The Concept
        With "Hungry Minds Think Alike?" dogfilm has initiated a
        cross-cultural multimedia project in 1997 which is now joined by
        film and videomakers from Canada, Germany, India, Kazakhstan,
        Lebanon and the USA. All the participants are working on the
        shifting border between documentary and video art. To realize a
        cross-cultural project in the times of economical and political
        globalization for us doesn't mean to surf on the wave of
        multicultural images and visions but to question these images and
        to web a net between each of our own, local, subjective,
        abstract, non-representative, radical views without building
        another centre. This can only be realized on the basis of common
        discussions and audiovisual experiments. The concept is seperated
        in different media. Along with the installation of an electronic
        database we would like to realize a film/ video programme with a
        total length of c. 260 minutes which is based on the structure of
        a cinematic relay race.
        
        Thematic Background
        Since 1970 the economical elite of the world meets at the annual
        World Economical Forum in Davos/Switzerland. They go skiing and
        discuss the future of the global markets within a confidential
        athmosphere. Politicians from all over the world are queueing to
        speak in front of the managers. They compete with each other for
        the attention of investors, ask for support to finance their
        politics and offer attractive economical locations between
        Eastern Germany and Southeast Asia. Davos becomes the symbol of
        globalization, for the new world order, in which multinational
        companies with their economical power remove the political power
        of the national governments. The new order influences every
        section of our lives. The market of art and culture is on one
        hand being pressed into the rules of this order while on the
        other hand its producers become the designers of the outfit for
        this new order. The Western industrial nations discover their
        multi-ethnicity, proclaim variety and arrange "carnivals of the
        cultures". Images created like this are blurring the fact that
        this "multiculture" is still related to the same centre, a
        Western dominated world order, from which nobody is released.
        
        "Multiculturalism appears as the necessary ideological reflection
        of the Global Market or "New World Order", the "one" world of
        too-late capitalism and the "end of History".  (...) Living as we
        do in the era of total Global order and the physical and cultural
        environment it secretes, it should be obvious, that particularise
        can represent a form of resistance. The totality has therefor
        undertaken to appropriate the energy of the resistance by
        offering a false form of particularism, empty of all creative
        power, as a commodified simulacrum of insurrectionary desire. "
        (Hakim Bey: "Against Multiculturalism", 1997)
        
        However, to evade multiculturalism, to reject the role of
        designers for the globalization for us as artists doesn't mean to
        withdraw into the privacy of our subjective, personal viewpoints.
        We rather think it is important to question our own subjective
        viewpoint  in relation to the society around us, which we are a
        part of (if we want to or not). And just because the "global
        village" is pretended to us over and over again, we have to
        discuss these questions across national borders. In the end there
        is a vision of cooperation, of a certain way of communication
        which Hakim Bey calls "cross-culturalism":
        
        "The image expresses a non-hierarchic, de-centered web of
        cultures, each one singular, but not alienated from other
        cultures. Exchange takes place in reciprocity across the
        permeable boundaries of this complex of autonomous, but loosely
        defined differences."
        
        Our subjective movements in their relation to social/ political
        movements, the possibilities and imposibilities of moving
        physically across national borders. A cross-cultural project, a
        relay between artists from different countries, which ends in a
        climatic health resort in Switzerland: Davos.
        
        
        The Complete Project
        
        The complete project can be diverted into different phases:
        Events, Symposium, Internet platform and elektronic database as
        well as a cinematographical video relay race.
        
        
      • I First coordination meeting of all participants (4 days) at the end of august 1998, in Berlin. Presentation of the works of the participants. Discussion and planning of the project. Start of the Internet platform.
      • II Cinematographical video relay race between the different participants (coordinated by dogfilm). Each participant will make a video/film about his/her own local situation. Than he/she travels to the next participant to observe this person in a cinematographical way, in his/her environment. After that the perspective will jump to the next participant and he/she will document his/her own reality and again travel to the next place and so on. A cooperation with different european tv producers is planned.
      • III TV broadcast; mulimedia presentation and screening at the Kunstamt Kreuzberg/ Bethanien; non commercial distribution via cultural institutions; festivals, libraries and local meeting places. The Film/ Video Programme In a cross - cultural video-/filmproject with artists from different countries we would like to try to set our own forms of "rapprochement", "cooperation" and "net-working" against the political and economical strategies of globalization. That lead us directly into reflecting the different meanings of the subject "movement". On one hand "movement" describes our own "subjective movements" in the certain places we are situated. On the other hand it refers to already existing or fictional "social movements". If we "move" physically from our own context to another it causes another change of our own viewpoint. As the most challenging structure for the common work we developed a kind of cinematic "relay race". In this structure every artist would take part in three different videos / films: - as "the documentated object" (the object/protagonist of a documentary) - as an "anthropologist" in his own context - as a visitor / documentator of the next relay participant. In the end the relay should lead to its starting point so that a form of "loop structure" has been developed. For example: Artist A creates a subjective video/ film on his own position between personal "movement" and political "Movement" within his/ her certain environment. Then he/ she travels to the next participant, artist B, to work out a portray which takes an alien, touristic view onto the other one. Then the point of view switches and artist B realizes a video/ film about himself, then travels to artist C etc. until the circuit is closed. After the rough edit of the single films/ videos we will meet altogether in Davos to realize a kind of framework for the programme. We now think that we should develop a series of clips which are compilating material from the pool of material collected for the project as well as new material shot together on location in Davos. Our own presence at this place, Davos, gives us the possibility to involve the annual World Economic Forum and this kind of "global cooperation" into the framework in a subtle way. We will be able to show the basic opposition between our own subjective theoretical and practical intentions and the ethics of the multicultural images of globalization.





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