Seitenlayout

Peter Zorn, D
Biennale Director

sub fiction

Preface

"The world is collapsing. Socialism doesn‘t work, capitalism doesn‘t work, marriage doesn‘t work, work doesn‘t work only this works!"

… pointing at a glass of whisky. These succinct words were said by a housewife, in one of the English long-term soap-opera "Coronation Street" episodes in the nineties. They describe a condition, which has gathered around the questions "Quo Vadis art" and "Quo Vadis social Utopia", for a long time. The space of disqualified and lost utopias seems to have developed to a mere shelter of indifference and insignificance, which especially in East Germany is tinged with the sentiment of social frustration. Barely ten years later, the euphoristic-illusionistic hope for a new beginning in 1989, has already been nipped in the bud by western predominance. The comment of a local: "In the past we didn‘ have the freedom to spend our holidays abroad, in western countries, today we don‘t have the money. Actually everything has stayed the way it was. What was bad in the past, is good today and what was good in the past, is bad today." What does one expect from an event, which has set its goal, to present artistic fictions in a rural area, which seems rather to be saddeled with the problem of unemployment between twenty to thirty percent, than getting informed about the current state of artistic productions?

Such an event can certainly neither assume to propose any solution to such social problems, but it can definitly set signals and destroy frontiers. At least it opens up the chance to dispel the prejudice that the academic art discourse can only happen in the white cube exhibition spaces of urban galeries and museums in Berlin, London or New York, elevated above from hopes, interests and needs of the ordinary citizen. The simple but satisfying experience that the villagers join a performance at the dike of the Saale river or watch the newest film productions in order to enjoy their unconventionality and difference, together with artists and specialists, assembled, can well object to the strategies of the entertainment industry, with their synthetic mass products. This experiment certainly does not always work, as the patterns of reception are highly different. The community of Werkleitz/Tornitz, as well as other regions of the new states of the Federal Republic of Germany, has to contend with the problems of a collapsed cultural autonomy and infrastructure. Their inhabitants usually have to either turning on the TV, or choosing between undertaking a 40 kilometer journey to the nearest cinema. Showing films, exhibitions and performances, especially at this place, is an important challenge, particularly if these productions resist the usually smooth and easy digestable slickness.

Something like a sub fiction seems to exist here already. Its truth would be considered unreal elsewhere. The tenor of most press reviews has been: "Art in a village, how on earth could that work?". For many people, the venture to setting up a center for media art off the beaten tracks of urban structures would have been a rather strange attempt than a serious undertaking. Nevertheless it was gradually supported, thanks to all our friends and artists, who came to visit, the community which was enthusiastic about the idea from the very start and some enlightened minds in the Ministry of Culture. Their far-sightedness and brightness in 1993 encouraged them, to put their trust in unconventional models, despite burocratic forms. A small original utopia celebrates its fifth anniversary with this year‘s Biennale, which certainly owes its realisation the hurly-burly of the changes of 1989 in east Germany and couldn‘t have been accomplished this way, in the established west German structures.

The Werkleitz Gesellschaft was founded in 1993 by representatives from various sectors of cultural life from the old and new states of the Federal Republic of Germany. Since then, fiction has played a major part in its conceptual orientation and realisation, as well as it has been aiming at supporting the "unpopular" and creating a self-governing body, whose non-existing manifesto is up until today factly based on its deliberate openness for new forms und ideas; "Crossing the borders", crossing (artificially) erected borders within society, for example between east and west, between art-disciplines and -forms and groups of recipients, Pip Chodorov has described in an interview with the New York Millenium Film Journal 30/31 1997, as content related, a concept, which has to be redefined permanently. The center for artistic visual media Saxony-Anhalt, supported by the Ministry of Culture, is existing since 1996, in its institutionalized form. Having become the administrative office of the media association Saxony-Anhalt in the meantime, it is in charge of the technical production centre of the cultural film- and media-funding Saxony-Anhalt. It coordinates independent projects and programs, like "European Media Artists in Residence Exchange/EMARE" (http://www.werkleitz.de/emare) and the "International database for experimental-film and video/oVid" (http://www.werkleitz.de/ovid), and it is also an office for media affairs as well as a media workshop. The development from its very start to its necessary professionalisation has been marked by many learning processes, as relying on critical self-reflection. This has been of particular importance in situations, when institutionalization is in danger of manifesting as bureaucracy. Time and time again, we have been confronted with the question, how this structure could remain obliged to its initial ideas and utopias, which have led to its inauguration, despite being hampered by administrative responsibilities and every day pragmatism.

