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In August 2021, The Witch Institute came to life as a seven-day virtual symposium to address the figure of the witch in art and media. For its duration, the symposium served as a collaborative meeting space for emerging and established voices, all of whom were responding to increasingly conservative political climates through critical, intersectional, and multi-modal engagements with the figure of the witch. This issue of PUBLIC represents some of these responses. In this introduction, symposium organizers/issue editors, offer some guiding thoughts to the collection and frame the accompanying voices via conversations of artmaking, activism, ritual, and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 2021, The Witch Institute came to life as a seven-day virtual symposium to address the figure of the witch in art and media. The complex discourses of this gathering are condensed in PUBLIC 69: The Witch. This appendix to the issue details the full schedule for the weeklong, hybrid (virtual/in-person) series of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worldwide interest in understanding art and creative practices as valid forms of knowledge production has led to the establishment of research-creation as an interdisciplinary academic field in the last twenty years in Canada as elsewhere. Its establishment relates to a growing interest in critical making and technological innovation and to the legacies of feminism(s) and its critique of the power dynamics of knowledge production within academia. This article outlines a series of interactive projects that bring visibility to Latin American women in art, science and technology and speculates on the legacies of feminism(s) in the emergence of research-creation. The four projects discussed build on each other and explore re-mediation, re-activation and re-enactment as part of a collaborative feminist research-creation methodology. I theorize their potential to activate political memory by highlighting how these three approaches to creation share a preoccupation for revisiting the past through repetition, iteration and the facilitation of intergenerational encounters among humans, non-humans and across media and technologies. While discussing the feminist orientation of these approaches, I suggest a critique of dominant modes of knowledge production that have obscured the contributions of Latin American women and offer four research-creation interventions in the media arts archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research in artificial intelligence (AI) sheds light on algorithmic bias embedded in AI systems. The underrepresentation of women in the AI design sector of the tech industry, as well as in training datasets, results in technological products that encode gender bias, reinforce stereotypes and reproduce normative notions of gender and femininity. Biased behaviour is notably reflected in anthropomorphic AI systems, such as personal intelligent assistants (PIAs) and chatbots, that are usually feminized through various design parameters, such as names, voices and traits. Gendering of AI entities, however, is often reduced to the encoding of stereotypical behavioural patterns that perpetuate normative assumptions about the role of women in society. The impact of this behaviour on social life increases, as human-to-(anthropomorphic)machine interactions are mirrored in human-to-human social interactions. This article presents current critical research on AI bias, focusing on anthropomorphic systems. Moreover, it discusses the significance of women's engagement in AI design and programming, by presenting selected case studies of contemporary female media artists and designers. Finally, it suggests that women, through their creative practice, provide feminist and critical approaches to AI design which are essential for imagining alternative, inclusive, ethic and de-biased futures for anthropomorphic AIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an auto-ethnographic approach, the artist presents decoloniality as an ongoing, transgenerational process, challenging the commercialization of decolonial efforts. This article explores the unique challenges encountered in academia by an artist who is Brown, Chicana, transfronteriza and Mexican American with Baja California Indigenous ancestry, emphasizing the rejection of code-switching and her stance against coloniality. By spotlighting institutional hostility and reprisals faced while advocating for decolonial initiatives, particularly in support of People of Colour faculty and students, the article addresses the repercussions on the health and wellbeing of activists. It underscores the determination to resist silencing, asserting that the transformative power of transfronteriza nepantlera life experiences propels decolonial artistic expression from a quantum computation-like mindset, showcasing how they push the limitations of new media art and how expanded animation serves as an ideal tool for such expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the environmental implications of ubiquitous information and communication technologies (ICT) manufacturing, operations and usage, using the theories of new materialism and digital materialism, and offers an interactive video installation as a case study for contemporary digital art's pedagogical potential in response to such environmental issues. Contrary to the imageries of the cloud and the notion of immateriality as promoted by the tech industry, digital media systems are grounded in the material world and operate at the expense of the material substrate. Such a sociopolitical landscape warrants an exploration of potential counter tactics in the fields of digital art and art education. Being informed by digital materialism and hinged on the notion that encounters with contemporary art can cultivate critical and different ways of knowing, this article proposes that a focus on the material can function as an antithesis to the abstracting act of information/data and its