Open Call | Virtual Workspaces by Medea Electronique
Transforming the Archive: Improvising Across Media/Medea. Improvising the Archive / Archiving the Improvisatory.
A series of workshops under the general title Virtual Workspaces, become a symbolic, virtual workspace for artists to communicate.
True to its mission to forge links with important institutions beyond Greece’s geographical borders, to support the professionalization of younger artists and to offer opportunities of connections within the international artistic community, Onassis Stegi is co-organizing the project Virtual Workspaces.
Artists from diverse artistic backgrounds, maintaining a transdisciplinary approach to their practice, offer the opportunity of a creative working space, involving a group of professionals from various backgrounds.
Embracing the digital shift that we are experiencing, this series of online workspaces is to be seen as an area that aims to bolster cultural fermentation, to encourage creativity and to build constructive exchanges in relation to specific goals and problematics. It will strive to maintain interactive processes within this safe-space of a temporary, but so valuable virtual framework of a selected group of peers.
Each Virtual Workspaces workshop is designed to foster the circulation of ideas between professionals, very often also involving non-professionals, with the hope to provoke sustained engagement within each group, and nurture the potentiality of new collaborations beyond the frame of the digital environment.
We hope that Virtual Workspaces will prove especially useful in times of upheaval and uncertainty, and offer comfort when things feel out of control.
This virtual workspace aims to explore collaboratively an artistic, theoretical and methodological framework with regards to new media art and art archives.
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:
We 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.
Dates: 22-25 September 2020
Time: 2:00pm Central European Time (GMT +2) / 3:00pm Eastern European Time (GMT +3)
Duration: 3 hours for each meeting
Place: ZOOM Platform
Given the theme, we are looking for artists and researchers (musicians, video artists, designers, performers, philosophers, anthropologists, archivists) excited by the idea of collaborative artistic creation, grounded in an improvisatory spirit and practice, who are excited by the thought of reanimating archived works. We invite anyone who designs, builds, and/or employs new interfaces or pre-existing interfaces in innovative ways, and performers who are excited by the prospect of working with new interfaces, or becoming one.
We hope this call will be of interest not only to new and mixed media artists, but also to archivists excited by the idea of thinking about the archive itself, and methodologies for its creation and access, in new ways.
A group of participants will be selected to take part in the workshops, as well as a separate group which will be able to observe the whole process. Please select the desired group in your application.
Deadline for applications Monday September 7th, 2020
Persons chosen to take part will be notified by Monday, September 14th.
There is no charge for taking part in the Workspace meetings.
The meetings will be held in English.
The workspace will be recorded and result possibly with a public show of selected fragments from these recordings.
Organizers:
Onassis Stegi (Athens) www.onassis.org
STUDIO teatrgaleria www.teatrstudio.pl
Co-ordinators :
for STUDIO teatrgaleria: Anna Lewanowicz
for Onassis Stegi: Christina Liata
Medea Electronique wish to collaborate with the participants in order to exchange good practices and to produce artistic and theoretical dialogue. 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: In their turn, they are expected to produce/present a series of presentations on specific issues. 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 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).
- Manolis Manousakis, Sound artist – Composer
- Angeliki Poulou, Curator - Dramaturg
- Prof. Eric Lewis, Philosopher, McGill University
In discussion with:
- Yianni Lolis, Designer – Art director
- Vicky Bisbiki, Creative Technologist – Visual Artist
- Evi Nakou, Μusician - Curator
