Exhibition
These works present different perspectives on the festival theme “record, record”: technical recording and reproducibility, the basis of most electronic arts, encourage a self-reflexive, playful approach. Alongside investigations of the aesthetics of recording and recording media, these artistic contributions also address current social issues related to the voluntary and involuntary registration and storage of data. Finally, the electronic registration and storage of data is also ever more closely interwoven with the constitution and construction of identity: how do I record myself; how do I present myself in databanks; how many, and which kind of data concerning myself do I reveal?
Lutz Bacher – Martin Brand – Garrett Davis / Kieran Gillen – Aleksandra Domanovic – Alejo Duque / Lorenz Schori – Etoy.Corporation – Verena Friedrich – Maia Gusberti / Nik Thönen – Esther Hunziker – Flo Kaufmann – Oliver Laric – Kristin Lucas – Christian Marclay – Agnes Meyer-Brandis – Frédéric Post – Michael S. Riedel – Lucien Samaha – Laurent Schmid – David Troy – Valentina Vuksic – Jordan Wolfson
Guided tours (in German): Thu 21.30 h, Fri/Sat 13.00 h and 21.00 h, Sun 13.00 h
Guided tour in English: Sun 16.00 h
Lutz Bacher
(lives in California, USA)
Closed Circuit
(1997-2000), single channel video 40 min
For her exhibition in the Pat Hearn Gallery in 1997, Lutz Bacher installed a surveillance camera in the gallery office, images of which were displayed in the exhibition space. The one year long exhibition gave rise to 1200 hours of footage, from which the artist later distilled the video, Closed Circuit. Pat Hearn, the main character in the short film that ensued, died of cancer shortly after the installation ended. This playful behind the scenes peep at the art market hence unexpectedly became an individual’s electronic legacy.
Martin Brand
(*1975, lives and works in Cologne)
Match
(2005). 3-channel video installaion.
Match is based on found video footage of a fight between hooligan gangs, one of the encounters they arrange for the purpose of beating the hell out of one another. Martin Brand stumbled upon websites and DVDs containing images of these fights – a jumble of amateurs’ material, much of which bore traces of having been copied numerous times. This huge visual stash contained images of the same fight, which had been recorded with three different cameras. Brand used the soundtrack to synchronise the three perspectives. Hooligans evidently gain self-assurance not only from the extreme immediacy of physical contact during the fight but also from recording the action.
www.martinbrand.com/works/match-t.html 
Garrett Davis / Kieran Gillen
(*1984, lives and works in Philadelphia / *1984, lives and works in Baltimore)
mif
(2008). Video
mif shows nothing more than the process of making a recording in a forest with a microphone mounted on a boom pole. It nevertheless suddenly seems as if we can see and hear more than that: the microphone scrapes along tree barks and bores itself into loose earth, thereby giving rise to distorted sounds, reminiscent of heavy breathing. The microphone is transformed into a Techno animal, and the seemingly sober recording into an act of shameless, sensual excess.
Aleksandra Domanovic
(*1981 in Glozan)
Anhedonia
(2007) Video
“Anhedonia“, was the original title of Woody Allen’s Film “Annie Hall“ (1977). As ‘anhedonia’ is the psychological term for the inability to experience pleasure or joy, the name was considered unmarketable and dropped. Aleksandra Domanovic uses the soundtrack of Allen’s film in her video but completely replaces his images with clips from a commercial video archive. This type of ‘stock footage’ as it is known is carefully indexed for instant retrieval - and it is on the basis of the index that it was selected and assigned to Allen’s soundtrack and script.
aleksandradomanovic.com
Shift Talk (together with Oliver Laric): Sat 16.00 h, Festival Centre
Alejo Duque
(*1970, Medellin/CO; lives and works in Seon/CH, Saas Fee/CH and Aix/F)
Lorenz Schori
(lives and works in Bern)
--re-routed (as default)
(2008 )
Armed with a myriad of different gadgets that record and store data, Duque and Schori set out to explore the Festival site at Dreispitz: from nocturnal acoustic layers via wireless-LANS through to the spectres in the nearby cemetery, from bio through to radio waves, electro smog positivism through to esoteric “Electronic Voice Phenomena“, from the possible to the impossible, they find it all. ‘Normal’ and ‘paranormal’ events and much that evades our five senses is thus made perceptible in re-routed. GPS is used to map recorded data that is then amended to create a new type of cartography of a place known as Basle.
co.lab.cohete.net
Shift Talk with Alejo Duque: Fri 21.30 h, Festival Centre
Etoy.CORPORATION
(Switzerland)
M∞ / Mission Eternity.
