Media Forum 2001

Category

Festival

Year

2001

Institution

MediaArtLab, Moscow

Comment

Media Forum is now in its second year which is certainly no anniversary. However, this brings its organizers both a great happiness and some significant difficulties. We are happy because the pilot issue of the Media Forum 2000 programme claims now in 2001 the status of an event that has asserted its rights to its own aethetics and its own audience. Media Forum 2000 mainly aimed at apprising both professionals and audience of the very fact that media culture actually existed. We have placed media culture into the official concept of new screen culture within the terminology of contemporary cinema. Realizing that behind this concept there is a cultural phenomenon probably not known to the general viewing public, we nevertheless expanded the field of our experiment. Taking a certain risk, we decided to test the viability of experimental art in the environment that makes no allowance for age or the radicalism of ideology, aethetics and technology. First of all we have put the emphasis upon the communication technologies. While the film industry production is targeted at the “passive” audience (whose inner activity awakens only at the moment of catharsis, i.e. of empathy and purification) we deal with the “active” consumer, with the new generation of art opponents. This generation plays an active role in its perception of cultural products. Participation or interactivity in the sense of contributing to the structural logic of a work is most important for them. The following significant distinctions of the Media Forum 2001 should be noted: the presentation of the three International Festival programmes in video, TV and Internet respectively. Every festival programme has to deal with the chance factor so the important thing is that the festival expands art’s habitat. Last year’s Media Forum featured the classics of video art from prestigiousWestern collections together with Russian video art classics. This year there is going to be much more... The programme includes art works produced in 2000-2001 from the USA, Western and Eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, Australia and the Commonwealth, as well as such exotic places as Hong Kong, India, etc. There is more to Media Forum 2001 than just showing unique programmes from the largest Western collections and thus causing a sensation in the cultural life of the country. It is the Moveable Feast, with meetings between interesting people, with the interaction of art and “active” audience. Alexei Isaev. (source: http://mediaforum.mediaartlab.ru/2001/about.html)