Digital Culture in Flanders and the E-Culture Fair
As you already might have read in previous posts, Social Spaces will be present at the E-Culture Fair 2010 (organized by BAM, the Flemish institute for visual, audiovisual and media art, “Virtueel Platform” and “Medienwerk NRW”) in Dortmund (Germany) on 23rd – 25th of August.
Elien Haentjens wrote an article for Knack on digital culture in Flanders and the E-Culture Fair. In the article, she reports how the digitalizing of the cultural field is unstoppable: artists and designers use new media more and more often. To archive this digitally made art is an upcoming challenge for the future. But also the archival of all sorts of cultural heritage – which not yet exist in digital forms – is an interesting topic for inquiry. All though several Flemish initiatives are making an effort to get a better understanding of this digitalizing of art and cultural heritage, Flanders is still behind in comparison to countries such as the Netherlands, France and Great Britain. Therefore, the E-Culture Fair might just be a perfect opportunity to exchange knowledge on this subject and see how other projects deal with this topic.
You can read the entire article here (it is in Dutch, though).
Participatory Art re-defined
I discovered this very interesting article about the meaning of Participatory Art and how it relates to concepts like space and time. Paul O’Neill - currently also investigating the art in public space landscape in Flanders – makes a difference between three stages of Participatory Art, being relational, social and durational art. While the first relates to what Bischop described as the authored tradition (expert vision), “social art” relates to a more community oriented and de-authored tradition (participatory vision). The third term “durational ” that O’Neill introduces is quite interesting. It gathers the first two terms in one concept (and in that way is able to go beyond a dichotomy) and adds one additional trait, namely time. Durational art produces “work” that keeps on generating social interactions after the artist has left the project site. This is of course very important when artists try to create work for a participatory culture (for more discussion around the concept of participatory cultures, join the discussion online, next wednesday!).