I have been thinking about the idea of a festival quite a lot. Beverley Hood wrote: re transmediale
All in all it was one of the better festivals > I've been to, focused in one place so you could keep track of the programme > and also get to meet people and find out what folk are up to, which as ever > is often more interesting than the official programme. It is indeed the case that often the edges smell more fragrant than the core. Mark Lawton wrote: "this is no more or less so than "art" festivals per se, or even exhibitions writ large, attendance of which can be equated with being a football fan (apart from the obvious class differences) - you dutifully plod along time after time to what is a usually less than edifying and often wholly disheartening experience, but, occasionally, you have your heart and breath taken away by moments of grace, beauty, courage and if you're really lucky, outright poetic genius." So I wonder what we might actually do to make something happen? We are all very astute at spotting the problems so that's not a bad start.It would seem to me that there are two possible models; either to work together and get an organising force in- which might mean the power of a curator to patrol and validate the borders of new ism- or to work together and become an artist run space of the net with realworld events occurring at regular intervals. These events would focus on the potential for new forms of production to be seen and felt around the city in new ways- projections, windows, sound pieces hidden amidst the architecture of the everyday. Work which did not feel right on the web would complement and contrast with ongoing strategy of new Media Scotland now. This work style would have the advantage of feeling social and able to change focus from the local to the international.Artists could develop joint projects, overcoming the dumb "I-me-the artist-individual-genius" nonsense. The drawback is that it would be hard to get funding for something inherently unpredictable, and it might turn out like transmission on the web with phases of great energy followed by periods of lassitude and low expectations. Or an organic synthesis of the two notions above would mnake a lot of sense... Perhaps we should start by thinking about the flexibility inherent in new ways of production: we need a similar tactical flexibility in getting work out there. So speaking for myself, I think it has to have an international outlook. Playing to the strengths of how scotland is perceived, I think it's as important to get Scottish artists showing in Europe and beyond as to have a show in the usual contexts. After all, place isn't so important in terms of base camp. why not have an ambitious <ambit> by having work from Scotland presented live in Europe, while simultaneously bringing theorists ideas people and international artists to scotland? Only get them away from the idea of presenting a bog-standard academic style talk, and get some engagement going! This is just to get some discussion focussed on what we might actually start to do... We have an astonishing amount of skills between us, so we can surely put some of our energy to use in getting into a bigger playpen! regards from Gair ------------------------------------------------- a m b i t : networking media arts in scotland post: [EMAIL PROTECTED] info: send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and write "info ambit" in the message body -------------------------------------------------
