The essay will explore depictions of working-class culture and rank-and-file labor organizing via a close examination of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Acht Stunden sind kein Tag (Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day), a five-episode miniseries the director produced for German television. Aired in 1972–73, Acht Stunden sind kein Tag follows a network of working-class friends, family, and colleagues at a tool-making factory in Cologne. Formally combining aspects of the bourgeois TV dramedy and more politicized worker films, the series depicts characters who organically come to develop workplace organizing tactics and, ultimately, their own critique of capitalism. In the essay, I will contextualize the miniseries within Fassbinder’s oeuvre while also drawing on my own experience with art worker organizing in order to think through cultural representations of left politics and the working class of the 1970s and today.

Elton Kuns will create an interactive website within RTRU. By applying WebGL or similar technology, the website will transform into an invisible grid of doors, chutes, blinds and sliding panels; what lies beyond these portals is a cabinet of morbid curiosities; forever in flux, its contents seemingly shifting between compartments. By engaging a seemingly blank screen, a visitor makes a mental map of its underlying structure. This, in turn, reveals a slew of hidden/abandoned/forgotten viscera: skeletons of major depressive episodes, moments of silence, words of hate laid bare. A chaotic loop of discovery, play and reflection.

Cultural anxieties about “black boxes” circulate across contemporary media theory, through artworld discourses on computation, and in the tech sections of popular news outlets. While these anxieties are most urgently concerned with the opacity of the algorithms that surveil, classify, and monetize our every move, a shift in the relation of human vision to the environments in which this surveillance operates characterizes contemporary computational media. One may sense this as well in the ecological conditions of the Anthropocene, where scales great (e.g. planetary climate sensin) and small (e.g. algorithms that recognize our faces or our emotions) evade direct perceptual access. I can’t help wondering where our sense for and discourses around computational opacity fit into the strange and shifting fates of visuality throughout the last century. From the dark depths of Freud’s unconscious to concepts of cinema as a revelation-machine to the hypervisuality and obscenity ascribed to the postmodern condition, we cannot see enough, or we see too much. The problem of these “black boxes” hinges on questions of epistemology and the relation (or lack thereof) between vision and knowledge.

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard may be best known for his works on poetics (The Poetics of Space, The Poetics of Fire, Water and Dreams), but he is also one of the most important figures in the philosophy of science of the twentieth century. In his analysis of the conditions of knowledge in The New Scientific Spirit, first published in 1934, Bachelard asserts that the ground of scientific knowledge in modern physics is nothing mysterious or unknown, but rather is the production of knowledge itself, a process in which instruments, concepts, and facts are co-constitutive and inseparable. Questions of epistemological access are displaced by his ascription of ontological priority not to one or another nature or ground which is then revealed, but to method—to the techniques of bodies and manners of thought that informs practice. As Bachelard writes, “When we have followed contemporary physics, we have departed nature to enter in a factory of phenomena.” Drawing on concepts developed by media theorist Thomas Lamarre and digital artists Alan Warburton and Lu Yang, Levitt’s essay explores the paradigmatic worksite of contemporary media culture: the interface between selves and screens.

Rio Roye will debut a real-time rendering technique which decomposes SVG drawings into pitched tones and swarming sonic textures in order to explore how motion is apprehended differently in sound and image. The final work will consist of four animations, each with two-channel sound, as well as accompanying SVG drawings, and a short description detailing the work’s construction.

The real-time rendering at the project’s heart is a two-part algorithm which first parses the points of an SVG drawing into tables of X and Y values, and then—evaluated by an oscillator that shifts between subsonic and ultrasonic frequencies—generates the sound of a drawing. As part of this rendering, values from the X and Y tables become the left and right-channel of the sound, respectively.

The second part of the algorithm functions like a custom oscilloscope, in which left and right channels are plotted on a Cartesian grid, resulting in a strobing, deconstructed rendition of the source drawing. The interplay between the evaluation rate of the drawing and the animation’s sixty frames per second capture-rate create stuttering after-images and “frozen” states in which the drawing appears to lock into new configurations.

These complex interpolations between sound and image afford us a chance to relate harmonic spectra with visual features: What does a drawing of sharp, repeating strokes sound like? What does a ringing bell look like?

This project takes inspiration from the wavetable synthesis methodologies employed by Industrial Music Electronics’ founder Scott Jaeger in his design of the Piston Honda Mk3 oscillator, as well as the wave morphing techniques made possible by Synthesis Technology’s Paul Schreiber’s WaveEdit tool.

The digital world is convenient for conducting different identity-related experiments. One almost always has the chance to create one’s own virtual image, specifying its age, sex, and role. One can choose not to reveal one’s true identity in the virtual environment, instead replacing it with something else — graphic icons, avatars, different symbols and heroes of pop culture — which characterizes your personality, or rather the idea of you, in a striking manner. Even though many still opt to replace their faces with anime characters, for instance, just as many put themselves on full display and choose to stylize their entire life instead of just their online profiles.

