In October 2008, the TESLA-Berlin association organised a workshop in Berlin called Labs for Art and Media. They invited a number of international media labs to come to Berlin to share three days of discussions around how artistic practice is changing today in relation to media, and how art labs, workspaces, production spaces and art institutions can best support artists in pursuing their work. In the context of The Future of the Lab, BALTAN invited Andreas Broeckmann, member of the TESLA curatorial team, to reflect on the outcomes of this workshop and on the experience of TESLA in Berlin from 2005-2007.
CASE STUDY PRESENTATION BY ANDREAS BROECKMANN (DORTMUNDER U – CENTRE FOR ART AND CREATIVITY, DORTMUND, GERMANY)
The idea of the TESLA Media Art Lab in Berlin was, essentially, to create a space where artists could work. We had some funding and a building, and we opened up for residencies (lasting from a few weeks to a year) to work on specific projects which were proposed by the artists directly. TESLA informally looked at the proposals, and then invited the artists. From the residencies, we created the core of our public programme, running four days a week. We were, in retrospect, surprised how much we could do in three years. One of the big projects was a series of symposia and performances with the artist Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag, who is interested in the history of electricity connected with Nikola Tesla, which made it a perfect key project for the TESLA lab. After two and a half years of operations, TESLA had to close down: the funding was pulled and the building was taken away.
In retrospect, the surprise was not that the local government pulled the plug. The miracle was that we could do this work for three years in the first place! We should have understood earlier that this was a temporary project. If we had, then we wouldn’t have put so much effort into building an institution. You have to think hard about what you want to achieve in the amount of time you have. Don’t worry about institution building if it will probably be temporary. Still, you have to be a little bit utopian…
The art and media ship, MS Stubnitz, for example, was a crazy, expensive and impossible plan by a handful of people in 1992. After the fall of the Wall, the East German fishing fleet was sold off. Some fully operational ships were sold for scrap metal. A group of artists bought a ship for a bit over 300.000 DM, and had the vision of a floating art and media centre. At a workshop in 1994, they looked to see if there were possibilities for European cooperations. At the time, it seemed largely impossible to me because it seemed crazy to spend all that scarce art money on diesel. Now, almost 12 years later, the MS Stubnitz is still sailing, still under construction, run by a committed crew of people. It’s a valuable project, not least because it sparks people’s imagination. They have a lot of live performances, exhibitions. It’s grungy and edgy, and also very valuable in terms of community work. I admit that I misjudged the potential of this project in 1994.
When they closed TESLA, a colleague of mine and myself received some money to research how to set up a media lab in Berlin. This was a little weird, because they just had taken a working model away from us – but anyway… We spoke to a lot of people about possibilities and structures, and it turned out that unless you have good local and regional support, you cannot start something that is reliant on public funding. You have to have people in politics who support your activities, although they sometimes don’t understand it. This is what we learned in Berlin, because we did not have that kind of local or regional support. So the message that we got out of our research was rather frustrating: I think that at the moment it is not viable to construct a lab in Berlin because there’s no support in the political arena. We wrote a little manifesto, a structural plan, which had this message to the politicians: if you want to support art and media production in Berlin, here are three models. First: a real centre where competencies can be combined. The second possibility is to support a network where the existing institutions can use money that is put into the network, where you give incentives for people to work together. The third possibility is to set up an agency that liaises between the different institutions. As a final report, we created a brochure which lists 32 institutions in Berlin that deal with art and media in one way or another – a list that is supposed to indicate the potential of such a cooperation network.
Q: Could you tell us more about the workshop last year?
Part of the research project was to organize an international meeting in October 2008. For three to four days, a group of about 15 people got together, mainly from European artist organisations and media labs, to discuss the same questions that are raised here today. From that event came the first really important realisation that there is no ‘one’ media lab. Most of us recognize that we’re from the same field and do more or less similar things. The ideological undercurrents are utterly different though – the motives why people are doing the things they do. The concepts of these different institutions can therefore also not just be copied and used elsewhere. For instance, Culture Lab in its Newcastle university setting is different in relation to the opportunities and restrictions of BALTAN. What we realised at the workshop last year was that what brings us together here is the difference, not necessarily a common ground. The next thing we learned last year is how dependent these structures are on individual people. Many organisations only survive on the back of one or two people, and they change when these people change (or when they don’t change). So it’s also a personality thing, since your personal energy and interests are in there.
It’s fascinating to hear people speak about their practice, because we are working in the same field. Melinda spoke about the problems of residencies, and we understand that. We can talk about the failures as much as successes. For me, TESLA is not a failure anymore. It was in 2007, but now I realise that it was a great thing to do for those years.
Q: If you say there’s no political will in Berlin to support a media art lab, don’t you think they are missing a point, and if so, what point do they miss?
To some degree, the talk about the media lab is self-serving and out of sync with the development of the role of media in the arts because it assumes there’s a special place for media art, and I don’t believe that. At TESLA, with three people from different backgrounds (curator sound art, someone from the field of performing arts / theatre, and me with a background in art and technology), we never curated with an interest in technology, but always with a high aspiration for artistic quality whatever the technology or media the artist used. We founded a place where critical thinking was dedicated to recent digital media and the aesthetic effects of working with those media, a place where you can think about this is hugely valuable. I believe that the conversation about the relationship between art, technology and new media that we initiated is the most valuable aspect of the work done at TESLA. Nowhere else in Berlin was there such a consistent and dense conversation on contemporary artistic practice as at TESLA at the time. The second asset we had at TESLA was a wizard in software and hardware interfaces. To have somebody like him, somebody who knows his stuff and can help artists or point them in the right direction, is a really important asset and something that you really need. So, whereas it remains important to support the specialised production in art and media, I think that we have to get away from the idea of an institution that is devoted to the presentation of new media art. That is not interesting anymore, and not necessary. One of the results of TESLA was that most of those institutions in Berlin are not media art institutions, but they all give room to the media arts in their presentations. But support for production is really necessary.
Tags: art, future, laboratory, network, research
