Language-based expert knowledge in contemporary mass media narrative franchises

Axel Stockburger’s current artistic work is focused on contemporary mass media narrative franchises such as the Harry Potter series, Pokémon or Lord of the Rings. Stockburger is fascinated with the global reach of these fabricated mythological universes and especially with their capacity to translate into and adapt to a variety of specific local settings. At the moment he is preparing an installation that deals with the translation of magic spells from the Harry Potter franchise into Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese. He attempts to shrink these narrative universes by extracting all the names of characters and locations in the form of lists that become a sort of popular specialist knowledge. While he is working on these “translations” he is interested in researching and critically reflecting the potential of artistic research regarding this practice. In particular he is interested in artistic strategies that address the dissemination of language- based expert knowledge. This entails not only visual practices but also epistemological questions that deal with the validity of different forms of knowledge but also with issues of access and distribution in global media environments.