Installation.
M∞ / MISSION ETERNITY is a death cult for the information age. Real live persons are digitally registered by etoy.AGENTS and sent as M∞PILOTS on an endless journey through time and space. The clinical death of an M∞PILOT automatically activates an individual POST MORTEM PLAN. The MISSION ETERNITY CAPSULE subsequently begins to reproduce itself and to embed itself in servers, cell phones and so forth. Ephemeral physicality ends in virtual immortality. etoy will present a documentary version of M∞ / MISSION ETERNITY at the Shift exhibition, enhanced for the first time by a comprehensive register of the pilots’ medical data.
www.etoy.com
Performance: Fri 14.00 h and Sat 22.00 h, Exhibition Hall
Verena Friedrich
(*1981, Hanau; lives and works in Frankfurt/Main)
ENDO
(2007). Installation.
ENDO is a digital recording apparatus equipped with various sensors and a terabyte hard disc. The black box continuously gathers data from its immediate vicinity until it reaches full storage capacity. Images, sounds, GPS data, brightness, air pressure and humidity are archived within this black box, without observers ever knowing what happens to the stored data. ENDO mirrors a situation we are all in: data – also about us - is gathered continuously. These mountains of data are rarely evaluated, yet they remain piled up, beyond the control of any single individual.
http://heavythinking.org 
Maia Gusberti
(*1971, Bern; lives and works in Vienna, Bern, Kairo);
Thönen Nik
(*1963, Zwieselberg/Switzerland; lives and works in Vienna):
Sunday-files
(2007). Video-Installation.
Images of workrooms, classrooms and offices, recorded by web-cams and streamed are a widespread phenomenon - and this is what Gusberti and Thönen use in their work, Sunday-files. On Sundays, the day when rooms stand empty and there is no information at all to be conveyed, they film the streams: a veiled reference to a source of increasing concern, namely the sheer endless flood of automatically compiled shadow data that is never evaluated by a human being yet already accounts for a major proportion of all data generated worldwide.
www.maiagusberti.net
www.re-p.org
Shift Talk with Maia Gusberti/Nik Thönen: Fri 15.00 h, Festival Centre
Esther Hunziker
(*1969, lives and works in Basel)
ooo
(2008). Interactive online videos.
Videos in the ooo series show everyday scenes in public space: seemingly incidental, anonymous and unspectacular footage, urban scenes one might find anywhere in the world. Viewers can interrupt the flow of these short loops. Action stops and doubles. The result is an a-synchronous circumstance, as if one had stopped and doubled time.
www.ref17.net/index.html 
Flo Kaufmann
(*1973, lives and works in Solothurn)
disk-o-mat
(2008). Interactive Installation.
The automatic disk-o-mat is similar to a photo-booth. Visitors sit inside, insert a coin and the recording process begins. Yet instead of a portrait, this machine records the visitor’s voice or a playback he brought along, and then instantly cuts a vinyl disc of it. After only a short wait the machine spits out a 7” single that visitors can then take home with them.
www.floka.com
Concert Flo Kaufmann and Strotter Inst.: Sat 20.00, Concert Hall
Oliver Laric
(*1981, Istanbul; lives and works in Berlin)
50 50
(2007). Video.