purported immateriality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the experimental examination of various audio devices and their storage media, such as the radio, the tape recorder and the CD player, in the context of interdisciplinary university courses in arts and humanities, particularly cultural studies, with a focus on music production, sound studies and audio culture. Glitches and intrinsic noises become perceptible as aesthetic material by means of hacking and modifying audio technology failures. Following Marshall McLuhan's concept of media, it is clear that the audio technology itself, not just the transmitted content of a piece of music or radio programme, is the message. Examples of diverse aesthetic strategies that account for various artists' positions are presented in detail. These strategies have been the subject of a seminar that has been held several times at two different universities in Germany, addressing interdisciplinary groups of students. Unconventional, hands-on approaches to the different media devices have been evaluated positively by the participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a conversation with Laura U. Marks, a distinguished scholar of film and new media who launched the Small File Media Festival in 2020. Marks' message is that large-file streaming is harmful to the planet and that we need to act against its growing yet under-the-radar carbon footprint. The festival's goal is to demonstrate that movies can be captivating and immersive even if they are not large in file size, and encourages creators to experiment with low-energy technologies and techniques. Given the high stakes, the festival's organizers hope that small-file media will become increasingly influential as an aesthetic movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to uncover the colonial character of the statement 'on est tous métis' ('we're all mixed-race') in Kanaky/New Caledonia, a racially and politically polarized space where there is an ongoing struggle for independence led by Indigenous Kanak people. It uses data gathered in semi-structured interviews with self-identified 'mixed-raced' people during a six-month stay in Kanaky/New Caledonia before and after the November 2018 referendum for independence. It also uses ethnographic material and, more specifically, encounters with the figure of the 'mixed-race' person in political debates, campaigns as well as art and media that signal an investment in the idea that, in Kanaky/New Caledonia, 'we are all mixed-race'. The article exposes the political discourse of multiracialism as exclusionary and as a mechanism of Indigenous disappearance in the settler colonial context. It also sheds light on the way in which settler anxiety feeds the multiracial discourse. In challenging and deconstructing the orientations towards a multiracial or métis.se future, that individuals and institutions imagine, wish or advocate for, the article aims to call for a desolidarization from modes of thinking and being that support the French colonial project, even when it masks itself as inclusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, precariousness is understood as an intrinsic characteristic of a vast set of images – being them pictorial, sculptural, photographic, cinematographic, digital or other. These images acquire their specific value, most of the time, precisely as a function of this attribute. Precariousness is, in this case, not an insufficiency or a weakness, but a power, understood in different areas, from aesthetics to ontology. This article is divided into two parts: the first one explores, in various ways, the ephemerality–eternity polarity based on precariousness; the second one allows us to know the plural manifestations of the precariousness of the image in multiple forms of expression by identifying a range of arts and media nuclei. Invoking the contribution of different authors, from ancient to contemporary times, the article ends as it begins: it highlights the intrinsic precariousness of both forms of artistic creation and the modes of academic thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through and post-COVID, disembodied technological interactions were experienced at an unprecedented, often involuntary level in households across the world, with the human voice often providing a link between geographically disconnected individuals, resulting in a decrease in perceived social connectedness. Recent research suggests that effects of social isolation and sensory deprivation can be mitigated through participatory media arts experiences (Tymoszuk et al. 2020; Tejada et al. 2020, All-Party Parliamentary Report 2017). Over the last ten years, the art collective Analema Group has explored the pivotal role of the human voice as means for social connectedness through their artwork KIMA (Tate, National Gallery, Barbican). The current development of KIMA: Voice seeks to challenge experiences of embodiment in remote environments. This article and artwork presentation will present a new development KIMA: Voice designed to provide new forms of embodied experiences across a distance. The publication will be supported by a demonstration and exhibition of the artwork [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controversies in current events highlight the important role that public space and monuments may play in demonstrating community values or conversely projecting status quo articulations of inequity. With this in mind, we felt compelled to develop curricula to unpack the complex relationships between public space and place identity through the shared ownership and development of public monuments. We started a curricular project called Spacemakers to engage learners in arts-based reflections on public space, identity and social justice through the generation of proposed monuments as matters of concern. Through frameworks of history and memory, design practice and cultural geography, we articulate the unfolding of the curriculum as we consider the monument as a curricular object. This article reviews