Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits lectures at Transmediale 2013 and are giving a talk on Thursday, January 31, in the panel
OPEN, O SESAMI. OPEN, O GREEN. OPEN, O FIELDS. A CHANCE MEETING IN THE NAME OF GREEN RUSH
THU 31.01.2013 – 11:00
Location: Central Foyer
This meeting on the occasion of the Composting the City | Composting the Net launch brings together partners and projects of green rush. In 2009, Nomadisch Grün launched Prinzessinnengärten on Moritzplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg, and cultivated a wasteland into a vibrant, self-sustainable urban farming/gathering site. In 2012, a Let it grow campaign called for public support to prevent the Property Fund from selling the land. ALOTOF, A Laboratory On The Open Fields, is an Okno (Brussels) initiative to develop framework and structures, seeking open lab/field possibilities for the practices of media art and ecology. Yo-yo (Prague and Hranice) supports experiments at the intersection of art, ecology and media, across rural and urban contexts. RIXC (Riga Centre for New Media Culture) organizes TECHNO-ECOLOGIES (since 2011), as part of the Baltic-Nordic initiative RENEWABLE NETWORK, taking the environment, social relations and human subjectivity into account. FIELDS maps expanded areas of artistic practices that merge politics, technology, ecology, gender and semiology. Composting the City (2012) investigates urban farms and cycles of composting systems. In search of biotechnological food production, Hu.M.C.C (2012) creates a brand new product line “Maya YogHurt.”
Extending the invitation to catch-up and chat with acquaintances and strangers, artists and organizers, builders and schemers, the techno-minded and those with dirty, soil-stained hands, this meeting serves as a depot for information drop-off, pick-up, take-away and tag along, walking us into a rhizomic rooted forest-scape.
Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits (Latvia) are Riga based artists, curators and cultural inventors, working with emerging media since the mid-1990s. They are key founders of E-Lab (1996) and RIXC (2000). They organise the Art+Communication festivals (since 1996) with the publication of publish Acoustic Space journal series. Together with RIXC, the festival introduces themes such as internet radio (1998), locative media (2003), waves (2009), transbiotics (2010), techno-ecologies (2011), and art of resilience (2012).
Raitis Smits and Rasa Smite next to “Talk to Me” work, Botanical Garden of University of Latvia, Riga, Summer 2012.
Photo: Daina Silina
Participants list: Shu Lea Cheang, Prinzessinnengarten, Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, Givan Bela, Annemie Maes, Lenka Dolanova and Michael Kindernay, Maja Smrekar, Armin Medosch.
Source: Transmediale 2013