During the design of the Biennale-idea, which was manifested in 1993 in its final essence, after the first event "Tapetenwechsel", it included film, video, video-installation, performance and visual art, of 41 partaking artists and groups from all over the whole republic, the idea of a flexible and constantly changing event developed, which is intended to elude monotonous repetition by its experimental conceptions and changing responsibilities (initially planned for 1995, the 2nd Werkleitz Biennale was postponed to 1996, in order to facilitate an alternating change with "ostranenie" (http://ostranenie.org), the international electronic media forum at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation). The 2nd Werkleitz Biennale in 1996, organized by Marion Kreißler and Martin Conrath, was titled "Cluster Images transmedial images, parallel networks" (http://www.werkleitz.de/cluster-images). It presented works from the realms of film/video, fine art, performance and new media/digital images and it made an offensive contribution to the current discussions about practical possibilities and functional assignments in art. More than 70 works related to the context, curated and judged by a jury, were assembled to represent international positions referring to the topic. The principles of the Biennale, to present different artistic positions and to examine their correlation impartially, has also formed the base for "Cluster Images". In addition, "Cluster Images" has tried to link the forms and contents of works with the surrounding and with each other. This undertaking has not only found its limits in specific production- and presentation-paradigms, but also due to the diverging ranges of important artistic contents refused to comply to clustering, "sub fiction" has tried to make this deficit its program, by choosing specialized curators, who have made their choice independently. They deliberately present diverting artistic positions in order to show a wide spectrum of the current developments in art. Again, the overlaping of formally separated sections shows the impossibility of a strict classification of artistic productions and has been one of the initial Biennale-ideas. Their classification was meant to set a starting point, in order to find important artistic positions and has never been seen as a restricting enclosure.

Quoting the 3rd Werkleitz Biennale concept: sub fiction is a helpful, possible expression for the new developments beyond the original term "fiction", especially its conceptual proximity to small and subcultural groups, interests and actions is more likely to take their actual phenomena into account, with which these "fictions" try to define contextual differences. sub fiction presents works, reflecting on their own fictional content and/or experimenting on destroying conventional fictions and their appearances. We are especially interested in interactions between technology, art and society; prospecting the developments of virtual media and their interaction with our understanding of reality, fiction, identity and culture.

The following questions have occured:

Which is fiction‘s status in society and art?
Are collective fictions being replaced by individual fictions?
How has the valuation of fiction construction and virtuality reality been shifted?
Does fiction appear, consequently to the possible realtime data transmission, increasingly in spatial and local specific qualities and distinctions?
How has fiction been changed by the New Media?
Which are the dramatic necesseties behind its development?
Which are the new concepts and contents thereby emerging in art and pop culture?

The concept has been interpreted differently by the curators. Some have found direct access to working with our questions, others unflustered chose works closest to their ideas. We thereby have become host and audience at the same time. A very exciting process, for which I would like to express my thanks to the curators Joachim Blank, Thomas Korschil, Boris Nieslony, Volker Schreiner, Holger Kube Ventura and Gerhard Wissner, also on behalf of the Werkleitz Gesellschaft, for their enormous engagement in choosing their artists and looking after them. Thanks also to the sponsors, supporters and the many helpers, who have tried hard to enable the realisation of the curators‘ and artists‘ ideas.

