Between Hybridity and Hyper-Space: AES+F’s The Feast of Trimalchio (2008)
Symposium:
- ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art
- More presentations from ISEA2011:
Session Title:
- Hybrid Cultures
Presentation Title:
- Between Hybridity and Hyper-Space: AES+F’s The Feast of Trimalchio (2008)
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Panel: Hybrid Cultures
In their nine-screen digital video the Russian artist group AES+F has sought to provide an analogy for the globalised third millennium by re/presenting it through a hedonist glut in the environment- as imaginary luxury hotel resorts that operate as compound non-places of supermodernity (Marc Auge). It is a place in which the power relations between contemporary masters and slaves is re/enacted and re/affirmed through the convergence of respective historical and contemporary cross-cultural signifiers. The space-time continuum is collapsed into an ahistorical, temporary paradise made up of fragmented ,global/ised referents from fashion photography, glossy tourist magazines, leisure advertisements, broad sheet supplements and soap operas (as well as art, design and architectural history) and shaped by metonymy (rather than metaphor). Using this complex and dense work as a primary case study, the presentation explores the tensions between its foregrounded media and technological hybridity and the mapped out allegorical hyperspace, as means to critically intervene in the understanding of contemporary mediated culture under the conditions of a global flow of capital.