Myth of Theuth @ Ars Electronica Festival 2017

Unique pub­lic per­for­mance of the game /// 
Sun, Sep­tem­ber 10 2017, 14:00 /// 
Work­shop Space, Postcity /// 
Test games dur­ing the fes­ti­val from Sep­tem­ber 7 to 11 on site ///

When he came to the alpha­bet, Theuth said: “This art, O king, will make the Egyp­tians wis­er and rich­er in mem­o­ry.” This is the myth of the inven­tion of writ­ing accord­ing to Plato’s Phaidros, which MYTH OF THEUTH takes as base for a play­ful exam­i­na­tion of media theories.

While walk­ing through ancient Athens, up to sev­en peo­ple gath­er dif­fer­ent media and get in touch with media-philo­soph­i­cal celebri­ties from the ancient world to the present. Vilém Flusser dri­ves aside the telem­at­ic soci­ety ad nau­se­am, Lau­ra Mul­vey takes a joy­ful look at our mem­o­ry and Mar­shall McLuhan final­ly gets his well-deserved mes­sage. Smart­phones, news­pa­pers, Lego bricks, sleep­ing masks, stamps and oth­er media are used through twelve unique stations.

At the fes­ti­val, MYTH OF THEUTH is put on dis­play for the first time in a unique per­for­mance with the fol­low­ing four media artists:

• Anne Niemetz (NZL) is a media artist and design­er work­ing in the fields of wear­able tech­nol­o­gy, inter­ac­tive instal­la­tion and audio-visu­al design. She is par­tic­u­lar­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by the con­ver­gence of art, sci­ence, design and tech­nol­o­gy, and she pur­sues col­lab­o­ra­tive and cross-dis­ci­pli­nary projects. Anne holds a Media Arts degree from the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestal­tung Karl­sruhe, with a focus in dig­i­tal media and inter­ac­tive sound instal­la­tion, and an MFA in Design|Media Arts from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Los Ange­les. Since 2007 she’s been liv­ing and work­ing in New Zealand, where she holds the posi­tion of Senior Lec­tur­er in the Media Design pro­gramme at Vic­to­ria Uni­ver­si­ty of Wellington.
• Hsinyu Lin aka Xin Xin (USA) is an artist and edu­ca­tor who stud­ies the modes by which inter­net shape and get shaped by social, cul­tur­al, eco­nom­ic, and polit­i­cal dynam­ics. She co-found­ed void­Lab, a fem­i­nist col­lec­tive for women, non-bina­ry, gen­der non­con­form­ing, trans and queer peo­ple to express indi­vid­ual iden­ti­ties through arts and technologies.
• Julian Sta­don (AUS) is a mixed real­i­ty artist, cura­tor and researcher who recent­ly sub­mit­ted his PhD the­sis at Curtin Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy. Stadon’s trans­dis­ci­pli­nary research has includ­ed time with Inter­face Cul­tures Linz, The Syl­grut Cen­tre, Sal­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, HIT­LabNZ, The Aus­tralian Cen­tre for Vir­tu­al Art; The Fogscreen Cen­tre, The Banff New Media Insti­tute, CIA Stu­dios, Col­lab­o­ra­tive Research in Art Sci­ence and Human­i­ty (CRASH), Ulster Uni­ver­si­ty, Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty Graz (TUG) and Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty Munich (TUM).
• Pete Ash­ton (UK) is an artist, most­ly work­ing with cam­eras and com­put­ers, based in Birm­ing­ham in the North West of Europe. He is inter­est­ed how places have echoes, in how the past can bleed through the con­structs of the present through mem­o­ry and foren­sic explo­ration; how the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary things can hap­pen in the most mun­dane and sub­ur­ban envi­ron­ments. His work involves group and solo jour­neys using ran­dom and struc­tured routes to draw mean­ing from and onto the city. Ash­ton is fas­ci­nat­ed with the act of pho­tog­ra­phy, more than pho­tographs themselves.

More about MYTH OF THEUTH: https://qujochoe.org/archive/en/myth-of-theuth

Links:
http://www.aec.at/ai/en/myth-of-theuth