At present, the brightest minds on the globe are involved in creating both private and institutional identities. Huge sums of money are invested in this research, and it is often the attractiveness of an identity that determines the financial fortunes of individuals and businesses. Seeing the extent to which a fortuitous identity can serve as a measure of success, it is no great surprise that identity theft is the fourth most popular type of cybercrime, accompanied of course by blackmail, threats, and different strategies for extorting money in return for a particular identity. For this RTRU project, Spunde will seek out and interpret information related to searching for, finding, and stealing an identity; she would then combine her findings with her own thoughts and experiences in the form of a visual picture-essay. Spunde's overall aim is to try to understand, through a fact-based and witty approach, the way in which obtaining and losing a virtual identity affects our real lives, and what the terminal destination of all the identities that remain captive is.

Part image archive and part text, this ongoing research explores the imaging and circulation of the “student body”—an educational imaginary that has materialized and fractured across time and space. From early twentieth century performances featuring students assembled as human flag formations, to the ubiquity of class portraits, to the rise of AI facial recognition softwares in schools, these composite images have long been institutionally reinforced under scholastic activities. With the recent pandemic-induced shifts to distance, hybrid, and back-to-school learning, the student body has become increasingly and technologically dependent on a broader ecosystem of corporations, machines, and contracts. What, then, might today’s student body convey about the function of educational spaces, and their relationship to exhibition and display, surveillance, and social noise?

Almost seventy years ago, André Malraux introduced the concept of a museum without walls (the “musée imaginaire”) containing photographic reproductions of artworks; he furthermore developed a detailed analysis of the shortcomings and benefits of such a “museum.” I am using Malraux as a starting point for thinking about photography through the lens of a museum without images. Central to my museum is the understanding of photography as a practice, an apparatus, and a form of social interaction. The museum examines photography as a complex mechanism where labor and leisure overlap; photography can simultaneously be a means of production, a source of entertainment, and a commodity for consumption. My method suggests a subversion of the patriarchal and Euro-centric concept of a museum as a collection of valuable masterpieces. Instead, this museum exhibits ideas as works in progress. No doubt, there are also images in this museum, but they play the role of footnotes. Even more importantly, at the time of their making, these images exist(ed) outside, or on the margins of, the mainstream art world.

I will introduce several rooms of the museum. These rooms offer ways of viewing photography as part of contemporary technological culture, with a focus on concepts like the networked camera, the labor-leisure machine, and obsolescence/prescience. Some of the exhibits in these rooms are based on, or derived from, sources such as Nikolai Tarabukin’s manifesto of Productivism, From the Easel to the Machine (1923), Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1927–29), André Malraux’s Museum Without Walls (1953), Pierre Bourdieu’s Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (1965), the Kraftwerk album Die Mensch-Maschine (The Man-Machine, 1978), Vilém Flusser’s Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), Ariella Azoulay’s essay “Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography” (2018), and Artificial Aesthetics (2021) by Lev Manovich and Emanuele Arielli, among others. The museum exhibits may also refer to works by artists, non-artists, and other creators and producers such as AI, Eugene Atget, Beeple, Caroline Calloway, Zenta Dzividzinska, Ivars Grāvlejs, Madelaine Turner, Penelope Umbrico, and some of the most popular photographers currently on the NFT marketplace, among others.

Viktor Timofeev is preparing supplementary materials from a recent work entitled Four Characters in Search of a Random, originally exhibited at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga in 2017, and recently refactored for Metabolic Rift / Berlin Atonal, a group exhibition at Kraftwerk Berlin. The piece is a software-driven choreography performed by four game character clones. The supplementary materials assembled specifically for RTRU include choreographic charts, screen recordings, and Timofeev’s own writings.

As part of RTRU’s inaugural season, Timofeev will hold a series of “office hours”—tutoring sessions with selected artists and researchers from across the Baltics.

Taking the form of several CG images and animations expressed as “facts and figures,” Nothing Left to do but Function (working title) takes up the thought of art historian Aby Warburg—specifically his notions of nachleben (defined as “afterlife” and “survival”) and pathosformel (“defined as “emotive formulas” or passionate gestural language) as it relates to the process of CG image-making and virtual worldbuilding.

The image files at play in a virtual scene can be thought of as symptoms, in that their behaviors and actions are manifestations of latent or repressed qualities, whether those qualities be RGB (color and transparency information), bit depth (resolution), or embedded contents (a shadow or a gesture). Images work as maps, defining the physical qualities of the scene: the human eye cannot see the quantities embedded in the image file, but the computer sees the otherwise intangible qualities and puts them to work in the rendered virtual scene.

I’m imagining this work as a flirtation—a push and pull between exposure and concealment: the textual form of “facts and figures” comes from the supporting visualizations in the essay, which demonstrates the impulse to index the processes of CG image-making and virtual worldbuilding as a way of “showing how it’s done,” and using Warburg as the entry point to understanding these processes.

The images and animations will engage with some of these processes—for example, changing lighting conditions on a virtual object, or investigating how a cache of images interrupt the transparency of virtual glass. However, by concealing the sub-perceptual computation that weaves together an arsenal of input files into seamless FX, the work maintains its enchantment. What remains is the anxiety around virtual worldbuilding as we recognize that the technical backdrop of these images are ghosts that haunt them, rather than their reason for existing.