“Being German and watching all these American television shows, some times I feel like, when I speak English, I’m just copy-pasting dialogue,” the artist Britta Thie said over the phone from her studio in Berlin. “I call it the Netflix-ification of life.”She turned this anxiety of living life as a scripted television show into “Translantics,” a six-episode web-series commissioned by the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and ARTE, which screens at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of its Migrating Forms series on March 5. Working initially with footage she shot as a child, Thie, now 27, had wanted to make a show about what she calls “digital puberty,” the sense of coming-of-age in between the pre- and post-Internet era. What it became was “more of a portrait of the freelance generation in Berlin,” she said, that folds the personal footage into fictional scenes starring many of her friends playing exaggerated versions of themselves, navigating the city’s humorous and volatile art scene.Thie, who studied undergraduate psychology and worked as a model before studying art with Hito Seyerl at the Universität der Künste in Berlin — and continued to model, she said, as a way to fund her studies, even during an exchange semester at the Cooper Union in 2010 — stars as BB, who moves from gallery opening to exclusive neon-lit nightclub in Berlin with her friends Yuli (Julia Zange) and Annie (Annika Kuhlmann), encountering snide, brace-faced galleristas and even snootier artists in their path. In some ways a work of Internet art that skewers the very idea of Internet art, the show, Thie said, was a conscious attempt at being funny while not mocking the characters. “It was important to me that it wasn’t a parody,” she said. The tone of the show is more of a “futuristic fairy-tale” that avoids the stressful well-written-ness of much cringe-based television. “The comedy moments are not always perfectly delivered because I didn’t have the budget,” she said with a laugh — the entire show was produced for €25,000. “But it has a certain charm.”In Germany, the reception to “Translantics” has extended outside the typical boundaries for this kind of work, partly due to it being available online. Thie said many people from her parents’ generation watched the show. The cast was photographed for the German edition of Interview Magazine as if they were a pop group, and she was invited on a popular German television talk show to discuss the project. “I sometimes feel like the art world, if I may say so, exists in a very elitist, self-referential bubble,” she said. “I thought it would be nice to make something that was visible for everyone, and also approachable for everyone in different ways. Everyone can find their own angle to like it or not like it, but it’s there. It exists in this limbo between pop culture and being contextualized in the art world.”Thie says there is room for the series to expand and keep going, even if it doesn’t have the same name or structure. It was the freedom of this spontaneous way of telling stories and its accessible nature that holds her interest. “The German film and television scene is very dusty, so it was funny to give birth to this crazy little TV show,” she said. “I feel like some people might feel alienated by it because it exists in this new, in-between format. It hadn’t decided to be anything yet.”
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