the curricular activities we developed for the Spacemakers project, their theoretical and pedagogical foundations, and the potential for making use of speculative design and critical making as powerful vehicles for reflection on public space and embodied learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Let me start with a confession. Though for years, I have had an interest in animation and have observed students engaged in puppet, paper and plasticine processes of animation by analogue and digital means, I have myself never constructed an animated sequence. Why, then, have I been invited to write a contribution to this collection? For philosophical and political reasons related to a lifelong engagement with arts and screen media practices and education, I have developed expertise in what some call artistic research and I prefer to call practice as research (PaR). In particular, I have developed an epistemological model for PaR, which sets three modes of knowing – know-how, know-what and know-that – in dynamic inter-relation. In what follows, I place my specialist terms in italics to mark them out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It can be difficult to acknowledge our own fragility. The equilibrium between a healthy environment, the energy our society needs to maintain or improve its usual lifestyle, and the world's interconnected economies can pass more quickly than expected from a delicate balance to an entirely new reality where human beings would need to be more creative than ever before to survive. The frequency and severity that certain weather and climate-related events are having around us are increasing, and the ability of human beings to modify our adjacent surroundings has turned into a power capable of altering the planet. Do the media arts have a role in all this? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How have contemporary media artworks been proposing hybrid experiences, discussing the ontological implications from the experimentation with emerging techniques that alter our way of being-in-the-world? These experiences dialectically articulate aesthetic relations between real and virtual, visible and invisible, human and technological. In this article, we develop a participant observation of two specific works: Generation 244 (2011), by Scott Draves, and Zee (2008), by Kurt Hentschläger. This observation establishes a dialogue with phenomenology as it considers experience and perception as needed prerequisites for the analysis, as proposed by Merleau-Ponty. In this scenario, we have observed that a whole way of partitioning the sensible resets itself and points in the direction of a trans-immanence, generating an integrated knowledge that not only relies on reason, but in a collective wisdom where we can find, according to Didi-Huberman, a 'light of survival'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The microbiome has become one of the most recognizable research subjects and presences in the headlines of news and scientific articles published in almost every biological science area in the last few years. The steady decline in the price of DNA sequencing has enabled metagenomics, community analysis and genome sequencing to enter routine research in microbiology and biotechnology laboratories all around the world. The already open access to national and international databases that include nucleotide (including full genomes) and protein sequences such as GenBank or EMBL-Bank and a multitude of free bioinformatic software resources accessible online, along with the international efforts towards open science publication and open data, allow the possibility of the microbiome and microbiota to be envisaged as a potential data and material resource for new media art projects especially for artists interested in biological processes. Recent results on the creation of synthetic life that are already testing the boundaries of life could be another approach for the creative exploration of microbiology and microbial processes from the artistic point of view. This article will attempt to uncover and reflect on the potential for further exploration of this resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Royal Cinema, Images Festival, Toronto, April 11 - 18, 2019 A review of Marnie Ellen Hertzler's film Hi I Need To Be Loved (2018) at the 2019 Images Film Festival in Toronto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses the various articles published within the issue on such topics as artistic practices and media art in India and Pakistan, film-making, and moving image art.

Abstract In this article, we introduce our interactive art installation Neuro Mirror that was developed in 2017 for the Cybernetic Consciousness [?] exhibition that was held in 2017 at the ITAU Cultural in Sao Paulo. This artwork enables participants to interact with their own images and those of their alter egos with the help of digital mirrors. The installation consists of three screens. The middle one shows a live image of the participant that is somewhat distorted. The one on the left side also displays an image of the interacting person, but with a time delay of a few seconds. On the right screen, however, another person is shown – a young man, who is acting and moving his head. In fact, this person is programmed to be an avatar or an alter ego who reacts to the participant. He ‘learns’ new behaviours by observing and imitating the participant and reacts accordingly. A neural network programme was developed to enable him to predict the participant’s next actions from his previous ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the unconventional views on film and art in general, and often unrestrained by the commercial imperatives, generative artists engage the poetic and expressive potentials of film playfully and efficiently, with explicit or implicit critique of cinema in a broader cultural context. This article looks at the creative incentives, insights and implications of generative cinema. In six interrelated categories, it presents the art projects