"Archiving" Participants

ABSTRACT
Ukrainian media art has more than twenty-year history. Whether the media arts in Ukraine are an independent artistic phenomenon or just a phantom pursuing the global model – is difficult to say. On one hand, they are steadily growing and currently it represents a large variety of genres. On the other hand, there are many unsolved issues and problems – a lack of official specialized institutions, festivals, archives and outlets for future theorists and practitioners of media art. One of the biggest problems is the lack of special education in the practice and theory of media art. Only a few universities in Ukraine teach history and theory of media art. This spring will start the first media art school in Ukraine, which has been initiated not by state educational art institution, but by NGO. But the biggest problem, at least for me as a curator of Opening archive of Ukrainian media artб is the problem of a full archive, which would have the status, institutional and financial support. Unique video works captured on VHS could disappear forever in the next few months. Digitized copies in unprofessional terms have not enough good quality. However, despite the mentioned problems, the media art in Ukraine today is represented in genres of video art, video installation, interactive installation, kinetic sculpture, net.art, sms art, pixel art, excel art etc. But video art still dominates as technically the easiest genre. The desire to create media art objects by the young Ukrainian artists is supported by the existence of regional (it is interesting that in Kyiv such one is absent at the moment) festivals, which include the program dedicated to media art. But galleries still does not dare to work with media artists because their work is still difficult to sell in Ukrainian art market.

BIO
PhD
Assistant professor of National Pedagogical Dragomanov University (Kiev, Ukraine).
Curator of Open archive of Ukrainian media art (Foundation CCA, Kiev).
Curator of “New Art School: media art for practioners”.