MEDEA ELECTRONIQUE
VIRTUAL WORKSPACE
Credit: medea electronique
Photos from the archive of Koumaria Residency
Workspace open for participants: 22-25 September 2020
TRANSFORMING THE ARCHIVE:
IMPROVISING ACROSS MEDIA/MEDEA
IMPROVISING THE ARCHIVE/ARCHIVING THE IMPROVISATORY
The workspace aims to explore collaboratively an artistic, theoretical and methodological framework with regards to new media art and art archives. In particular we will focus on translating previous archival content into new media, aim reached through:
Identifying research questions: Can an artistic archive be participative and multisensory? Can a digital archive user act at the same time as an archivist?
Exploring the activity and exchanging good practices of artistic and archival case-studies by artists, collectives, institutions worldwide;
Introducing the notion of the Commons and the Archive as a platform where the sensible is re-distributed
Investigating the creative potential of improvising and performing the archive in order to articulate artistic interventions
Workspace’s leaders wish to collaborate with the participants in order to exchange good practices and to produce artistic and theoretical dialogue. Participants will be invited to create new works of art, based on art archives by Medea Electronique, or other archives that they will suggest. The artistic experimentation, follows an exploratory approach for understanding the creative potential of these processes/interventions and seeks for originality and innovation, demonstrating and supporting value creation for academic, artistic and other communities.
Members of Medea Electronique will be guiding the overall direction of the workspace meetings. While these members will be able to lend their expertise in assorted new media practices, having great knowledge of the area, they are equal partners with the participants. In other words, this WORKSPACE is not a school, or workshop in new media art production run or taught by Medea Electronique, but the applicants/participants are expected to be experienced in their chosen media/field area. Medea Electronique does not aspire to a one-way communication or to a reproduction of the "transmitter-receiver" model, but faithful to its collective / improvisational profile, wishes the equal involvement of all participants.
The meetings will be inaugurated with a theoretical presentation on ARCHIVE and its political / philosophical / anthropological debates, and later on they will develop / embrace the art of sound and image, interaction, interface, user experience, the methodology of meta-tagging, and so on. The Medea Electronique Archive will be also presented, an archive produced since 2009 at Koumaria Residency: Medea Electronique Art Collective has collected documentation (audio, video, photos, text, image) of its past 11 new media art residencies, in and about the village of Sellasia, approx. 10 km north of Sparta, where the residency takes place. Focusing on site-specific mixed media performance, this material not only traces the history and development of the residency, but also that of Sellasia—stories told, histories revealed, places explored, narratives uncovered.
Manolis Manousakis, Angeliki Poulou and Eric Lewis will be present throughout the meetings, holding a transdisciplinary role, while in each meeting a different member of Medea Electronique will deliver a mini presentation / intervention addressing intriguing issues (improvisation, sound art, web app design, interaction design, meta-tagging, community development, the archive seen through philosophy and anthropology).
