Knowbotic Research huwwara anybody, looking

January 30 – January 31 2010

Preview of the project: huwwara _ anybody, looking

Opening Friday January 29th, 18.00 – 20.00
Official opening by Andreas Broeckmann 19.00 hrs

With pleasure we announce the preview of the project huwwara _ anybody, looking by the artists collective Knowbotic Research. It’s a project they have realized with the help of the Artists in Residence Program at NIMk. The installation huwwara _ anybody, looking is being exhibited at NIMk firstly as a preview and will afterwards be shown amongst other places at FACT, Liverpool and the Edith-Russ-Site for Media Art, Oldenburg.

a participative dis/play
A female voice recounts the TV-report about an interrupted and failed suicide attack by a Palestinian boy on an Israeli checkpoint. Or is the voice narrating a dream about the hybridisation of the suicide bomber with a military robot and its surrounding security architecture, merging both and turning them into an undecodable, computer-animated being?

huwwara _ anybody, looking is an installation consisting of different sets, media and viewing formats (an audio piece, a single-screen computer animation, a double-screen interactive video). The installation is based on the re-enactment of video footage, archived on Youtube, of a report from Israeli TV Channel 2. The installation enables the observer, placed in a "third position", a vexing immersion into his/her ways of looking at, and perceiving of, extremely overcoded protagonists such as suicide bombers and high-tech military actors. Interjected is a doubled, apparently inconspicuous view of the neutral silhouette of a Palestinian city at night. The display of the restaged TV scene provides access to a "narrative of strangeness", an opaque extension to the existing demonizing imagery applied from both sides of the political antagonism in the Middle East, as well as a displacement of super-hero figurations from adolescent role model techniques.

The collective Knowbotic Research consists of the artists Yvonne Wilhelm (*1962), Christian Huebler (*1962), and Alexander Tuchacek (*1962), who are based in Zurich/Switzerland. The group experiments with urbanity, the construction of knowledge and political representations in public spheres. http://krcf.org/krcf.org/

knowbotic research in collaboration with:
modelling / animation: Sophia Zauner, Noe Marti
blender game engine: Simon Broggi, Ruedi Lüthi

supported by:
Netherlands Media Art Institute Amsterdam, Artists in Residence Program
Bundesamt für Kultur BAK Schweiz, Projekt sitemapping
Daywalker - Detlev Bollmann, Köln

thanks to
Susanne Jaschko, Petra Heck, Nat Muller, Eran Schaerf and Andreas Broeckmann