Showing the partaking curators and artists of this Biennale, with their potential of individual positions, mustn‘t cover the fact, that it has become increasingly difficult, to gain free presence for works, that do not depend on self-exploitation and politico-cultural pally attempts. Artists have developed strategies and ideas within the production- and product-economy, moving subversively among the existing structures of society, market and art. Apart from art‘s occupation by those in power, for prestige purposes, history of art has repeatedly shown the artists‘ endeavours for independence from constraining burocratic and market economic orientations. In times of visual inflation through mass media, this battle has become the more drastic, as the production methods of artists, wishing to use media devices, reflect a difficult and constricted position. The argument about production- and distribution-means is principly centered in a conception proposing the change and increasing respectively transmitting knowledge, contrary to a status quo obliged, affirmative and consumption orientated attitude. Cinema‘s and television‘s dependence on mass consumers‘ viewing quota, is an always welcome argument against any urge for artistic experiment, critical statements on society or elaborate reflection. That‘s why a break through or simple entry of artistic productions into these media, has only been achieved extremely rarely. Mass media are still obliged to the maxim of producing market orientated collective fictions. In the meantime, the socialization groups of the targeted consumers keep split up in decreasingly small groups, which will hopefully inspire the large-scale producers to reflect, some times. This is why sub fiction stands for the refusal of the so called globalization, as the trademark of transnational companies intending to eliminate a national cultural identity, aiming for the transglobal market orientated egalitarianism, leading to a uniform leisure consuming culture.

"Cultural conspicuousness is not welcome and has to be suppressed. National history and culture have to be left out and must not be demanded, neither by opposition nor by dialectics. They are mere variations of the one "universal" like a giant amusement park or shopping centre. Culture will be restricted to remain in museums and the museums, exhibitions and theatre performances will be quickly occupied by tourism and other forms of commercialisation. No matter how subversive they might appear in the beginning, the slightest deviation will be aggressively occupied by various areas of consumption industries, for example by the entertainment industry or tourism, as happened to rap, graffity, even to classical music and other forms of high culture." Noted by Masao Miyoshi in his article "A borderless World", for the documenta X book, p. 199.

Individual artistic fictions carry cultural characteristics, arising from specific socialisations. Mainstream has often been used as a source, blended with other images and worlds, and its policy has been revealed by using deconstruction and persiflage. The variety of the different artistic methods of digesting main stream influences, becomes visible in some of the 3rd Werkleitz Biennale exhibits. Despite Hollywood‘s 40-percentage credo of the equality of all human emotions and needs, they count on the 60 percent difference.
Hollywood‘s demand to reaching emotional stratums, which are supposed to exist latently in as many potential target groups as possible (principally do also international broadcasting companies continue this attempt) has lead to a forced second rehash of success proved patterns and contents. Therefore it is not surprising that above all existing collective myths, at the fin de millenium, the myth of catastrophy has been booming, commercialized by the dream factory.: From the "Titanic" - apocalypse (Director: James Cameron, USA 1997), reminding us of a historical collective trauma, via "Deep Impact" (Director: Mimi Leder, USA 1998), to the finale of all days "Armageddon" (Michael Bay, USA 1998). Here the dream-giant has reached a level of unbelievable perversion. Every achievement of mankind, every scientific and technological development and realization, every war that has been waged, here they have finally got their long yearn legitimation: they will have to help to overcome the biggest challenge mankind has ever had to face. Only with nuclear warheads, top institution Nasa and the help of the best drill-experts Greenpeace opponents by the way the threat of a meteor approaching at top speed can be stopped. What would one have done without the "educational" experiences from Hiroshima?

Hiroshima provides the key word for another thought: In "Hiroshima mon amour" (France 1959), Alain Resnais made the Japanese actor comment on his French friend‘s visit of the memorial museum for the Hiroshima victims: "You haven‘t seen anything, you have invented it all." His statement relates to the correlation of the poles: reality imagination and memory construction, which form the background of any reflection upon fiction. So, we are touching the field of memory a memory formed by images rather than language, as Chris Marker notes in his film essay "Sans Soleil" (France 1982): "I ask myself, how people, who don‘t film, take photographs or record tapes, remember how mankind acted in order to remember (…)." This is how filmed images have become historical artefacts, documents, whose verifiability has hardly ever been questioned in the beginning. At the latest, since the development of digital media since the thereby inherent manipulability was increased, the fictive idea of objectivity, has finally lost its altogether dubious credibility.