of generative cinema, which in various ways point to the algorithmic models for parametric, analytical and/or synthetic generation of the cinematic structure, narrative, composition, editing, presentation and interaction. The article states that the algorithmic essence of generative cinema significantly expands the realm of creative methodologies for the artists working with film, but also provides a platform for critical assessment of the algorithmic strategies and overall creativity in contemporary film industry. Exploring the algorithms on a multitude of levels, generative cinema is on its way of becoming the supreme art of the moving image in the early twenty-first century. Its poetic divergence, technical fluency and conceptual cogency successfully demonstrate that the authorship evolves towards ever more abstract reflection and cognition that equally treats the existing creative achievements as inspirations, knowledge sources and tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to analyse interactive reinterpretations of two of Raul Meel's artworks. They were created after the original works were made; they reference the original artworks and are meta-referential. These reinterpretations allow the original artworks to be opened and explained and become instantiations of their algorithmic content. The questions that arise in this article are as follows: how can physical artworks be opened up for audiences by means of interactive emulations? How can this serve to document and preserve the unique experience of the artist? The aim of this article, in addition to the practical analysis of the two case studies, is to discuss the wider context of the problems of meta-artworks and the following direct questions that arise out of analysing them as research objects. I analyse in detail a selection of media artworks in which meta-referentiality is foregrounded. A focal point of my discussion is an interactive emulation of Raul Meel's Under the Sky, which was created for his biggest retrospective exhibition entitled Dialogues with Infinity (2014) at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn. My second object of interest is the mobile app 'seeESE' based on Meel's installation The Dice, shown in the same exhibition at the Kumu museum in 2014, of which the original version dates back to 1969. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a mixed-media installation titled Ekphrasis, consisting of close-up videos of a heavily scarred body projected onto an elastic screen. The screen has one string attached to its centre, which in turn is attached to a stepper motor. The motor pulls the screen in a controlled random pattern, stretching it and letting go, sometimes carefully, sometimes violently. The piece explores the relationship between the digital representation of the body and its corporeity, recreating the trauma that generated the scars on the medium itself, and proposing a new layer of abstraction that sustains the reflection on the significance of the human body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lure of animal instinct appears to be an important consideration for the development of intelligent (or simulated intelligent) robotic creatures. Studying the behaviours and playful engagements of animals (like humans) provides robotic artists with a plethora of engagements from which to draw and mimic in their development of whimsical-behaving robot bodies. Animals, as the human other, present us with a counterpoint from which we can study robots as lively entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Art that uses non-traditional media and emerging technologies, specifically the electronic or digital, has the potential to create and nurture a distinctive 'public space' for the articulation of alternative M?ori worldviews. Although a growing number of publications focus on contemporary M?ori art practice, no specific attention has yet been given to the swelling numbers of M?ori practitioners operating in the field of digital media. This essay contextualizes my earlier research in the wider framework of M?ori digital art and seeks to explain a kaupapa M?ori creative practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this brief essay I will attempt to discuss the theoretical debates between sovereignty/self-determination and recognition/emancipation as it relates to Indigenous and global theoretical positions. The above debate will be framed through selected artworks such as, in Pursuit of Venus by Maori artist Lisa Reihana, and Cheryl L'Hirondelle's web-based Vancouver song lines project. This paper will be building on the idea that Indigenous engagement with digital and new technologies is unequivocally contemporary, and that their artwork is not stuck in the anthropological past for Indigenous artists working in this medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several images of digital prints arts by multi-media artist Bracken Hanuse Corlett is presented which include "Giants Among Us", "Pk'vs Paperchaser" and "Copper Bones".

Games offer a space for Indigenous artists to reify the connections between tradition and technology since Indigenous games can directly engage players in Indigenous ways of knowing through design and aesthetic. The social impact game Survivance, the musical choose-your-own-adventure text game We Sing for Healing, and the mobile game Invaders exemplify games as self-determined spaces for Indigenous expression. And yet, these examples still merely hint at possibilities of self-determined Indigenous games as access to technology expands and the potential to design systems with Indigenous perspectives from the code up unfolds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the importance of indigenous digital and new media art as future possibilities. It cites that the tools of survival are established in from ability to work in collective methods and Indigenous methodologies. The article also cites that the intention is to radically transform public spaces and to create paradigms for community engagement in the arts.

