Interview Matthias Tarasiewicz
In 2005 Matthias Tarasiewicz set up the 5uper.net group with about eight fellow students. TThese new media arts students had a shared interest for critical practices in computer- and new media arts, which they felt were lacking in the university program they attended. It proved to be a fruitful initiative, for a couple of years later they extended their activities to organizing a festival in Vienna: ‘Coded Cultures’, which has been successful and growing ever since.
Matthias himself has a background in creative programming and academic research. With his own ‘Artistic Technology Research’, he is affiliated with the Viennese University of Applied Arts. His research mainly concerns media production and practices; practical technological research from a critical artistic viewpoint.
The first ‘Coded Cultures’ festival (2004) was taken up from this very angle. It was self-funded, which immediately got them noticed and brought forward the initiative NetzNetz, which thematized principles of community funding and liquid democracy. The initiative was partially grounded in the dishonesty that Matthias sees in (the standard Austrian process of) jury funding for cultural events. The cultural elite that have their hands on the money, often have quite a low regard for discourse analytic research, which is not by coincidence a great part of the ‘Artistic Technology Research' program and greatly reflected in the festivals program.
Currently, ‘Artistic Technology Research’ is positioning its work between discourse analytic research into documenting and "big data" as well as into the idea of virtual currencies. This latter research has been reason for Ryanne Turenhout to conduct a research into the community of Bitcoin users and their digital discourses from a Humanities perspective during her stay in Vienna as to contribute to the ongoing research program of Artistic Technology Research.
With the discursive analytic research, Matthias is aiming at a different approach then the more common approaches following the ideas of Michel Foucault or Bruno Latour. With his programming background, he is trying to find a more practical and pragmatic approach to discursive research. He is looking to abstract discourses to data, in such a way that patterns will be recognizable and interpretable. As a humanities scholar myself, I am very interested in this approach as I recognize the low regard for discursive research because of it being non quantifiable. But developing a semantic query system is (almost) impossible, as he himself admits, so there is definitely a (theoretical and practical) challenge there.
Here I should probably enlighten the reader into the reason for all of our trips to Vienna. Both people from the University of Utrecht and SETUP – Mirko Tobias Schäfer, Ryanne Turenhout, Frank-Jan van Lunteren, Tijmen Schep, Max Laane and myself – have been going on trips to this beautiful city with the motive to exchange on thoughts, knowledge and practices within digital culture. Artistic Bokeh (a sub-division of the Artistic Technology Research project) has made this possible together with the MuseumQuartier and their lively artist-in-residence program.
‘Coded Cultures’ was a genuinely positive addition to the Viennese cultural event calendar. It was not afraid to ask questions. Why is media art flourishing in these time and what is its message? And how has Eastern Europe risen as a creative catalyst for media art and the demo scene? The answers were given in Vienna in May 2004. Since then other themes have been media art and visual culture in different localities, such as Japan in 2009 and Southern America in 2006 and The City as Interface (Vienna) in 2011. The themes are quite closely linked to popular culture as well as academic discourse. This relevant and critical media festival is one to keep an eye out for.