Nevertheless the big media-news head offices work according to their self declared postulate of objectivity, although the limits of reality and its interpretation, as could be witnessed in reports of the Golf War in 1991, have permanently oscillated. No wonder therefore that these forms have constantly been picked up by artists. In the meantime, the disagreeing and differently thinking, have changed to using small, independent possibilities of spreading information, which has very rarely been a financially lucrative alternative, but here they are at least much closer to the producers‘ interests and philosophies and to an even though small group of recipients. The run of cultural institutions, focussing on more and more spectacular events, accelerated by strictly reduced financial sponsoring, has supported the continuous limitation of that freedom. These fictions have been reduced to use small, independently set up and committed places, where they seem to flourish vehemently, before the more "successful" of them experience a merciless occupation.

"Low-tech" has become a means, which has not only been established for financial reasons, but also for its aesthetical and substantial qualities, particularly because the daily floods of images have been used as a source of inspiration, re-commented and recycled with the help of television set and videorecorder. Meanwhile the second and third up and coming generation of artists have lined up, in order to deconstruct the artificially generated fictions to their own subversive imaginations.

Despite the various contemporary artistic positions and discussions, like for example the criticism of the television picture flattening images to a two dimensional level, using the body as an alternative again, turning away from the virtual, two dimensional space to a tactil or personal experience or, on the other hand, the tense relationship of Found Footage and the used "popular images" and "myths", we may have to assume that any hitherto developed medium be it paper or hard disk (and its inherent materiality) will keep its validity and coexist next to each other.

The remaining question is what kind of visions are they going to transport. What will be art‘s task in the future? Will there be any? If not, why are you sitting here, flicking through the catalogue?



