Reading by Michelle Teran: Work-in-Progress Guest Lecture

New media artist and researcher Michelle Teran will present work-in-progress on her Folgen project

Folgen (2011), draws on the existing narratives of amateur video makers found on YouTube to build a multi-layered media landscape of Berlin.  My subjective approach combines fragments of images and sound from the videos with my own narration, using the traces video makers have left in the public sphere of the internet to follow people throughout the city. A large table, roughly shaped like the city of Berlin is covered with drawings, texts and documentation from videos. It emerges as a temporary tactile media archive and becomes a physical environment for the re-playing of personal histories, which are then performed live. The many protagonists involved in the making of the work create the stories told during the performance.

Michelle Teran (Canada) explores the interaction between media and social networks in urban environments. She develops performances via the staging of urban interventions such as guided tours, walks, open-air projections, participatory installations and happenings. Michelle Teran won the Transmediale Award 2010 for her work Buscando Al Sr. Goodbar, a "bus tour happening" that took place in Murcia, Spain, in 2009. 

Michelle Teran is a Kunstipendiat admitted to the Artistic Research Fellowships Programme at The Bergen National Academy of the Arts in October 2010 with the project Future Guides for Cities. Future Guides for Cities is a research project that proposes alternative ways to navigate through urban space. It investigates the relationship between online video archives and urban space and examines notions of guide, as a person, map or a method.

(Source: Electronic Literature Research Group, University of Bergen website)