Berlin's urban landscape is a living testament to the intricate interplay between visionary counterculture, and corporate-driven speculative initiatives. City of Gold – Berlin in Flux explores the city's multifaceted history, marked by profound transformations, intriguing collisions of visions, erasures, and possible projections into the future, through a series of collective visits to key sites that have shaped the city’s identity over the decades—as well as mirrored the dominant political-social-economic forces at play. From the late 80s until today (the period this seminar will mostly refer to) Berlin has undergone significant shifts, punctuated by the fall of the Wall on November 9, 1989, occupations of overly available spaces, densification, and—most recently—gentrification and hyper commercialization. This makes it essential to discuss strategies for artistic engagement in a city that seems to be losing its historical marks and very few empty spaces to corporate-driven urban development.

City of Gold – Berlin in Flux focuses on the city, its memory, the use of its vacant spaces from the 90s until today, and the potential of artistic visions as a catalyst for socio-political renewal. It delves into questions concerning the existence of remaining spaces, the preservation models for certain areas, and the critical emergence of new ones. It also reflects on our strategies as citizens, artists, and cultural practitioners for navigating a landscape where vacant venues and available spaces are dwindling due to urban densification and full-scale commercialization.

In this context, we will look at the influence of pivotal figures from the 1990s art scene in Berlin, with particular emphasis on the artists and practitioners who initiated or are associated with projects such as Floating University, Haus der Statistik, and Flussbad Berlin. We seek to understand their impact on the city's development and the messages conveyed through their initiatives. We will also examine the model known as "Zwischennutzung'' (which literally translates to the “in-between use”), a urban practice aimed at "revitalizing" vacant areas in urban zones, particularly abandoned and decaying buildings, often repurposing them for cultural or artistic projects temporarily, before the inevitable urban development ensues. These encounters will be complemented with visits to projects of a diametrically opposed intention (Tempelhofer Feld, Humboldt Forum), and walks around neighborhoods where a wild gentrification process has taken place in a few years (Oranienstraße in Mitte, Kreuzberg). 

To broaden our perspective beyond Berlin's confines and acknowledge the parallel developments occurring globally, the seminar fosters discussions that leverage our international viewpoints and experiences. Through these discussions, we aim to construct a mental map that contextualizes our local reflections within a global framework.

The Oranienstraße in Berlin Kreuzberg is the starting point for an artistic and cinematic exploration of the theme of living space. The participants of the seminar will research, discover, explore and observe a street and its inhabitants and develop short video works that will be shown in the shop window and interior of SCOTTY, a project space for contemporary art and experimental media at Oranienstraße. The exhibition will be jointly conceived and organized by the participants of the seminar and will take place in January 2024.

Film curator Florian Wüst will be our guest to present and discuss a series of historical films about Kreuzberg. We will visit the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum as well as the exhibition "Voicing Bethanien" at Kunstraum Bethanien and explore the open archive "Block 57" about living and working in Kreuzberg curated by artist Sigrun Drapatz. There will be shared walks with short impulse talks by the participants on specific self-selected topics and places on Oranienstraße.

Are we prepared to question, explore, and challenge norms and boundaries in the era of artistic expression? Witnessing the captivating interactions that transpire between humans and AI-driven outcomes, shall we endeavor to redefine the boundaries of art?

This seminar is formed around combining a bunch of thought-provoking writing exercises about the very essence of creativity, intelligence, and the role of technology in shaping our artworks. Challenging conventional notions of creativity and consciousness, we will critically explore the use of AI "text-based" tools, the symbiotic relationship between machine generated material and artistic expression and finally focus on some AI tools and programs that work with textual prompting. 

Through the exploration of platforms for artists to use machine learning tools in intuitive ways without coding experience, this seminar invites you to critically examine the profound implications of AI in the realm of animation, video art and essayistic films. The goal is that participants, employing those tools and platforms, in a hands-on hybrid workshop, to create AI experimental videos based on their writings.

We will explore applications such as stable diffusion, Midjourny, Leonardo, Kaiber, Gen-2, Runway LM and new releases.

In search of spaces for reflection that allow us to problematize different forms of sensitive approach to the world, this course called Residual Heat invites students of the experimental film and media arts class -among others interested- to collectively think, develop and record visual, verbal or corporeal actions and gestures around the idea of the production and conservation of heat.

Under the winter framework of the WS 23/24 semester, we seek to stimulate a reflective encounter that catalyzes questionings and problematizations related to heat as a metaphor. From its thermal interpretation translated to the affect between bodies, to its tangible connotations under a framework of global energy and ecological crisis, the possibilities detonated by heat as a subject of thermal-affective research open the way to the interpretation of the world from a wide range of action.

The thermal and affective interest of this course suggests the creation of a space for the conception and production of images where, through light, movement, body and language, we will reflect together on the relationship between audiovisual language and its affective translation of the qualities of the environment. 

As a practical component of this course, we will experimentally explore cyanotype, a photographic printing technique that uses exposure to sunlight, as a tool to present the visual material that participants will develop during the course, which may include either image sequences or short experimental videos.

Montage as a composition of sound and image: We will talk about the selection and arrangement of individual shots and scenes, including their limitations. At each editing point, different components are brought together, resulting in transitions and omissions. Audio and video narratives may be synchronized or separated. The timing is determined by the way the elements are connected or disconnected, each at its own pace, thus creating rhythm, flow and breaks.

Group and individual discussions on participants’ individual projects throughout the process.

In der Lehrveranstaltung POSTPRODUKTIONSBERATUNG bieten Christian Obermaier und Jochen Jezussek theoretische sowie praktische Hilfestellung für die Audio-Postproduktion filmischer Arbeiten aus den Bereichen Narrativer Film, Dokumentation und Videokunst an.