		Peter Zorn, D Biennale Director

			sub fiction Preface

		"The world is collapsing. Socialism doesn‘t work, capitalism doesn‘t work, marriage doesn‘t work, work doesn‘t work only this works!" … pointing at a glass of whisky. These succinct words were said by a housewife, in one of the English long-term soap-opera "Coronation Street" episodes in the nineties. They describe a condition, which has gathered around the questions "Quo Vadis art" and "Quo Vadis social Utopia", for a long time. The space of disqualified and lost utopias seems to have developed to a mere shelter of indifference and insignificance, which especially in East Germany is tinged with the sentiment of social frustration. Barely ten years later, the euphoristic-illusionistic hope for a new beginning in 1989, has already been nipped in the bud by western predominance. The comment of a local: "In the past we didn‘ have the freedom to spend our holidays abroad, in western countries, today we don‘t have the money. Actually everything has stayed the way it was. What was bad in the past, is good today and what was good in the past, is bad today." What does one expect from an event, which has set its goal, to present artistic fictions in a rural area, which seems rather to be saddeled with the problem of unemployment between twenty to thirty percent, than getting informed about the current state of artistic productions? Such an event can certainly neither assume to propose any solution to such social problems, but it can definitly set signals and destroy frontiers. At least it opens up the chance to dispel the prejudice that the academic art discourse can only happen in the white cube exhibition spaces of urban galeries and museums in Berlin, London or New York, elevated above from hopes, interests and needs of the ordinary citizen. The simple but satisfying experience that the villagers join a performance at the dike of the Saale river or watch the newest film productions in order to enjoy their unconventionality and difference, together with artists and specialists, assembled, can well object to the strategies of the entertainment industry, with their synthetic mass products. This experiment certainly does not always work, as the patterns of reception are highly different. The community of Werkleitz/Tornitz, as well as other regions of the new states of the Federal Republic of Germany, has to contend with the problems of a collapsed cultural autonomy and infrastructure. Their inhabitants usually have to either turning on the TV, or choosing between undertaking a 40 kilometer journey to the nearest cinema. Showing films, exhibitions and performances, especially at this place, is an important challenge, particularly if these productions resist the usually smooth and easy digestable slickness. Something like a sub fiction seems to exist here already. Its truth would be considered unreal elsewhere. The tenor of most press reviews has been: "Art in a village, how on earth could that work?". For many people, the venture to setting up a center for media art off the beaten tracks of urban structures would have been a rather strange attempt than a serious undertaking. Nevertheless it was gradually supported, thanks to all our friends and artists, who came to visit, the community which was enthusiastic about the idea from the very start and some enlightened minds in the Ministry of Culture. Their far-sightedness and brightness in 1993 encouraged them, to put their trust in unconventional models, despite burocratic forms. A small original utopia celebrates its fifth anniversary with this year‘s Biennale, which certainly owes its realisation the hurly-burly of the changes of 1989 in east Germany and couldn‘t have been accomplished this way, in the established west German structures. The Werkleitz Gesellschaft was founded in 1993 by representatives from various sectors of cultural life from the old and new states of the Federal Republic of Germany. Since then, fiction has played a major part in its conceptual orientation and realisation, as well as it has been aiming at supporting the "unpopular" and creating a self-governing body, whose non-existing manifesto is up until today factly based on its deliberate openness for new forms und ideas; "Crossing the borders", crossing (artificially) erected borders within society, for example between east and west, between art-disciplines and -forms and groups of recipients, Pip Chodorov has described in an interview with the New York Millenium Film Journal 30/31 1997, as content related, a concept, which has to be redefined permanently. The center for artistic visual media Saxony-Anhalt, supported by the Ministry of Culture, is existing since 1996, in its institutionalized form. Having become the administrative office of the media association Saxony-Anhalt in the meantime, it is in charge of the technical production centre of the cultural film- and media-funding Saxony-Anhalt. It coordinates independent projects and programs, like "European Media Artists in Residence Exchange/EMARE" (http://www.werkleitz.de/emare) and the "International database for experimental-film and video/oVid" (http://www.werkleitz.de/ovid), and it is also an office for media affairs as well as a media workshop. The development from its very start to its necessary professionalisation has been marked by many learning processes, as relying on critical self-reflection. This has been of particular importance in situations, when institutionalization is in danger of manifesting as bureaucracy. Time and time again, we have been confronted with the question, how this structure could remain obliged to its initial ideas and utopias, which have led to its inauguration, despite being hampered by administrative responsibilities and every day pragmatism. During the design of the Biennale-idea, which was manifested in 1993 in its final essence, after the first event "Tapetenwechsel", it included film, video, video-installation, performance and visual art, of 41 partaking artists and groups from all over the whole republic, the