"New Imagery" Participants

ABSTRACT
Documentation of media art in various forms, be it formal and standardized – for example the Variable Media Questionnaire (Depocas, Ippolito & Jones 2003), the database virtualart.at (Grau 2004) or V2_’s Capturing Unstable Media Conceptual Model (Fauconnier & Frommé 2003) – or informal and subjective – like the project Botaniq (Vanegas 2010) – was and still is an important method for preservation of media art. The activity of documentation produces various forms of metadata about artistic projects, from basic tombstone information, technical requirements, artist’s intents, media documentations to documentations of individual experiences in diverse forms. Thus we are building up repositories of potential meaning and sources for many possible stories. But the data needs to be activated in order to create new knowledge, new meanings and new experiences on the basis of the archived artistic projects. Departing from my concept of “Digital Mediation of Art”, which builds on the theoretical concepts of “Critical Mediation of Art” (Moersch 2011) and the “Participatory Museum” (Simon 2010) and analyzes emerging digital and digitally enhanced interfaces for art and culture, I will explore, how different forms of digital media can be used to co-creatively transform existing archive data on media art projects into new knowledge about and new or enhanced experiences with and on basis of these projects and their metadata. The examples will cover the possibilities of participative environments for data-driven mediation on site – for example within an exhibition space or in public space – as well as online.

BIO
Florian Wiencek (B.Sc. in Digital Media – 2006; M.A. in Art and Cultural Mediation – 2009;
University of Bremen) is currently PhD fellow at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany (Visual
Communication and Expertise) and visiting lecturer at the department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at
Duke University (Durham NC, USA).

Before he served as Steering Committee Member of the Research Center “Visual Communication and
Expertise” (Jacobs University Bremen) and was working as research associate in the BMBF-funded project
„Visual–Film–Discourse“ (Jacobs University Bremen) on the categorization and image typologies of news
images and the use of image archives and -databases in news production.

Moreover he has worked as freelance graphic- and webdesigner and as curator / project manager /
designer in several exhibition projects. His main research interests are digital mediation of art and culture,
digital archives, media- and hybrid art, digital culture and communication as well as co-creative and
participatory methods of knowledge generation and education.