Lecture by Oliver Grau (Germany) "Media Arts Challenge for Our Societies"

 
26.02.2014
 
School of Arts and Cultural Heritage

Over the last thirty years Media art has evolved into a vivid contemporary factor, Digital Art became the art of our time but has still not arrived in the core cultural institutions of our societies. Although there are well attended festivals worldwide, well funded collaborative projects, numerous artist written articles, discussion forums and emerging database documentation projects, media art is still rarely collected by museums, not included or supported within the mainframe of art history and nearly inaccessible for the non northern public and their scholars. Thus, we witness the erasure of a significant portion of the cultural memory of our recent history. It is no exaggeration that we have to face a total loss of digital contemporary art and that works that originated approximately 10 years ago can normally not be shown anymore. The aim of the lecture is to create an understanding that the present image revolution which uses indeed new technologies and has also developed a large number of so far unknown visual expressions can not be conceived without our image history. Media Art needs as many bridges as possible into our societies: Conferences, Text Repositories, Database Projects developing collective documentation and preservation strategies - new thesauri, new curricula for the next generation of teachers and collectors.

Oliver Grau (Germany) - media art historian and theoretician.
Professor, Head of the Department for Image Science at Danube University, Krems (Austria). Professor Grau lectured in numerous parts of the world, received various awards and is widely published (12 languages). Recent works include Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (MIT-Press 2003), Mediale Emotionen (Fischer, 2005) and MediaArtHistories (MIT-Press 2007). His research focuses on the history of media art, the history of immersion and emotions; and the history, idea, and culture of telepresence, genetic art, and artificial intelligence. He was head of the German Science Foundation project Immersive Art, whose team since 1998 developed the first international Database of Digital Art: www.virtualart.at now based at Danube University. Grau directs as well the development of the Database of the Graphic Collection Goettweig, Austrias largest private graphic collection, which contains 30.000 masterprints from Duerer to Klimt: http://dbw.donau-uni.ac.at/gssg. Grau taught at Humboldt University Berlin and served as exchange professor at several international universities. He is an advisory board member of numerous international journals (e.g. IMAGES, journal for visual studies in Southeast Europe) and was elected as member of the Young Academy of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the Leopoldina. Oliver Grau was director of Refresh! First International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science, and Technology, Banff 2005. www.mediaarthistory.org.inf