LEFT_CHANNEL is a compilation of experiments of digital image manipulation of archival film sourced from the Prelinger Archives and the NFB. Some of the footage was obtained with the collaboration of Wapikoni Mobile during the 400th anniversary of Quebec. This video was shown as part of a multi-channel installation in the ARCTIC NOISE project as well as the ISUMAGINAGU exhibit during the Asinabka Festival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of the 'future imaginary' seeks to capture the ways people imagine the futures of their societies. This article considers how Indigenous artists from North America and Oceania have used digital media to illustrate such possible futures from an Indigenous perspective. The review of their work forms the basis for a preliminary analytical framework for understanding different types of imaginings and the cultural and political work they do in expanding the possibilities of future action by Indigenous communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a mobile media art curriculum for engaging at-risk students with their schooling and with civic engagement. The pilot study was conducted with at-risk youth who were seeking their high school diplomas. The curriculum encouraged participants to use mobile media in school and outside. Students examined aspects of their neighbourhoods and sometimes explored themes suggested by the workshop leader. Data consisted of participants' images, their posts and interview responses. We noted that civic engagement grew out of participants' initial interest in, and concern for, the formal, technical and aesthetic aspects of their images. Our participants recognized that, if an image is well made, it will be that much more effective in communicating its civic message. In this article, we will consider the primacy of the aesthetic as a promising principle for developing curricula that reorient at-risk youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revisions - Zen for Film, Hanna B. Hölling New York: Bard Graduate Center (2015), 100 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-941-79202-5, US$20.00 Family Ties: Living History in Canadian House Museums, Andrea Terry Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press (2015), 248 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-0-773-54561-8, CAD & US $110.00/Paperback, ISBN: 978-0-773-54562-5, CAD & US $44.95 Introducing Suzy Lake, Georgina Uhlyarik (ed.) London: Black Dog Publishing (2014), 232 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-1-90896-673-5, US$34.95 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union's media art initiative Connecting Cities and New York-based Streaming Museum are two recent examples of curatorial models that operate through large, networked digital displays. This growing exhibition category combines expressive media architecture and telecommunication elements to engage 'trans-local' sites and diverse publics in complex media spaces. By investigating the confluence of exhibition-making, public art and urban experience, this article explores the relationship between spectacle and criticality with respect to shifting notions of space, identity and 'the common'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can a history of exhibitions inform curators on the challenges of exhibiting new media art? How can histories of exhibitions dealing with interaction and participation inform the curation of new media art involving these behaviours? Exhibitions of broadly conceptual or immaterial work such as Information (1970) and Les Immatériaux (1985) lead to an examination of exhibitions where participation is key, including Bodyspacemotionthings (1971 and 2009), Serious Games (1996), 010101 (2001), The Art of Participation (2008), and Current (2011). New media artworks including Talkaoke, www_hack, and Random Information Exchange help to establish critical categories for different kinds of participatory systems. For future critical art histories of participatory art exhibitions, I propose that an effective method would include a combination of documentary sources, such as installation images, audience data, and crowd-sourced documentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses digital art in China. The author notes that the advent of the Internet and the application of the computer in China have brought unprecedented creative tools and means to Chinese artists. Brief mention is made of the work of the artist Feng Mengbo. In addition, the author comments on the various international and local digital art and new media art exhibitions, arts festivals and forums which have been held in China since 2000. Finally, brief mention is made of digital art education at several Chinese universities.

The article explores the role that human emotions play in artistic expression and creativity. The author argues that emotion plays the role of catalyst, exactly like a medium, in the birth of artistic expressions. The author compares artistic creation to a chemical reaction in which artists use sense-data to generate the objective or material elements of an artwork and then employ their internal emotions to generate the subjective elements of an artwork. It is thus argued that artworks are emotive objects and that a spectator's reaction to an artwork is an emotional activity. Finally, the author argues that new media and digital art often suppress the emotive aspects of art.

The author, the founder and director of the SHAN Audio Visual Lab in Beijing, China, discusses the various new media art events the lab hosts. She notes that since its founding in May 2010 the lab, which also serves as her personal art studio, has held 18 events including free talks, workshops, lectures, artist residencies and film screenings. The author comments that through these activities she has met artists who, like herself, work in the field of new media, noting that all new media artists must have knowledge and a grasp of high technology.

