“Risk society” – the end of industrial society?
Scholarship holders at the Edith Russ House for Media Art present their project
Friday, July 10, 2009 from 8 p.m.
Risk is increasingly determining the development of our society. As part of their residency at the Edith Russ House for Media Art, which is funded by the Lower Saxony Foundation, the artist duo “Reinigungsgesellschaft” is planning the project “Risk Society”. A video installation will depict the structural change in society and the redistribution of risks. On Friday, July 10, 8 pm, Martin Keil and Henrik Mayer will present their new project at the Edith-Ruß-Haus für Medienkunst, Katharinenstraße 23, and give a first insight into their artistic working processes. The artist group will then be in Oldenburg for a month in the autumn to realize their project.
The works of the artist duo “Reinigungsgesellschaft” address the interdependence of economic, cultural and political processes. The artists explore the question of how society is formed against this background and what the relationship between cultural identification and professional life looks like. The research project is flexible: Social and technological processes are examined from different perspectives. One focus is on the individual and group dynamic relationships between consumer and producer cultures. The video installation is intended to make the connection between personal and social needs transparent.
The prevailing economic doctrine of recent decades is beginning to falter in the face of current developments: the global crisis is not without consequences for human identification with work. There is an emerging tendency to shift economic risks from overall responsibility to the individual. The sociologist Ulrich Beck describes this phenomenon, which occurs in the course of social change processes, as a “risk society”, while the sociologist Anthony Giddens describes risks as the consequences of general human action. A central theme of the “cleansing society” is the definition of an artistic perspective on these processes, which are particularly evident in the worlds of work and consumption.