16th World Wide Video Festival 1998, Seminar

The World Wide Video Festival takes place in 1998 for the sixteenth time. Over the
years the festival has brought to the public all the trends in video art and media art:
video as a form of media criticism, abstract works, poetic narratives, installations,
Internet projects and multimedia performances. We have seen a change for the better
in the climate for presenting media art over the years with more and more Dutch
museums showing interest in the visual arts. But the art historians, and to a lesser
extent the film historians, have still not truly accepted media art. Little is written or
taught about media art, and scientific research is still at the teething stage. This is one
of the reasons the World Wide Video Festival decided to schedule this three-day
seminar. The lectures will be given by Michael Punt, Yvonne Spielmann, Philip
Pocock, Sean Cubitt, John Hanhardt, Timothy Druckrey, Hans Peter Schwarz and
Elba Benitez. The workshops will be led by Vuk Cosic, Alexander Hahn. The
workshops will go into the artistic aspects of media art, and production and other
professional aspects that are specific to media art.

The lecture programme is divided into three theme days.

Day 1. Playing with narrative structures in video
Media art has a strong non-lineair tradition, which developed out of the need for
abstraction and poetry and the wish for a distinction from television and cinema. The
speakers, Punt, Spielmann and Pocock, will illustrate in their lectures how art criticism
of the seventies has influenced the development of intermedia images and hypertext
structures within this non-narrative tradition in media art.
Friday
September
18, 1998

Game and play with narrative

structures in video

11.00 - 12.30 Michael Punt, University of Wales

College, Newport

Between the waves: Reflections

on Art, Technology and Public
Affairs since 1986

13.30 15.00

PD Dr. Yvonne Spielmann,

University of Siegen

Playing the rules: Intermedia

Forms of the Images

15.30 17.00

Philip Pocock, photographer and

writer

Mixed-biographical Hypernarrative Network Art Strategies

17.00 18.00

round-table conference moderated by Jeroen Boomgaard

Day 2 Ontology of the electronic image.

The fragile status of the electronic image is at the centre of this day. Cubitt sees the
electronic image as a form of anticulture, a reaction to the computer games industry
and the world of computer data. Hanhardt will place video in the tradition of our
modern ideas on art. Druckrey sees the electronic image as the most significant
medium of this century, a treasury of memory and records.
Saturday
September
19, 1998

Ontology of the electronic

image

11.00 - 12.30 Prof. Sean Cubitt, Professor at the Escaping the Playpen
Liverpool John Moores University
13.30 15.00

John Hanhardt, Senior curator of

Film and Media Arts of the
Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum-New York

Re-Positioning the Moving

Image 1963-1998

15.30 17.00

Timothy Druckrey, Curator and

writer

Reconceptualizing Reception

17.00 18.00

round-table conference moderated by Nelly Voorhuis

Day 3 Creating exhibition spaces for media art

The two speakers, Schwarz and Benitez, lecture on the theme: are the walls of
museums for modern art the right 'bearers' for media art? Schwarz proceeds from the
context of a specialized media museum and Benitez is a gallery owner.
Sunday
September
20, 1998

Creating exhibition spaces for

media art

11.00 - 12.30 Hans Peter Schwarz, director of

the ZKM Media Museum &
Mediathek, Karlsruhe

The discourse on a
mediamuseum: ZKM

13.30 15.00

Elba Benitez, Gallery Benitez,

Madrid

Re-Positioning the Moving

Image 1963-1998

17.00 18.00

round-table conference moderated by Ineke Schwartz

The lectures are accompanied by film, video and Net fragments. Each of the three
days closes with a roundtable discussion.
SPEAKERS
Elba Benitez
Gallery owner in Madrid. Special to her gallery is that she exhibits rather a lot of works
by media artists, something also quite unusual for the Spanish art world. Artists she
represents are: Francesc Torres, Francisco Ruiz de Infante and Manuel Saiz.
Vuk Cosic http://www.vuk.org
Writer, associated with the media institute in Ljubljana. He was one of the first artists
to become involved with Net art. Cosic sees his Net projects as states of final
incompleteness; and so calls them documents, not art works. At the festival his
Website 'No Land's Man' is presented.
Prof. Sean Cubitt http://www.livjm.ac.uk/~mccscubi
Has written two books on video and electronic media, 'Timeshift' (1991) and
'Videography' (1993), as well as articles for Screen and Third Text, among others. His

latest book, 'Digital Aesthetics', comes out in August. He is associated with Liverpool
Polytech and is active in that city for the media organization Fact, now hosting the
ISEA 98 conference.
Timothy Druckrey
Curator and writer who works with photography, electronic media and theory. He
organizes seminars and exhibitions and is editor of, among others, Electronic Culture,
Aperture 1996. In collaboration with Gretchen Bender he edited 'Culture on the Brink:
Ideologies of Technology' (1994) a book in the famous series from the Dia Center for
the Arts in New York.
Alexander Hahn
Visual artist. He started his career by making video tapes and video installations such
as the four-panelled 'The Kircher Itinerary' (1990-1994). His work is shown regularly at
the World Wide Video Festival and this year we can see a video dance performance
he made in collaboration with Niki Good.
John Hanhardt
As curator of film and video he was associated with the Whitney Museum of American
Art for quite some time where he set up exhibitions with, among others, Yoko Ono,
Nam June Paik and was responsible for the film and video sections of the Whitney
Biennials. He is now associated with the Solomon Guggenheim Museum (also New
York). One of his most recent exhibitions was 'Rooms with a View'. Hanhardt edited
the book 'Video Culture. A critical investigation' (1986).
Philip Pocock http://king.dom.de/equator
Writer and artist. Studied at the New York University Film School, working mainly with
photography. Was associated with the ICP in New York as instructor. Together with
John Zinsser he started the Journal of Contemporary Art. He has lived in Europe
since 1991. In collaboration with Felix S. Huber, Udo Noll, Florian Wenz and others he
set up the Internet project 'A Description of the Equator and Sometherlands'. An
experimental, text-based and cinema-related project that is reworked daily by Website
visitors. This Site was selected for Documenta X.
Michael Punt
Film historian and artist. He is associated with the Centre for Advanced Inquiry into
Interactive Art and head of Postgraduate Studies in Art and Design at the University of
Wales College in Newport. He is also editor-in-chief of Leonardo Digital Reviews. His
recent publications deal with the relationship between early cinema and digital
technology.
Prof. Dr. Hans Schwarz http://www1.zkm.de/d/c/ma/schwarz.html
Director of the Media Kunstmuseum and of the Mediathek of the ZKM in Karlsruhe.
Hans Peter Schwarz contributed hugely to the establishment of this prestigious media
institute. In addition to his work at the ZKM, he lectures at the university.
Prof. Dr. Yvonne Spielmann

Lecturer in Media Studies (art department) at the University of Siegen. Professor

Spielmann lectures and writes on the experimental and avant-garde in film, the visual
arts and electronic media. She also organizes international conferences such as Arts
and Media (Frankfurt, 1991) and Images-Media Images-Images in Mediarts (Siegen,
1998). Her book, 'Intermedia, The System of Peter Greenaway' will appear this year.
nelly@mecano.org