idea of a flexible and constantly changing event developed, which is intended to elude monotonous repetition by its experimental conceptions and changing responsibilities (initially planned for 1995, the 2nd Werkleitz Biennale was postponed to 1996, in order to facilitate an alternating change with "ostranenie" (http://ostranenie.org), the international electronic media forum at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation). The 2nd Werkleitz Biennale in 1996, organized by Marion Kreißler and Martin Conrath, was titled "Cluster Images transmedial images, parallel networks" (http://www.werkleitz.de/cluster-images). It presented works from the realms of film/video, fine art, performance and new media/digital images and it made an offensive contribution to the current discussions about practical possibilities and functional assignments in art. More than 70 works related to the context, curated and judged by a jury, were assembled to represent international positions referring to the topic. The principles of the Biennale, to present different artistic positions and to examine their correlation impartially, has also formed the base for "Cluster Images". In addition, "Cluster Images" has tried to link the forms and contents of works with the surrounding and with each other. This undertaking has not only found its limits in specific production- and presentation-paradigms, but also due to the diverging ranges of important artistic contents refused to comply to clustering, "sub fiction" has tried to make this deficit its program, by choosing specialized curators, who have made their choice independently. They deliberately present diverting artistic positions in order to show a wide spectrum of the current developments in art. Again, the overlaping of formally separated sections shows the impossibility of a strict classification of artistic productions and has been one of the initial Biennale-ideas. Their classification was meant to set a starting point, in order to find important artistic positions and has never been seen as a restricting enclosure. Quoting the 3rd Werkleitz Biennale concept: sub fiction is a helpful, possible expression for the new developments beyond the original term "fiction", especially its conceptual proximity to small and subcultural groups, interests and actions is more likely to take their actual phenomena into account, with which these "fictions" try to define contextual differences. sub fiction presents works, reflecting on their own fictional content and/or experimenting on destroying conventional fictions and their appearances. We are especially interested in interactions between technology, art and society; prospecting the developments of virtual media and their interaction with our understanding of reality, fiction, identity and culture. The following questions have occured: Which is fiction‘s status in society and art? Are collective fictions being replaced by individual fictions? How has the valuation of fiction construction and virtuality reality been shifted? Does fiction appear, consequently to the possible realtime data transmission, increasingly in spatial and local specific qualities and distinctions? How has fiction been changed by the New Media? Which are the dramatic necesseties behind its development? Which are the new concepts and contents thereby emerging in art and pop culture? The concept has been interpreted differently by the curators. Some have found direct access to working with our questions, others unflustered chose works closest to their ideas. We thereby have become host and audience at the same time. A very exciting process, for which I would like to express my thanks to the curators Joachim Blank, Thomas Korschil, Boris Nieslony, Volker Schreiner, Holger Kube Ventura and Gerhard Wissner, also on behalf of the Werkleitz Gesellschaft, for their enormous engagement in choosing their artists and looking after them. Thanks also to the sponsors, supporters and the many helpers, who have tried hard to enable the realisation of the curators‘ and artists‘ ideas. Showing the partaking curators and artists of this Biennale, with their potential of individual positions, mustn‘t cover the fact, that it has become increasingly difficult, to gain free presence for works, that do not depend on self-exploitation and politico-cultural pally attempts. Artists have developed strategies and ideas within the production- and product-economy, moving subversively among the existing structures of society, market and art. Apart from art‘s occupation by those in power, for prestige purposes, history of art has repeatedly shown the artists‘ endeavours for independence from constraining burocratic and market economic orientations. In times of visual inflation through mass media, this battle has become the more drastic, as the production methods of artists, wishing to use media devices, reflect a difficult and constricted position. The argument about production- and distribution-means is principly centered in a conception proposing the change and increasing respectively transmitting knowledge, contrary to a status quo obliged, affirmative and consumption orientated attitude. Cinema‘s and television‘s dependence on mass consumers‘ viewing quota, is an always welcome argument against any urge for artistic experiment, critical statements on society or elaborate reflection. That‘s why a break through or simple entry of artistic productions into these media, has only been achieved extremely rarely. Mass media are still obliged to the maxim of producing market orientated collective fictions. In the meantime, the socialization groups of the targeted consumers keep split up in decreasingly small groups, which will hopefully inspire the large-scale producers to reflect, some times. This is why sub fiction stands for the refusal of the so called globalization, as the trademark of transnational companies intending to eliminate a national cultural identity, aiming for the transglobal market orientated egalitarianism, leading to a uniform leisure