In his web-based video piece 50 50 Oliver Laric reflects on the reception of videos and popular culture on the Internet. To do so he compiled from YouTube fifty amateur renditions of songs by HipHop icon, 50 Cent, and then edited isolated sequences from these in such a way as to seamlessly reconstruct the original song in its entirety. The video therefore comes across as a collective effort at karaoke by singers with different geographical and cultural backgrounds, who have appropriated and interpreted the iconography of HipHop in amateur settings in various ways. At Shift Laric will present for the first time the 2008 version of 50 50, a remix of a remix, for which he used only YouTube videos from 2008.
oliverlaric.com
Screening of YouTube-Videos compiled and commented by Oliver Laric: Fri 16.00 h und Sat 21.00 h, Small Hall
Shift Talk (with Aleksandra Domanović): Sat 16.00 h, Festival Centre
Kristin Lucas
(*1968 lives and works in Brooklyn)
Refresh
(2007)
Before and After
(2007)
On 5th October 2005 the Superior Court of California permitted artist Kristin Sue Lucas to legally change her name to Kristin Sue Lucas. The judge made the following comment: “You have changed your name to exactly the same name as you had before in order to refresh yourself, as if you were a website”. The ease with which recording technologies process data makes it possible to keep new and more up-dated versions available at all times – which in turn create a need for these and also the expectation that newer versions are always an improvement on older ones. In kl-v2 the artist applies this common new procedure to her own life: she creates a current version of herself, of which her artist friends subsequently make a portrait that is then compared with the earlier version.
Court room sketches: Joe McKay
Before and After contributions: Paul Slocum, Will Pappenheimer
www169.pair.com/klucas/before_after
Performance-Lecture by Kristin Lucas: Sat 17.00 h, Festival Centre
Christian Marclay
(*1955 San Rafael, CA, USA; lives and works in New York)
Marclay takes his exploration of the playback potential of vinyl recordings to an extreme. The exhibition presents two works that illustrate the broad spectrum of his preoccupation with this theme also in temporal terms:
Record Players
(1984). Video.
In ”Record Players“ Christian Marclay addresses the playback potential of vinyl records. The video was made in 1983/84, the era of analogue recordings and playback. By swinging, scratching and ultimately even breaking vinyl records a group of people creates rhythmic sounds in an absurd, playful way – thereby themselves becoming ‘record players’. “Breaking is making music“, says Marclay. The actors emancipate vinyl from its role as a storage medium and turn it into an instrument.
Looking for love
(2008). Video
A record player needle in close-up as it scans a vinyl record to find the word ‘love’. As soon as the needle finds the word it glides several times back and forth across it and plays it, before continuing on its way into other song sequences.
www.whitecube.com/artists/marclay/
© Christian Marclay. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Agnes Meyer-Brandis
(*1973, lives and works in Cologne )
CCS-Trailer - (Cloud Core Scanner)
On a parabolic flight run by the German Centre for Air and Space Research, the artist – at 8,500 metres above sea level and in a state of microgravity - investigated the activity of so-called aerosols, the core of clouds. A cloud-core scanner she developed especially for this project registered 5 terabyte of data in the course of the research, which the artist is presently evaluating. Agnes Meyer-Brandis presents a short video and a performance lecture that offer insight into this evaluation procedure and her own artistic practice: to use scientific research as a springboard for the exploration of fantastical realms.supported by Filmstiftung NRW und Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt www.ffur.de/Performance
Supported by Filmstiftung NRW and Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt
Performance-Lecture by Agnes Meyer-Brandis: Fri 19.00 h, Festival Centre
Frédéric Post
(*1975 Annemasse CH, lives and works in Genf )
Miracol
(2000-2003). Installation / Performance
Using a simple cast made from the run-of-the-mill white PVA glue, ‘Miracol’ Frédéric Post produces copies of vinyl records. An ‘A’ or ‘B’ side becomes a ‘C’ side, a negative full of side noise, which the needle traces from its centre to periphery, playing in reverse whatever was copied: lo-fi piracy becomes an authentic intervention in the material. Besides making non-authorised casts, Post is also working with musicians on a series of Miracol Editions, one of which - produced in cooperation with Flo Kaufmann, who features also independently in this year’s exhibition and music programme - will be released just in time for Shift and be on sale in the Shift Shop.
www.evergreene.ch/ARTISTS/POST/post.htm
DJ-Performance with Miracol-records Sat 20.00 h, Concert Hall
Michael S. Riedel
(* 1972, lives and works in Frankfurt a. M.)
