Image of sound – you don’t need a TV of your own …

.. to watch football here in Berlin. Instead it is getting harder to escape the constant buzz about football and not to feel guilty of not joining the steady parties gathering around the still all over the city emerging screens and monitors. It seems almost no bar, coffee place, restaurant and as well private gatherings after 3 o’clock in the afternoon happen without a projection or monitor being placed towards the streets.
Last night a 5 min bike ride brought me through at least three bigger crowds which block passage ways and sometimes as well the streets …

… this are not images from being even near the ‘fan meile’…
One could start to speculate here about the level of mediation which changes now almost ‘naturally’ a cityscape, that usually is except for certain center parts (like Potsdamer Platz), not really known for being exposed to too much medial transformations. Its an over all phenomenon which effects almost everything from tiny Doener places to better restaurants up to the designed places in the ‘Regierungsviertel’. It is coming as a layer covering wide areas and adding to the exsisting – in this sense its more like a huge advertisment area inhabited by people than a mediated area which is designed and adjusted to be revived for living.
And it’s still more than 2 weeks to go on like this …

.. nice aspects though – and definitly alone trough its title ‘The Image of Sound: Football‘ more concretely relating to the chanced environment is for example the Brazil event of the HKW
which also hosts the interesting exhibition Tropicália.
… Tropicália, perhaps the most important South American cultural movement of the last 50 years. A revolution in music, visual art, theater, and cinema that also had far-reaching effects on advertising, fashion, and TV. The movement took its name from an experimental installation that the young artist Hélio Oiticica realized in 1967 in the exhibition New Brazilian Objectivity: a traversable wooden hut surrounded by sand – the intrusion of everyday life into the site of art.

Hélio Oiticica‘s name giving work Tropicália, Penetráveis PN2 e PN3 from 1967

correspondingly metamute had posted Rodrigo Nunes’ article ‘We have never been catechised’, where he contrasts the current Barbican exhibition Tropicália – A revolution in Brazilian Culture with the V&A’s Modernism: Designing a new world 1914-1939.:

.. Arguing against the latter’s reductive caricature of modernism as simply an authoritarian and ultimately dystopian attempt to impose utopia on an unready world, he situates modernism as immanent to the wider imperatives of capitalist society in transition. The questioning, non-teleological exploration of potentials and limits which characterised the Brazilian modernist ‘moment’ of the ‘60s suggests that another modernism was and remains possible.
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