the net, and the obstacles that are put in place through a restrictive copyright. CC offers licenses that contrary to the “All Rights Reserved” policy of traditional copyright allow certain uses and thus uses the claim “Some Rights Reserved“. Markus Beckedahl showed how big this initiative has already spread over the globe and offered a “utopian” view of a worldwide culture based on sharing and collaborating.

Stefan Kluge then gave concrete examples of how Creative Commons can be incorporated into the process of creating media, especially movies. He presented excerpts of community-based works, where people who might have never met each other in the “physical space” created inspiring movies through the net using CC-licensed material.

Discussions followed each talk before everyone joined in the relaxing atmosphere in the lounge where live jazz music, food and drinks await.