Filmed Film (1999-2008).
Outdoor InstallationAfter exhibitions in New York (David Zwirner) and Frankfurt (Städelmuseum), Filmed Film will be projected onto a facade on the Shift festival site. Primary source material for the installation is more than 40 hours of video footage made in the period 1999 – 2002 and motivated by the desire to film films. Due to the camera’s auto-focus setting such recordings were regularly blurred or pulsated. Ostensibly badly filmed, the image runs through the image or the film disappears in the film. The audience is visible. The length of a film is rarely the same as that of a filmed film. Some films begin before the film; most of them end when the camera is put back in its bag. The performance of a camera’s rechargeable batteries not infrequently determined how much of a film should be filmed. What is more, even silent movies automatically acquired a soundtrack. Shift Talk with Michael Riedel: Fri 20.30 h, Festival Centre
Lucien Samaha
(*1958, Lebanon; lives and works in New York)
a_synchronous self-reflection in exif:precision:time (2008)
For years now, Samaha has been using a camera and other electronic recording equipment to document all aspects of his life. The artist drew on this personal archive to develop for the exhibition a new installation designed to track synchronicity in data mountains. Visitors to the exhibition can sit down at a dressing table yet they see themselves, not in a mirror but in a monitor with an integrated camera. At the press of a button visitors can activate a mechanism that inserts their personal likeness into an arrangement of images, which can be correlated with the precise time. The visual collage feeds on the visitor’s portrait as well as on online sources and Samaha’s personal archive and can be printed on paper: an art takeaway.
www.mondolucien.net
Shift Talk with Lucien Samaha: Sat 15.00 h, Festival Centre
Outstation at Unternehmen Mitte, Gerbergasse 30, Basel, during exhibition opening hours
Laurent Schmid
(*1960, Basel; lives and works in Bern und Geneva)
Memory Piece
(2006). Installation and mp3-player edition.
‘Memory Piece’ builds on (disputed) methods of learning languages whilst sleeping. The American Secret Service used learning-by-sleeping methods as early as World War II. Its agents were meant to memorize the dialects, accents, habits, customs and other aspects of the country to which they would be posted. Many specialists claim this is a very effective method whilst others decry it as charlatanry.‘Memory Piece’ operates on the premise that the source code of a small image of a black hole can be memorized completely. It is therefore possible to reproduce an image thus memorized, using text editor and a programme capable of opening JPEG data.
www.electric-haze.org
Shift Talk with Laurent Schmid: Fri 17.00 h, Festival Centre
David Troy
(lives and works in Baltimore, MD)
Flickrvision
(2007). Software.
Online services and picture archives such as Google Maps and Flickr change the way we perceive the world. David Troy’s ‘Flickrvision’ project illustrates this fact emphatically. ‘Flickrvision’ shows a Google Maps map of the world on which photographs appear at the very place at which they were uploaded onto Flickr only one or two moments previously. The geographic position of the image and hence of the photographer is thus identified. David Troy has developed a programme that allows us to visually grasp the exponential growth of a global platform such as Flickr;
and at the same time permits the global iconography of everyday snapshots to roll by on our screens.
flickrvision.com 
Valentina Vuksic
(*1974 Munich; lives and works in Amsterdam and Zürich)
Harddisko
(2004). Installation
For Harddisko 16 Vuksic opened redundant hard disks and equipped them with audio recorders. The reading and writing heads of each hard disk emit different noises, depending on their age and type of manufacture. The sequenced interplay of all 16 machines gives rise to constantly varied music, sometimes reminiscent of Click-Techno and sometimes of hard disk crashes one would rather forget. The storage medium becomes an object and instrument in its own right whilst the data it stores becomes obsolete. The open hard disks also look like record players: hard disk becomes harddisko.
harddisko.ch
Shift Talk with Valentina Vuksic: Fri 18.00 h, Festival Centre
Jordan Wolfson
(*1980, lives and works in New York and Berlin)
An installation by Jordan Wolfson is located on the roof.