Can we find different means of communicative visual solutions to aid societies in the development of multicultural global communities? This means not revolving only around a particular language or even human language, but rather the concept and structure of communication. This transforms any kind of sign, body gesture or visual element into a method of communication, not simple phenomena. The aim of the research is to use media art and new technology to establish a better (wide) visual communicative language in multicultural societies and provide a solid bridge between east and west, through in-depth visual/technological experimentation, seeking a transcultural visual solution to the problem of visual integration. Can any perceivable phenomenon become a conveyor of meaning? While language is based very much on common agreements, the way each of us responds to a message can be entirely different. Communication therefore creates diversity from uniformity: the idea of mixing setups of humans and machines (robots, computers, etc.) that are somehow able to communicate. The communication would give rise to some sort of choreography of movements that is synchronized because of the communication but diverse because of different responses to the communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the challenges that new media art presents to the traditional art world. More specifically, the author addresses how new media art challenges the traditional museum techniques of displaying, collecting and protecting works of art. It is argued that the immaterial qualities of new media and digital art cannot and should not be separated from the material components of the medium. The tensions and connections between the material and immaterial aspects of new media art, the author suggests, make up the background of the discussion regarding the presentation and preservation of the medium. Other topics addressed include the characteristics of the digital medium and new media art in the gallery and museum.

The article explores how contemporary new media and interactive art practices are formulating new ways of creating cinematic imagery and narratives. The author suggests that new media techniques are challenging the traditional notion of the central narrative as it has been developed in Hollywood cinema. In addition, the author discusses how the new digital modalities for the production and presentation of cinematic content are setting up the conditions necessary for the further evolution of independent and experimental film.

'Six Degrees of Separation' is analogous to what we have come to know as the origins of the 'social network' (social network service, social network software or SNS). In our time, the application of the 'social network' has become a common mode of living shared ubiquitously by different societies, cultures and communities. With the popularity of open source technology, the creation of social networks is no longer the exclusive domain of professional computer programmers. In China, social networking has also become the new focus of new media artists, who are extremely sensitive to materials and creative media. The current article bases its analysis on the collaboration between American artist Max Kazemzadeh and the Jackie Chan Charitable Foundation Beijing in the exhibition of Max's interactive work 'Wishing Well' in China, trying to showcase the intriguing interaction between the social network service, human beings and Chinese society, and inviting the reader to re-examine the role and duties of an artist in our time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PUBLIC 46: Prime Mover is a selection of five essays corresponding to five hypothetical exhibitions of works from an influential private collection with which Eamon was professionally involved for more than ten years. The collection, one of the first in private hands to focus almost exclusively on time-based media, has been the subject of a number of graduate theses and museum catalogues, but this publication aims to bolster these efforts towards better understanding of a collection that has altered the field of media art. In a sense, these essays constitute a history of moving-image art starting from around 1900 that is meant to be a resource for students of film and video art, on the one hand, and for scholars investigating the history of collections on the other. Although the five exhibitions imagined here evolved separately, they can be read as chapters of a continuous story, or, alternatively, they can be read as different lenses through which one can look at the history of media art itself, as a necessarily fragmentary history. The different formats and different approaches in this publication all come from the curator's toolbox, where one is able to place works of art in a variety of contexts, grouping them in ways that both illuminate the works and, hopefully, the history of art as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PUBLIC 46: Prime Mover is a selection of five essays corresponding to five hypothetical exhibitions of works from an influential private collection with which Eamon was professionally involved for more than ten years. The collection, one of the first in private hands to focus almost exclusively on time-based media, has been the subject of a number of graduate theses and museum catalogues, but this publication aims to bolster these efforts towards better understanding of a collection that has altered the field of media art. In a sense, these essays constitute a history of moving-image art starting from around 1900 that is meant to be a resource for students of film and video art, on the one hand, and for scholars investigating the history of collections on the other. Although the five exhibitions imagined here evolved separately, they can be read as chapters of a continuous story, or, alternatively, they can be read as different lenses through which one can look at the history of media art itself, as a necessarily fragmentary history. The different formats and different approaches in this publication all come from the curator's toolbox, where one is able to place works of art in a variety of contexts, grouping them in ways that both illuminate the works and, hopefully, the history of art as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PUBLIC 46: Prime Mover is a selection of five essays corresponding to five hypothetical exhibitions of works from an influential private collection with which Eamon was professionally involved for more than ten years. The collection, one of the first in private hands to focus almost exclusively on time-based media, has been the subject of a number of graduate theses and museum catalogues, but this publication aims to bolster these efforts towards better understanding of a collection that has altered the field of media art. In a sense, these essays constitute a history of