abstract dirk hoyer

Abstract
Dirk Hoyer
UTOPIA IN ESTONIAN VISUAL ARTS IN THE 21 st CENTURY
To get an understanding of how much Estonian contemporary visual arts is
related to society the research is using the concept of “Utopia” as
a critical tool. Thomas More, the creator of the concept, has embedded an
ambiguous statement already in the choice of the word “Utopia” which is a
combination of “outopia” (no place) and “eutopia” (good place). The research
attempts to clarify the concept, elaborate a new conceptual framework for the
term “Utopia” and then interview Estonian artists in order to find out how much
their work is informed by utopian concepts or impulses.
The leading questions are what kind of vision is guiding the contemporary
artists? Can art help articulating a new utopian vision, developing a new
collective imagery? What can be deducted from the existing Utopias or absence
of Utopia? Ultimately this will lead to the question how much art can still articulate
new visions of society, how much it can get people out of their self-induced
passivity, how much it can stimulate the individual and collective imagination. In
German, one of the translations of imagination is “Vorstellungskraft”, a concept I
would like to develop in order to understand how art can help projecting new
ideas. So the focus of the research will be more on the “eutopia” aspect of
“Utopia”.
As a creative project, the results of the research will be visualized in a 60 minute
documentary film, mixed with elements of animation film. Through a juxtaposition
of blurry and un- (out of) focus documentary and interview footage with
articulations of classic utopian visions shown in the animation sequences, the
current state of ideas can be thus compared to some bold historic attempts to
create different societies.

Dirk Hoyer
Abstract of the TAhTO presentation 26/11
OUTOPIA
In the end of October I test-shot some material with my cinematographer.
During the two days we mainly tested some cameras and shot material which
shall illustrate the current state of Estonian society through juxtapositions of
architecture. For two hours we also shot at the (former) site of the Estonian
Academy of Arts (EKA) which has now been torn down and through a series of
unfortunate events ended up as a parking lot, leaving EKA without a building.
From the material shot at EKA I edited a 2minute rough cut, a clip called
“OUTOPIA”.
The raw state of the extract demonstrates one basic problem in audio-visual
production: unfinished material should never be publicly shown.
For the sake of the demonstration the clip “Outopia” is a mere short sketch that
is not intended to be a stylistic demonstration of how the documentary film will
look like. In fact, the shooting style, the editing style, the approach to the subject
and the sound-track in the documentary will be fundamentally different.
Consequently the clip is named “Outopia”, not only because the parking lot is a
no-place, that used to be the only Academy of Art in Estonia, but also because
the clip is a no-place on the way to the final documentary.
In the presentation that follows the clip, I will try to describe the methodological
approach of its production and of the actual production of the documentary film.