Invited curator |

A selection of works produced at one of the most important research centers for audio-visual arts in Europe The Academy of Media Arts, founded in October 1990, was the first German institution to devote itself to the development and teaching of a vast array of artistic creations within the realm of audio-visual arts. Today it is an internationally acclaimed institution and concentrates on researching and teaching what it calls "art in an era of technological production". Professors and students alike dedicate themselves in a joint search for the interaction between artistic imagination and historic and theoretical knowledge, so as to obtain individual expressions through new media. A partial result of this process can be evaluated at Videobrasil in a presentation curated by Nils Röller - a professor at the Academy - who put together a collection of the most significant work produced by the institution.

*The curator attended the festival and gave a lecture on his curatorship before the exhibition.

artists

Works

Curator's text Nils Röller, 1998

Academy of Media Arts

Has the film already started? (Maurice Lemaitre / 1951)

Film is in its starting position as young men and women at the Academy of Media Arts in Köln correlate their expressions with the possibilities of audio-visual machines. Motion pictures here are an industry in the Latin sense of the word as they relate to individual effort rather than an organize economic structure. It is a commitment to test different media and to find out if and how expressions are created by technology. Computers connected through the Internet, video-machines and editing stations allow the integration of high and low-tech images. Discovered footage gains new attention: sound, words, and images - retrieved from servers in different parts of the world - are reanimated and set into motion as well as frames of stratched films which are painted over and manipulated in film courses without cameras. Music is the invisible force in ths imagery.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "XII Videobrasil - Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica" [XII Videobrasil - International Electronic Art Festival]: from September 22 to October 11, 1998, pp. 48, São Paulo, SP, 1998.