moving-image art starting from around 1900 that is meant to be a resource for students of film and video art, on the one hand, and for scholars investigating the history of collections on the other. Although the five exhibitions imagined here evolved separately, they can be read as chapters of a continuous story, or, alternatively, they can be read as different lenses through which one can look at the history of media art itself, as a necessarily fragmentary history. The different formats and different approaches in this publication all come from the curator's toolbox, where one is able to place works of art in a variety of contexts, grouping them in ways that both illuminate the works and, hopefully, the history of art as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PUBLIC 46: Prime Mover is a selection of five essays corresponding to five hypothetical exhibitions of works from an influential private collection with which Eamon was professionally involved for more than ten years. The collection, one of the first in private hands to focus almost exclusively on time-based media, has been the subject of a number of graduate theses and museum catalogues, but this publication aims to bolster these efforts towards better understanding of a collection that has altered the field of media art. In a sense, these essays constitute a history of moving-image art starting from around 1900 that is meant to be a resource for students of film and video art, on the one hand, and for scholars investigating the history of collections on the other. Although the five exhibitions imagined here evolved separately, they can be read as chapters of a continuous story, or, alternatively, they can be read as different lenses through which one can look at the history of media art itself, as a necessarily fragmentary history. The different formats and different approaches in this publication all come from the curator's toolbox, where one is able to place works of art in a variety of contexts, grouping them in ways that both illuminate the works and, hopefully, the history of art as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PUBLIC 46: Prime Mover is a selection of five essays corresponding to five hypothetical exhibitions of works from an influential private collection with which Eamon was professionally involved for more than ten years. The collection, one of the first in private hands to focus almost exclusively on time-based media, has been the subject of a number of graduate theses and museum catalogues, but this publication aims to bolster these efforts towards better understanding of a collection that has altered the field of media art. In a sense, these essays constitute a history of moving-image art starting from around 1900 that is meant to be a resource for students of film and video art, on the one hand, and for scholars investigating the history of collections on the other. Although the five exhibitions imagined here evolved separately, they can be read as chapters of a continuous story, or, alternatively, they can be read as different lenses through which one can look at the history of media art itself, as a necessarily fragmentary history. The different formats and different approaches in this publication all come from the curator's toolbox, where one is able to place works of art in a variety of contexts, grouping them in ways that both illuminate the works and, hopefully, the history of art as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Catch+Release' is a Canadian government-funded research and creation project of interactive new media artworks produced by a team of artists, educators and designers in collaboration with Parks Canada's Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site. Its exhibition component addresses marine environments and coastal communities that once relied on the fishing industry. Through viewer engagement with the artworks, within the context of the museum, the exhibition fosters awareness of the region's social history and contemporary cultural conditions - 'catching' stories and 'releasing' stories into the public sphere. The aesthetic and pedagogical strategies for promoting sensory, experiential, participatory learning opportunities and critical engagement, acknowledge the museum as an important informal educational site in its role as custodian, maker of meaning and source of regional identity. The exhibition's themes resonate globally in coastal communities that share challenges in adapting to (g)local circumstances of cultural and geographic transitions due to the demise of fishing industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on a paper I gave for the first seminar of a series organized by the AHRC Artists' Moving Image Research Network, held at Chelsea College of Art and Design in January 2011 - 'Rewriting History: Interrogating the Past and the Question of Medium Specificity'. The printed version tries to preserve the informal style of the talk, including its jumps of focus and attention. At the risk of being churlish about the 'Moving Image', which after all is embedded in the name of the Network and that of this journal, I argue against the notion of a Moving Image culture and its tendency towards homogeneity. I strongly support MIRAJ and its mission, and am glad to be part of it, but I want to question some of the consequences, as I see them, of an inclusive approach to media art in all its many shapes and forms, to which the Network is dedicated in principle and deed. In particular, I think we need more critical distinction and debate in this ever-growing area of practice. I refer to some of the seminar discussion and objections the paper led to, in the hope of stimulating still more responses. The debate goes on, in events, conferences and the art press. Originally, I was going to name this paper after King Lear's angry growl 'I'll teach you differences', but that hostage to fortune pitched it a bit high. I settled for a milder title, and I hope a milder tone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New media art and activist organizations, such as FutureEverything in Manchester, Bootlab in Berlin, and the Waag Society in Amsterdam, sound a strikingly Productivist tone in their avowals to employ digital technology to turn consumers into producers, availing mass participation for social innovation. As such practices seek to reconstruct the public sphere, the question remains whether this access to information and the technological means of its production actually redistribute ownership of knowledge, labour and experience, or whether such projects further institutionalize an ideal bourgeois public sphere by creating a mere semblance of cultural participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews an exhibition which features the video art of Hilary Lloyd at the Raven Row gallery in London, England from November 25, 2010 to February 6, 2011.