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thealit Laboratorium 2004
Virtual Minds
Congress of Fictitious Figures
• Call/Concept • Time Schedule
Invitation to
Agents, spies, zombies, con-men, fakes, legal entities, novel and dream characters, avatars and bots to participate in the "Congress of Fictitious Figures"
For January 2004-March 2004 the Frauen.Kultur.Labor thealit (Women.Culture.Lab-thealit), Bremen, has scheduled a laboratory "Virtual Minds. Congress of Fictitious Figures" (Exhibition, Symposium, MultiUserDomain). Female artists and scientists are invited to send proposals to thealit until the 10th of May 2003 via e-mail or snail mail or fax. It is possible to take part in the exhibition, the symposium and/or MUD.
The artists, scientists and other fiktional figures invited to the symposium and the exhibition will receive reimbursements for their travel expenses and lodging as well as a small fee or respectively contributions for production costs.
It is intended to publish all contributions in print.
The laboratory will be curated by Helene von Oldenburg and Andrea Sick.
For further information send an e-mail to: sick@thealit.de and helene_oldenburg@arachnomancy.org or call: 0049-421-701632
For reference to other projects by thealit please go to: http://www.thealit.de
CALL/Concept:
Virtual Minds
Congress of Fictitious Figures
Agents, spies, zombies, con-men, fakes, legal entities, novel and dream characters, avatars and bots are crossing borders in a virtual as well as in a real setting. They allow themselves to be understood as those staged, imagined, dreamt of, substituted or programmed. According to the respective context they change their properties and tasks as well as their relationship with us, the real, respectively natural persons. Sometimes they are classified as identifications, embodiments or ‘composite formations and pictures’ (Freud), sometimes communicated as independent characters. They are not just protagonists of a being BETWEEN life and death, being awake and dreaming, madness and reality, technology and life, stage and world, but from time to time can occupy the position of a BEYOND, too – or at least they promise to do so. They enable traffic, a transition between these states and borders. This transition is often recognised only in retrospective by the continuing re-invention and actualisation of signs, images, properties, tactics and faces belonging to the figures. Though their fictional reality in communication - if successfully working - is as a rule is inscrutable.
The fictitious figures acting in the graphically oriented or text-based MUDs, in our dreams, however, on all stages are perceived from time to time as uncanny yet partly funny, too, because they never tend to side completely with, for example, life, death or one gender. These fictional figures – whether originating from the context of internet, dreams, theatre, secret service or psychiatry - trace a border that can question any identity assurance, if ever crossed.
Their existence indicates that reality is no clearly defined secure notion or even state, but a question permanently posed anew. One of the most exciting questions at all! All fictional figures different from real persons by definition are, however, real within their special context (and can therefore not be differentiated from real persons at first sight). These border-crossing figures are being addressed by this call.
Invited are fictional figures that within their respective context are what they pretend to be. They are to get the opportunity to stage themselves. This will necessarily effect the definition and visualisation of borders and transitions.
We see all the congress’s participants as fictional figures including the real, natural and biological persons. The respective context has yet to be defined. The "Congress of Fictional Figures" offers a field of action allowing both fictional figures and natural persons to meet, communicate and compete.
The congress will open a platform to fictional figures inviting them to introduce and present as well as to reflect themselves and transfer their procedures. Thus, the border-crossing potentials of fictional figures can be examined by female artists and scientists. Here, all these characters are to be reflected from the view of the overlapping discourses and procedures from media theory, art, informatics, psychoanalysis.
The congress sees itself as a forum FOR fictional figures and will offer you three communication platforms related to each other:
1. MUD: a text-based as well as graphically oriented web-based MultiUserDomain that on the one hand publicly invites to create fictional figures and allow them to communicate in different surroundings, but on the other hand allows to enter texts, images and lectures or to create surroundings for your self, too (e.g. participate in writing programs).
Additionally, so-called real life meetings between logged-in fictional figures and visitors at the site (exhibition) are organised.
The three-day symposium will be streamed and documented and made available in the MUD.
2. Exhibition: Presentation of projects dealing with fictional figures. Projects creating, presenting, documenting fictional figures, developing and supplying contexts and fields of action for them. This exhibition will give the opportunity to communicate by using the MultiUserDomain as well as real life meetings with fictional figures of the MUD about special topics at special dates.
3. Symposium: Lectures by female scientists and artist with the topic: Virtual Minds. The symposium will be streamed in the MUD thus enabling the participation of more fictitious figures.
Time Schedule:
Opening of the web-based MultiUserDomain
with life event: january 2004
Exhibition: february 27 - march 28 2004 opening: friday, february 27. at 7:00 p.m.
Künstlerhaus Bremen/ Shops in the street: Vor dem Steintor, Bremen
Symposium: march 12 - march 14 2004 at Gästehaus of University, Teerhof Bremen
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