The Connection Between the War Against Terrorism, Economics and Media-Art

Researchers, activists and media-artists meet on the Trans-Siberian train from Moscow to Beijing September 11th –20th 2005.

The conference “Capturing the Moving Minds” gathers a pack of people … artists, economists, researchers, philosophers, activists … who are interested in the new logic of the economy, the new form of war against terrorism and in the new cooperative modes of creation and resistance, together in a space moving in time. Spatially moving bodies and bodies moving in time (through the different time zones) creates an event, a meeting that not really 'is' but 'is going on'.

Is this project about economics, is it political activity or a work of art? This “boundlessness” or “indeterminacy”, which always characterizes the creation of new, is where the energy of the project is coming: The enterprise expresses and exposes itself the “knowledge economy” in which it exists. It is something the orthodox conceptions about work, action, economy and art are unable to grasp. In this organizational experiment everybody is “alone together” like a pack of wolves around a fire having neighbours to the left and to the right but nobody behind their backs exposed to the desert.There are 50 participants on the train involving well known media-artists, frontline contemporary thinkers and political activists. The project has been invited to participate in the International ARS2006 biennial at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki and to arrange an exhibition at the Villa Croce Museo d’arte contemporanea di Genova during summer 2006.

Pressconference and Opening Seminar Wed 7.9., 15:00-19:00, Hämeentie 33 A, 2nd Floor, Helsinki

15:00-15:20 Intro to the project, its themes and methods (Tuula Karjalainen, Jussi Vähämäki, KlausHarju)

15:20-15:40 Launching of the mobile documentation (Minna Tarkka, Adam Hyde et al.)
15:40-16:00 Trans-sib as a work of art (Akseli Virtanen, Anna Daneri, Genova)

16:00-17:00 Questions, interviews, refreshments

17:00-19:00 “Aesthetics of Resistance” –seminar with Bracha L. Ettinger (Tel Aviv), Pierre Guillet de Monthoux (Stockholm), Jordan Crandall (Los Angeles), Steffen Böhm (London)

Mobicasting brings the event directly for all: The Trans-siberian conference is documented and broadcasted through an audiovisual mobicasting platform to the internet. The documentarists, photographers, artists and researchers produce discussions, ideas, interviews, texts and films along the route. The documentation will be projected in Kiasma during the journey and it will also be available on several international www-channels. The webpages http://www.kiasma.fi/transsiberia will be opened on September 7th. See also http://trans-siberianradio.org

Further info on the conference and the participants: http://www.ephemeraweb.org/conference

Further info on the mobicasting platform: m-cult, Netta Norro +358 40-5618004
Further info on the opening seminar: Akseli Virtanen +358 400-302010 akseli.virtanen@hkkk.fi
The event is organised by Ephemera, Tutkijaliitto, Kiasma, Frame, m-cult, Helsinki School of Economics and the Chydenius Institute