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Two lectures by GEOFF STAHL (in english)

Donnerstag, 28. Jänner 2010, 18.30 Uhr

@ Galerie aRtmosphere

Taking the Scenic Route: Making Music in Berlin and Montreal

This discussion will outline a book project dedicated to the study of making music in Berlin and Montreal. The book's primary focus is on the image of place, noting how the figure of the divide circulates in discourses about musicmaking. It does this in relation to a rich bohemian pedigree borne by each city, noting how these histories inform the urban imaginary and thus musical practice. As a way of introducing this project, the talk will address issues of comparison and exemplification as well as the deployment of terms such as scene and subculture.

Geoff Stahl is a Lecturer in Media Studies at Victoria University in Wellington, Aotearoa-New Zealand. His research involves the study of urban culture and popular music, and he has published on cities such as Berlin, Montreal and Wellington.

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Dienstag, 26. Jänner, 14.00 Uhr
@ Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien, Roter Lichthof

"Growing Older" in the New Berlin: Club Transmediale and Creative Life in the City

Vortrag von Geoff Stahl (in english)

In January 2009, the electronic arts and music festival, CTM (formerly Club Transmediale), celebrated its tenth anniversary. For the better part of a decade, this annual event has been a showcase for contemporary electronic visual art and music (its subname is Festival for Adventurous Music and Related Visual Arts), and has contributed to the image of Berlin as a city dedicated to encouraging creative ferment, further extending its longstanding legacy as a crucible for musical and artistic experimentation. This talk will use CTM as a case study suited to address aspects of what is referred to as the city's "precariat," or LIMEs (a colloquial term applied to Berliners, meaning "Less Income, More Experience"). This cohort of creative individuals is caught up in the nebulous and tenuous, but an increasingly central, cultural economy in what is (still) referred to as the "New Berlin," a term deployed by city marketers, developers and others to brand the city as it has evolved after 1989 and the reunification of East and West Berlin, about which more will be said below (Strom, 2001; Till, 2005; Binder and Niedermüller, 2006). In order to explore issues related to this phenomenon, the first section of this talk will briefly contextualize arts and culture festivals in the city, drawing on recent work on cultural tourism and festival culture as a way of exploring how events come to define urban culture within the confines of a particular discursive and symbolic apparatus: the "event city" (Richards and Williams, 2004; Evans, 2005). A discussion of the similarities and differences between film festivals and music festivals provides a framework to further consider the unique ways in which CTM evolved, relying upon a series of interviews with the founders/organizers, noting particularly the festival's social function and value. More specifically, this talk will explore what it means to be "grow older" in the context of the New Berlin. This draws specifically on Pierre Bourdieu's (1993) use of the term, which refers to the accumulation, deployment, and translation over time of certain kinds of capital that can provide both the ballast and cultural prestige needed to claim and maintain a privileged place in a particular field of cultural production. The discretionary use of cultural and social capital that makes this possible has been dispersed through networks which have their roots firmly planted in Berlin, which have also been extended to bring in festivals, institutions and individuals from elsewhere. These networks do not necessarily ameliorate the kinds of tensions addressed here; instead, they embody a number of strategies that have lately been translated into imperatives for the organisers of CTM as they and the festival have "grown older." As will be argued here, the organizers have adapted to the changes in Berlin pragmatically at the level of infrastructure, entrenched as part of the city's vibrant club culture and its art and music scenes, and discursively at the level of how to imagine the intersection between themselves, the "New Berlin" and CTM as a constellation of forces, ideas, images and practices which is shifting, unstable, and secures no guarantees for a creative life in Berlin other than the certainty of uncertainty.