VIDEO VORTEX 10 ISTANBUL – ART, ACTIVISM, ARCHIVES
BAU GALATA, DEPO İSTANBUL AND SALT GALATA
31 OCTOBER & 1 NOVEMBER 2014

The 10th annual meeting of Video Vortex is to be hosted in Istanbul at three adjacent institutions all involved in this year’s topics: art, activism and archives. The two-day event of workshops, speaker-led sessions, discussions, panels and work on show will explore how video, art and activism criss-cross questions of recording, archives and archiving, and how working with these intersections can remotivate engagement from one to the other in important and novel ways.

Video’s capacities for both recording and transmission has meant that it has moved into spaces of visibility and the visual in ways that contest as well as confirm the dominant meanings and effects, across different socio-political and cultural frameworks. Video Vortex 10 will consider different issues opened up across the histories, presents and futures of video, from ‘live on tape’ to ‘live streaming’, and from one paradigm of surveillance to another, exploring the ways in which early as well as recent and contemporary video technologies and practices contest accounts of normative realities by renegotiating boundaries between the live, the recorded or the streamed, challenging repressive norms via inventive modes of archival access.
The interests and values of art and activism, sometimes taken to be in conflict, converge around this renegotiation of the meanings of video and the terms of its storage and use. As forms of data gathering enable new forms of covert observation, by the agents of states and corporations, how can video interrupt or divert these processes? Video Vortex 10 Istanbul thus aims to bring together those who, working with inventive ways of accessing, classifying or ‘declassifying’ video recordings and transmissions are seeking to reinvent the terms of freedom, across places and spaces of cultures, processes and practices of memory, representation and senses of future.

We are currently finalizing the program. To keep up with our progress, please check here as well as the Video Vortex discussion list. Information about subscription to this list can be found here.

The Video Vortex Istanbul Edition website and blog, containing the latest information, will be online soon.

For inquiries please contact Lewis Johnson (lewiskjohnson@gmail.com) and Andreas Treske (treske@gmail.com).