Camera Austria #81 2003

Camera Austria No. 81, the first issue in 2003.
A conversation with Isa Genzken, conducted in Berlin by Wolfgang
Tillmans, continues our series of conversations between artists, launched last
year with Isaac Julien and Constanze Ruhm and followed by AA Bronson's talk with
Matthias Herrmann. This is the first time Isa Genzken who also designed the
cover for this issue speaks about her work in an interview. A second
contribution by Annett Busch and Max Annas is devoted to the œuvre of the
Senegalese film-maker Djibril Diop Mambéty, author of the legendary film "Touki
Bouki". In their texts, both writers demonstrate that moments identified by
predominantly European reception as specifically African are ultimately
universal: Mambéty's motivation, they say, is linked to his homeland and is
certainly political: "My motivation? The motivation for me is always the image,
and for me it is always the image of the place you were born." In his essay,
Helmut Draxler focuses on Michael Schuster's installation "Drombeg" at Camera
Austria Gallery, approaching this Austrian media artist's work by way of
describing the technical, photographic implementation and computer simulated
installation. His methodical approach, characterised in Michael Schuster's work
in such parameters as transfer and shift, reflects the artist's fundamental
stance, whereby meaning arises in the process and art must be seen as a process
running parallel to contemporary everyday life. Vuk Cosic's computer generated
works, which he presented as artist in residence of Medienturm Graz in an
exhibition at Neue Galerie, exhibit a multi-layered system of references that
adds "motion" to canonical works of art history by means of FBI data
surveillance technology: by usurping art works such as Malevich's famous "Black
Square" as an interface for the surveillance software, he creates a "socially
compatible surveillance spectacle: an upmarket version of the popular TV series
Big Brother" (Saul Albert).

The series on the "Aesthetics of Globalisation" by Krystian Woznicki started in
Camera Austria No. 79 is continued in this issue with an essay entitled "You
Messages". Woznicki here analyses advertisement motives of several service
sectors in terms of this type of communication strategy and concludes, "that,
although you are your own boss, or your own product, you are at the same time a
servant / product of the market that controls the supply and demand
relationship, thus indirectly articulating codes of conduct." Like every issue
of Camera Austria this publication includes numerous reviews on international
exhibition projects, recommends recent publications and informs on current
events in the fields of media art, awards, calls for applications a.o.