CiTiZEN KiNO - the "parallel politics" series

Describe your idea and concept of your work in relation to the festival outlines:

CiTiZEN KiNO is an initiative to create a new relationship to our rapidly “shifty” media environments. We experiment with a combination of online participation ( social media platforms ) and social gatherings (various local and neighborhood venues) which are begin as a cinema environment, but which ultimately are transformed into realtime public forums. Our events are what may be called a public media navigation system, and utilized as a medium to intervene in an (over-)mediated society, thereby instigating a new space in which to re-discover full community engagements, better collective intelligence and on-the-ground political agency.

In 2016 and 2017, C-KINO will be working with the theme of “parallel politics” and post-electoral situations. Our working title is “ Strategies For Turtle Island(s)” – which takes its cue from the indigenous tribes’ original name for the North American territories. And we explore what it might mean for 21st century global citizens to identify as indigenous inhabitants and cultures now under threat of a techno-industrial colonialism, mass displacement and ecocide.

If accepted for a Memefest residency, we would bring our performance(s) of CiTiZEN KINO to Australia. And provide an exhibition of our current and previous cinema poster work ( see attached). These visualisation processes are a important element of creating the framework for each CK episode, and could become a larger part of poster campaign for "Turtle Islands" theme and its evolving serial episodes over the next year.

What kind of communication approach do you use?

Our arts+media praxis involves inviting citizens into the process a month or 2 before the actual CiTiZEN KiNO events by proposing an urgent topic that we feel a need to analyze, startegize and mobilize. In the initial phase, we make a call out for citizens to help us collect media materials, resources and perspectives, and enter into the preparatory and curatorial discussions. These topics or situations are territories which our societies ultimately require new community strategies, collective agency and praxis. At the screening nights we bring the collected materials as a playlist ( images, movie extracts, video clips, agitprop, special guests, performers, etc. ) and we explore and navigate together. And we provoke debates, dialogue and brainstorming. Our main objective is to transform the old download-only viewer setting into an expanded and recombinant cinema, a newsfeed embedded in an art event, and eventually unfolding into a town hall meeting. It's potentially a reclaiming of the Pathé newsreels ( a feature of early cinema up until television) + public service broadcasts intermixed with all those disintegrating Hollywood-screen spectacles and cubicle-izing digital frames and arriving at a re-embodied social media gathering. One that that has real teeth for collective agency and unscripted futures… and the revolution of everyday life! CiTiZEN KiNO: One small step for occupied humans, one giant leap off the edge of our screens ! An open-source (and rhizomatic) platform to return home and start building communities again.

What are in your opinion concrete benefits to the society because of your communication?

The impacts have thus far have been to awaken audiences to the possibilities and potentials of re-inventing the cinema + social media, as a far more dynamic medium. And to imagine using the powerful learning tools of the various media formats as something that resembles more a kind of civic engagement rather than a labyrinth of consumer downloads.

As Christoph Schlingensief once said at a screening he presented at the Berlinale film festival, shortly before he succumbed to a terminal illness that same year. The event was billed as Schlingensief presents the very first Italian feature film based on Dante's Inferno. Paraphrased, he said: " Well, we do not need to treat this as some sacred untouchable thing, we can use it for whatever we want and need." Five minutes into the film, he broke into its artistic mediated trance, he froze the frame of the historic film and launched into an hour-long rant and a lucid analysis on much more immediate versions of the hell on earth that we are creating now on our planet, in our times. Mixing in a wide variety of various media sources along the way ( including excerpts from Apocalypse Now ). The theater was now alive, an unpredictable vehicle, we were taken off the rails !

What did you personally learn from creating your submitted work?

We're continuing to learn that cultures of resistance are anything and everything but futile ! They are also an abundant source of energy and inspiration.

And it should be mentioned that the project does address this year's pleasure theme, in 2 ways:

1.By sharing media in a communal and performative setting we have experienced that it becomes far more pleasurable to navigate the materials in a space where people are given the chance to respond to the inputs, rather than swallowing it all in solitary cells of computer screens and isolating online formats. And perhaps needless to say, it makes processing heavy subject matter far more rewarding when your own thoughts and ideas can be immediately shared and appreciated.

We also learned not to exhaust citizens w/ the most challenging sources. The shows function better when we mix difficult intellectual work with humorous and uplifting bits, utilizing the full spectrum of the cinematic arts. And also making fun of ourselves when we have over-intellectualized some rather obvious problems.

2. From another angle, there is also an element of C-KINO which is meant to challenge the escapism which the film industry has so ubiquitously capitalized on and made into a consumer formula.

In affect studies, pleasure is considered a short term gratification. And spectacle and eye-candy has become a very dominant pleasure commodity in our society, which circumvents from the larger aims and strategies of communications to provide common meanings and contexts needed for political action.

By disrupting, interrupting or deconstructing this now almost irreperably imbalanced medium, we can postpone the gratification for greater rewards later on. C-Kino bypass the lesser spectacle-pleasure for the more relevant and empowering social gratification. Less appeals to the eye and the Id, and more to the Ego (rational), and building upon pleasures of a connected group and the collective spirit.

We've learned that changing our media environments, and our behaviors within them, are crucial and urgent for changing the operating systems of our society.

Why is your work, GOOD communication WORK?

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Where and how do you intent do implement your work?

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Did your intervention had an effect on other Media. If yes, describe the effect? (Has other media reported on it- how? Were you able to change other media with your work- how?)

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