[curatorial.net] WRO 07 sympozjum/podsumowanie

[Joasia Krysa]

Dear All,

As promised we have a summary of WRO 07 Media Art Biennale symposium on the theme of digital archives that took place in Wroclaw (Poland) last week. 

Many thanks Michal for this extensive overview.
 
joasia


-----Original Message-----
From: Michal Szota [mailto:michal.szota at gmail.com]
Sent: Tue 29/05/2007 20:02
To: Joasia
Subject: sympozjum/podsumowanie

-----------------------------------
WRO 07 Biennale Symposium: Recap

The WRO 07 Biennale was accompanied by a two-day symposium devoted to 
digital art archives, and curatorial practice in the digital era. As
the organisers of the symposium, we have decided to tackle these 
subjects for a specific reason: we are launching an new institution, 
WRO Art Center, whose objectives include archivisation and 
presentation of our media art collection, which is a great challenge, 
not least because of its sheer size (over 5000 works). Our interest 
in the topic of the art archive isn't then purely theoretical.

The symposium was kindly chaired by Geoff Cox (UK), who also 
presented an insightful introductory talk on the evolving cultural 
and political significance of the archive, from the pseudo-scientific 
collections of the 19th century phrenologists, to contemporary 
Indymedia and peer to peer networks. Geoff's understanding of the 
archive as an "active site of the production of meaning" proved to be 
an efficient conceptual framework for the following presentations.

In the first talk, Vincent Bonin from the Daniel Langlois Foundation 
(Canada) discussed the role of archivists and researchers as 
mediators between unstructured, "organic" fonds and public 
presentation. He focused on two archival projects carried out by his 
organisation: Steina and Woody Vasulka fonds research and 9 Evenings 
- Theatre and Engineering research. The talk was accompanied by a 
presentation of the visual interface to the archival material, 
designed as a part of the projects.

Sandra Fauconnier from V2_ Institute (the Netherlands) presented the  
development process of V2_'s archive, which provided a perspective of 
an institution devoted to documenting, and not collecting artistic 
projects. She discussed V2_'s innovative flexible object-relation 
data model comprising multimedia data, which she co-authored, and 
demonstrated the V2_ archive as a successful model for a semantic 
data-set.

Sandra Thomas, the director of inter media art institute imai 
(Germany), a publicly supported distribution-focused archive of video 
art, discussed the preservation of cultural heritage undergoing 
physical decay. She described the process and the challenges of 
analogue data preservation, and presented the framework of imai's 
archive operation.

John Thomson from Electronic Art Intermix (USA) gave a presentation 
on the emergence, evolution, dissemination and commercialisation of 
video art, and its "journey from production to being seen". He showed 
the historical perspective of video art, from the birth of the genre 
to the era of media convergence, where, as he concluded, the idea of 
everyone having the possibility to become a video artist surfaces, 
pointing out that the archives and distributors, such as EAI, serve a 
significant role as a selective filter for the ever-growing stream of 
media art.

Wiel Seuskens from the Netherlands Media Art Institute (Montevideo) 
focused on the technical aspects of video preservation. He discussed 
the choices his institution has made for the storage of data, and 
presented MPEG-2 as the format of choice, in comparison to other 
video compression standards.

Joasia Krysa (Poland/UK) delivered a talk on the relationship between 
archiving and curating online. She discussed a number of examples of online curatorial
platforms that facilitate new models of curatorial practice and archival exchange and at the same time indicate potential of archive as dynamic and collaborative form. 

Prof. Wulf Herzogenrath from Kunsthalle Bremen (Germany) emphasised 
the importance of the curator in the process of public education, and 
discussed the collaborative process that led to the publication of 
"40 Years of Video Art". He also presented excerpts from the 
project's collection and provided an insight into the choices made by 
the curatorial board.

Lukasz Guzek (Poland) discussed collaborative database projects 
hosted by his online art journal spam.art.pl. He focused on two 
platforms: a  Library of Unrealized Art Projects, and the Archive of 
the Censorship of Contemporary Art in Poland.

In the final talk, Dorota Monkiewicz (Poland) presented a curatorial 
and art critical perspective on virtuality and virtual presence. She 
presented illustrations of the process of the multi-layered visual 
translation between the reality and the work of art by electronic 
means. The presentation was also concerned with art using traditional 
media (as opposed to electronic media), and yet reflecting on new media.

The Symposium turned out to be a successful review of the current 
state of media art archiving. Although the presentations focused on 
different, discrete archival and curatorial projects, there was a 
common theme pervading all the perspectives: There is an ongoing 
shift in the power relations between the curators, creators and 
audiences, effected by the increasingly participatory character of 
the Internet. The question that the symposium poses is how this 
influences media art archives, which by their nature operate at the 
intersection of the public and institutional control.

The abstracts of the talks, along with the speakers' biographies are  
available at http://wro07.wrocenter.pl/biennale/symposium.php

The entire event was recorded, and the videos will be made publicly 
available on our website. I'm hoping I'll be able to announce it here
soon.

Michal Szota, WRO 07 Biennale Symposium coordinator
msz at wrocenter.pl