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RTRU Season 2 December 2023

Betweenness

Season two, “Betweenness'', explores cultural identities as technocultural and networked epistemes, binding them through their broken histories. Over the past thirty years, the Baltics have experienced dramatic geopolitical upheavals and  shifts in power; once bound to the Soviet Union in quasi-political isolation, the region is now more opaque and free-floating, with a cultural atmosphere  that always seems to be in search of solid ground. The season title is borrowed from Oliver Laric’s video work Betweenness (2018), which models a commitment to the interstitial through its own indexicality, hybridity, and peculiarities. As animated media, it exemplifies this season’s central critical disjunction — one between cultural aftershocks and the artistic and technical possibilities that can emerge from them. Like the infinitely shifting time-lapse movements of the video, the presented projects manifest through a series of vignettes — display materials, cultural ephemera, archival objects — in their investigations of technoculture. ‘Betweenness’ champions the credo that construction and deconstruction are interrelated functions, experiences that must share one another.