Syndicate: Kino-Eye3: CyberCities, Brussels, 20-22 November

[Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@v2.nl>]

From: de andere film <asinema@glo.be>

Kino-Eye3: CyberCities
A festival on the relocation of urban space
5-28 November (conference 20-22 November)

A Production of De andere Film/Centrum voor Beeldcultuur
Koninklijk Paleis, Meir 50, Antwerp (Belgium)

AGENDA

Thu 5 Nov.  20.00 City Symphonies: Metropolis (F. Lang)
Sat 7 Nov.  22.00 City Symphonies: Blade Runner (R. Scott)
Tue 10 Nov.  20.00 City Symphonies: Rain (J. Ivens), Images d'Ostende (H.
Storck), A Propos de Nice (J. Vigo), Rien que les heures (A. Cavalcanti)
Sat 14 Nov.  21.00 City Symphonies: Heat (M. Mann)
Mon 16 Nov.  20.00 City Symphonies: Menschen am Sonntag (R. Siodmak & E.G.
Ulmer)

CONFERENCE

Fri 20 Nov.  20.00 Scott Bukatman: 'The Syncopated City: New York and
Musicals' (lecture)
	     21.00 Utopia/Dystopia (video)
	     23.00 City Symphony: New York
Sat 21 Nov.  14.00 Saskia Sassen: 'Electronic Space and Power' (lecture)
	     15.30 David Blair: 'MetaTokyo' (presentation)
	     17.00 Mapping the City (video)
	     20.00 Edward Soja: 'SimCities: Hyperreality and the
Restructured Urban Imaginary' (lecture)
	     22.00 Virus/Surveillance (video)
	     23.00 City Symphony: Rudy Burckhardt (film)
Sun 22 Nov.  14.00 Christine Boyer: 'Crossing CyberCities' (lecture)
	     15.30 Closing debate
	     17.00 City Symphony: Dominic Angerame (film)
	     20.00 City Symphonies: Kino-Glaz (D. Vertov)

CONFERENCE END

Mon 23 Nov.  20.00 City Symphonies: La Tour + Paris qui dort (R. Clair)
Fri 27 Nov.  22.00 City Symphonies: Berlin, die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (W.
Ruttmann)
Sat 28 Nov:  21.30 City Symphonies: Playtime (J. Tati)

KINO-EYE3: CYBERCITIES

"It is then that the great buildings lose reality and take on their magical
powers. They are immaterial; that is to say one sees but the lighted
windows. Squares after squares of flame, set and cut into the aether. Here
is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will." (Ezra Pound
on New York)

The birth of the modern city, the railroad and the cinema are - as any film
historian knows - intimately linked events. The geometric sublimity of the
city with its bridges and skyscrapers and the dynamic sublimity of the
train journey could only be rationalized via a cut up reality, the cuts and
close-ups of the cinema. To a large extent early cinema reflected the
experience of  the fl=E2neur, the city dweller who with every new passage
took in new constellations of bewildering images which he then later
(re-)constructed into a coherent, sometimes narrative whole. The close-up
disturbs the passage of time, freezes what is in permanent motion and would
otherwise remain blurry, chaotic, invisible. As Walter Benjamin has amply
demonstrated in his groundbreaking studies of early modernist experience,
both the narrative logic, the phenomenological reality and the technical
apparatus of the cinema are reflections of the caleidoscopic reality of the
metropolis. The past century has seen a countermove in which the city has
in its turn become more and more cinematographic, illusory, virtual. The
sweatshop production logic of industrial city life (the city of Dickens and
Dreiser) was replaced by the ethereal datalabor of uniform(ed) knowledge
workers, the polymorphous masses of the agora were replaced by the
standardized and hyper-transparent meeting place of the shopping mall,
human contact is induced via fiberoptic cables and the city loses its
material center. Postmodern urbanists like Jean Baudrillard talk about the
'hyperreality' of the city as 'pure simulation'. Cities like New York are
"vital, kinetic and filmic". While the city threatens to lose its meaning
as public space cyberpunk-auteurs like William Gibson dream of the
cyberspace matrix as a virtual reality version of Le Corbusiers Radiant
City. And it's not only in fiction that cyberspace is rediscovered as a
utopian urban space. While the Infobahn is essentially an anti-spatial
space, the traditional fora of urban life are easily transferred to the
ethereal dataspace. An interesting thing about the virtual city - the "city
of bits" - is that its spatial model can best be described as a condensed
infinity (Rem Koolhaas' "culture of compression"), an infinite space
without space, a meeting place with an infinite number of entrances. Just
as the early twentieth century dream of progressive urbanization, of the
city as final fullfilment of all democratic promise was corrupted by the
monopolization of public space, the dream of digital democracy is
threatened however by the corporate take-over and socio-economic control of
the virtual agora. Kino-Eye3: CyberCities will explore the relationship
between visual media and urban structures, between the disappearance of
public city space and the budding urban infrastructure (virtual libraries,
museums, theaters, bookstores, banks, shopping centers, ...) on the
internet. What can we learn from these new cohabitation models, from these
'cities of bits'? Is the city of tomorrow a hypnotic, vertiginous mirage
inspired by Blade Runner and Baudrillard or a concrete - albeit
anti-spatial - collective of conscious users?

INFO

Lectures: 150 BF
Video and film: 120 BF
Weekend price: 1350 BF
Cd-rom, internet and debate: free admission

Reservations:
Centrum voor Beeldcultuur
(32) 3-234.16.40 (tel.)
(32) 3-226.27.64 (fax)
asinema@glo.be (e-mail)
http://www.dma.be/cvb/as (website)

Location:
Koninklijk Paleis/Filmmuseum
Meir 50, Antwerpen
By car: parking facilities (Hopland, Oude Vaartplaats, Stadsschouwburg, St.
jacobsmarkt, Groenplaats, Eiermarkt, Lombardenvest, Oudaan)
Public transportation: tram =E9 (Hoboken/linkeroever), tram 15
(Mortsel/Linkeroever)


AS/Sinebase/Kino-Eye/TechnoLust
De andere Film v.z.w.
Meir 50
B-2000 Antwerpen
Belgium/Europe
0032-3-234.16.40 (vox)
or:0032-3-233.85.71
0032-3-877.44.88 (fax)
or: 0032-3-231.86.60
asinema@glo.be (e-mail)
http://www.dma.be/cvb/as