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The notion "industrial culture" encompasses all historical phenomena which have been influenced by the Industrial Revolution and its spatial configurations: social structures, economic, political and social transformations, new living styles and habitations, technological developments, the organization of labor, new architectures, new forms of transportation and communication, transformations of everyday life, and intrusions into nature and the environment. Similarly, new visual representations and developments of artforms and media can be understood under this encompassing notion.

As the interrelationship between humans, nature and technology had been affected profoundly by industrial culture, so we must assume that the psychic geography of the inhabitants of de-industrialized regions is severely challenged by current economic and societal transformations under global capitalism, distributed systems and communications networks. The infrastructural predicament of my home region (Saarland, Germany), displays symptoms (structural unemployment, replacement of heavy industries by service, cultural and technological companies, devaluation of production, deurbanization, deterioration of local communities and social relationships) which are believed to indicate the disappearance of places or a total loss of their functions.

In July 2003 I will implant a laboratory of interactive performance in an abandoned coal mine in this region which has been in a permanent crisis for 20 years since the closing of the coal and steel industries which for 150 years had dominated and shaped the rural landscape. While the regional government has advocated the preservation of the closed coal mines as "landmarks" and "museums of industrial culture," other initiatives in the exhausted region envision activities that go beyond a poetics of decay and the relic, especially in the sector of small entrepreneurial development firms investigating "networks" of integrated research in "postindustrial nature" (regional urbanism, nano-nature, digital nature, environmental and milieu studies, bionics).

In this preview, I will sketch some of the ideas which drive the "Interactive Performance" Laboratory at the coal mine, and which address an artistic perspective on media arts as conversion performances -- devising projects for subjective inscription and alternative economies of communication and connection, while also devising partnerships and transfer services between science, culture and teaching that can put former sites of labor to different uses.

Project Website: http://www.aliennationcompany.com/gallery/goet.htm

Biography

Independent choreographer Johannes Birringer is artistic director of AlienNation Co. (http://www.aliennationcompany.com). He has created numerous multimedia performances and installation video with collaborators in Europe and the Americas. His books include Media and Performance (1998), and Performance on the Edge (2000). He currently heads the Dance & Technology Program at Ohio State University.