[spectre] XI Media Forum, Moscow, 19.-23 June

[Oliver Grau]

XI Media Forum
As part of the 32 Moscow International Film Festival 

19-23 June

MediaArtLab Centre for Art and Culture, Mediafest. 

Media Forum is the most avant-garde program at the Moscow Film
Festival, and is dedicated to new and experimental forms of screen
culture. It presents the audience with a certain alternative to the
traditional cinema art, or probably demonstrates tendencies for the
recent cinema development, the new opportunities that artists have
already mastered and the filmmakers examine keenly. If this is indeed
the Media Forum*s mission at the Moscow Film Festival, then it
requests a far greater variety of events and formats that can be
provided by ordinary movie theaters. And thus the 32nd festival guests
will be able to visit exhibitions and workshops, media art parties at a
club and live media performances * all that is new and cutting-edge in
contemporary art. 

The most important events of this year Media Forum program:

The Transitland project * retrospective of video art from Central and
Eastern Europe spanning from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present
day

Central and Eastern Europe - a common information space, recovering
from common historical turmoil in the 80s and 90s, at the same time this
part of Europe is represented by very different countries with their own
destinies and traditions. Each lived with an eye to the global context
and used artistic techniques to investigate and re-form their own
national identity. What we all have in common? What makes us different? 
Thus the project was initiated by the leading centers of modern art in
several countries, former comrades in the Iron curtain: InterSpace
Modern Art Center (Sofia, Bulgaria), the famous Transmediale festival
for art and digital culture (Berlin, Germany) and Ludwig Museum of
Modern Art (Budapest, Hungary). From numerous entries an international
jury selected a hundred of the most brilliant * video quintessence of
ideas, opinions, cultural and social events, which showed the era from
1989 to 2009.

In Media Forum there will be events in various formats for this
project. For those who like to browse leisurely through artworks
returning to see missed parts or favorites again, there will be an
exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Those who prefer movie
theatres will be able to attend screenings at the Garage Center for
Contemporary Culture. The whole program is divided into three thematic
video selections, which will be shown separately. Those who appreciate
personal conversations with the artists will enjoy the workshops of Anri
Sala, Milica Tomic and Egon Bunne. The panel discussion will bring
together critics and art historians, who won*t miss the opportunity to
express their opinions about video art after the fall of the Berlin
Wall.

Gary Hill - one of the most renowned American video artists

Gary Hill*s place in the pantheon of contemporary video art is
attested to by his many awards and exhibitions  *  a Golden Lion at
the Venice Film Festival in 1995; participation at the Documenta IX in
Kassel; solo exhibitions at MOMA in New York; frequent participation at
biennales at the Whitney Museum; exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre in
Paris; and many other prestigious awards and grants. Gary Hill is one of
the pillars who shaped the video-art of today as we know it.
The main theme of Hill*s oeuvre is researching the relationship
between word, sound, and the electronic image. In essence, Hill*s work
is based on structural analysis and deals with the problems of the
essence of text. Nevertheless, text is mostly dealt with in a
post-modern way, as a way to depict the surrounding world. The video
image separates the subject reality into its semantic and material
components. Hill shows the divergence between the spoken word, the
visible subject and the present reality of this subject, which actually
has little in common, and are tied together only in human
consciousness.The formal perfection of his complex multichannel video
installations speaks about the author*s research in the figurative
world of the visible subject environment and its conflict with human
communications. GMG Gallery will show Hill*s most significant works,
which were chosen mostly because of their educational use for the Moscow
public.

Legendary Net-artists Jodi 

The Netherlands artists duo JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) who
are in fact the pioneers of net art * i.e art created in the World
Wide Web - will appear at the Media Forum.
The audience of Media Forum will discover that net art is not limited
to the window of their favorite browser only, it sometimes goes
off-line, for example, to a nightclub where the performance aspect is
quite obvious. That*s why Jodi are planning to present a live
performance The Folksomy at Solyanka Club. The materials they use are
amateur videos from YouTube.com. Millions of users affectionately make,
edit and upload their videos to the network; these files are mostly of
meaningless quality, with rare splashes of really good work. Jodi state
that when mixing them in a live multimedia performance they explore love
and hate relationships between users and new technologies and, at the
same time, they find out the means by which the system works. 
Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans will screen their classical works
during their master-class at the Garage Center for Contemporary
Culture.

Best Media Art Festivals` Video Programs

Media Forum presents a series of media art parties - an opportunity to
get to know the best works from world famous media
festivals Transmediale, PIKSEL, Japan Media Arts Festival and PRIX Ars
Electronica in a club atmosphere. Strelka Institute for Media,
Architecture and Design and Solyanka are welcoming aesthetes and
intellectualls. PIKSEL Festival director Gisle Frøysland, Ars
Electronica curator Bianca Petsher and Transmediale curator Markus Huber
will present a selection of the best recent festival projects and would
talk about multimedia art today, its asessment, comprehension and
understanding and how the highest-level media art festivals are
organized.


For more information see:  
Press contacts: Natalia Tomilova  ,
+7 (910) 432 01 52



Forum MIFF programme

19 June, Saturday

Moscow Museum of Modern Art: 
20:00 * Transitland exhibition opening * Video art from Central and
Eastern Europe for 20 years: from the fall of the Berlin Wall to 2009
Solyanka Club:
23:00 (pre-party), 00:00 (Opening) * Media Forum opening party, a
live performance by the JODI trendy net artists, 4D-Sound party.

20 June, Sunday

Garage Center for Contemporary Culture:
15:00 * Workshop by Anri Sala (Albania, France)
17:00 * Workshop by JODI (Belgium, Netherlands)
20:00 * A selection of Gary Hill's (USA) most famous video works and
his workshopSolyanka Club:
21:30 * Media art party, the best from Japan Media Arts Festival in
the club format

21 June, Monday

Garage Center for Contemporary Culture: 
15:00 * Video art after the fall of the Berlin Wall * panel
discussion with the participation of major Russian and foreign critics,
artists and art historians
 18:00 * Egon Bunne workshop (Germany) * *Marketing, the way of
realizing short video loops of 90*180 seconds*
GMG Gallery:
20:00 * Gary Hill exhibition opening 
Solyanka Club:
21:30 * Best of the PRIX *rs Electronica (Austria)

22 June, Tuesday

Garage Center for Contemporary Culture:
17:00 * Milica Tomic workshop (Serbia)
19:00 * Transitland screening: Part I *Out of bounds*
Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design:
21.30 *  Ars Electronica presentation with the comments by curator
Bianca Patcher
23:00 *  best of the PRIX Ars Electronica 2009 (Austria)

23 June, Wednesday 

Garage Center for Contemporary Culture:
15:00 * Transitland screening: Part II *Documentation*
17:00 * Transitland screening: Part III *Performance*
Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design:
 21:30 * PIKSEL festival presentation with the comments by Gisle
Frøysland, the festival director
23:00 * Best of the Transmediale festival (Germany) with the
comments by Markus Huber, the festival curator