consuming culture. "Cultural conspicuousness is not welcome and has to be suppressed. National history and culture have to be left out and must not be demanded, neither by opposition nor by dialectics. They are mere variations of the one "universal" like a giant amusement park or shopping centre. Culture will be restricted to remain in museums and the museums, exhibitions and theatre performances will be quickly occupied by tourism and other forms of commercialisation. No matter how subversive they might appear in the beginning, the slightest deviation will be aggressively occupied by various areas of consumption industries, for example by the entertainment industry or tourism, as happened to rap, graffity, even to classical music and other forms of high culture." Noted by Masao Miyoshi in his article "A borderless World", for the documenta X book, p. 199. Individual artistic fictions carry cultural characteristics, arising from specific socialisations. Mainstream has often been used as a source, blended with other images and worlds, and its policy has been revealed by using deconstruction and persiflage. The variety of the different artistic methods of digesting main stream influences, becomes visible in some of the 3rd Werkleitz Biennale exhibits. Despite Hollywood‘s 40-percentage credo of the equality of all human emotions and needs, they count on the 60 percent difference. Hollywood‘s demand to reaching emotional stratums, which are supposed to exist latently in as many potential target groups as possible (principally do also international broadcasting companies continue this attempt) has lead to a forced second rehash of success proved patterns and contents. Therefore it is not surprising that above all existing collective myths, at the fin de millenium, the myth of catastrophy has been booming, commercialized by the dream factory.: From the "Titanic" - apocalypse (Director: James Cameron, USA 1997), reminding us of a historical collective trauma, via "Deep Impact" (Director: Mimi Leder, USA 1998), to the finale of all days "Armageddon" (Michael Bay, USA 1998). Here the dream-giant has reached a level of unbelievable perversion. Every achievement of mankind, every scientific and technological development and realization, every war that has been waged, here they have finally got their long yearn legitimation: they will have to help to overcome the biggest challenge mankind has ever had to face. Only with nuclear warheads, top institution Nasa and the help of the best drill-experts Greenpeace opponents by the way the threat of a meteor approaching at top speed can be stopped. What would one have done without the "educational" experiences from Hiroshima? Hiroshima provides the key word for another thought: In "Hiroshima mon amour" (France 1959), Alain Resnais made the Japanese actor comment on his French friend‘s visit of the memorial museum for the Hiroshima victims: "You haven‘t seen anything, you have invented it all." His statement relates to the correlation of the poles: reality imagination and memory construction, which form the background of any reflection upon fiction. So, we are touching the field of memory a memory formed by images rather than language, as Chris Marker notes in his film essay "Sans Soleil" (France 1982): "I ask myself, how people, who don‘t film, take photographs or record tapes, remember how mankind acted in order to remember (…)." This is how filmed images have become historical artefacts, documents, whose verifiability has hardly ever been questioned in the beginning. At the latest, since the development of digital media since the thereby inherent manipulability was increased, the fictive idea of objectivity, has finally lost its altogether dubious credibility. Nevertheless the big media-news head offices work according to their self declared postulate of objectivity, although the limits of reality and its interpretation, as could be witnessed in reports of the Golf War in 1991, have permanently oscillated. No wonder therefore that these forms have constantly been picked up by artists. In the meantime, the disagreeing and differently thinking, have changed to using small, independent possibilities of spreading information, which has very rarely been a financially lucrative alternative, but here they are at least much closer to the producers‘ interests and philosophies and to an even though small group of recipients. The run of cultural institutions, focussing on more and more spectacular events, accelerated by strictly reduced financial sponsoring, has supported the continuous limitation of that freedom. These fictions have been reduced to use small, independently set up and committed places, where they seem to flourish vehemently, before the more "successful" of them experience a merciless occupation. "Low-tech" has become a means, which has not only been established for financial reasons, but also for its aesthetical and substantial qualities, particularly because the daily floods of images have been used as a source of inspiration, re-commented and recycled with the help of television set and videorecorder. Meanwhile the second and third up and coming generation of artists have lined up, in order to deconstruct the artificially generated fictions to their own subversive imaginations. Despite the various contemporary artistic positions and discussions, like for example the criticism of the television picture flattening images to a two dimensional level, using the body as an alternative again, turning away from the virtual, two dimensional space to a tactil or personal experience or, on the other hand, the tense relationship of Found Footage and the used "popular images" and "myths", we may have to assume that any hitherto developed medium be it paper or hard disk (and its inherent materiality) will keep its validity and coexist next to each other. The remaining question is what kind of visions are they going to transport. What will be art‘s task in the future? Will there be any? If not, why are you sitting here, flicking through the catalogue?