EDDO STERN

Eddo Stern’s interests lay in new modes of narrative and documentary, and in cross-cultural and cross-media representation in film, computer games and Internet culture. His works examine the military and fantasy computer game genres for their cultural and social roles in the play of politics and pleasure. Stern studied visual arts, new media and computer sciences at the University of California (Santa Cruz) and at the California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, USA). In 2000 he started C-Level, a co-operative public and private new media lab formed to share physical, social and technological resources. Its members are artists, programmers, writers, designers, agitpropers, filmmakers and reverse-engineers. Part studio, part club, part stage and part screen, C-Level is located in a basement in Chinatown Los Angeles and plays host to various media events such as screenings, performances, classes, lectures, debates, dances, readings and tournaments. Stern works with electronic warfare, video games, science fiction, foodstuffs and other forms of soft and hard propaganda. As a producer of culture he hacks codes, develops computer games, builds computer installations, produces videos, and cooks public dinners. His interests lay in hacking the codes of popular culture and sampling them to new, sometimes cynical and mostly political statements. Besides making films and performing, Eddo Stern has speculated that he finds the net as a whole more interesting than any individual art project. Furthermore he produced the installation Redball (The Fall of the Russian Empire: Mir, Kursk, Chernobyl), a series of Soviet pinball machines, animatronic cultural centrepieces, computer controlled jukeboxes and a feature documentary tracing the historic and contemporary manifestations of the relationship between magic and technology; meanwhile evoking the relationship of American pop culture to the Soviet Union’s post-Cold War decline.