Begint de wetenschap zich eindelijk te ontworstelen aan de houdgreep van uitgevers? Publiceren in open-access-tijdschriften neemt immers flink toe. Tijdens het seminar Toegang tot de toekomst werd de balans opgemaakt van het Open Access Jaar 2009. "Verplichten helpt niet, verleiden wel", vindt NWO-directeur Jos Engelen.
DOCUMENT
As the revolutions across the Arab world that came to a head in 2011 devolved into civil war and military coup, representation and history acquired a renewed and contested urgency. The capacities of the internet have enabled sharing and archiving in an unprecedented fashion. Yet, at the same time, these facilities institute a globally dispersed reinforcement and recalibration of power, turning memory and knowledge into commodified and copyrighted goods. In The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, activists, artists, filmmakers, producers, and scholars examine which images of struggle have been created, bought, sold, repurposed, denounced, and expunged. As a whole, these cultural productions constitute an archive whose formats are as diverse as digital repositories looked after by activists, found footage art documentaries, Facebook archive pages, art exhibits, doctoral research projects, and ‘controversial’ or ‘violent’ protest videos that are abruptly removed from YouTube at the click of a mouse by sub-contracted employees thousands of kilometers from where they were uploaded. The Arab Archive investigates the local, regional, and international forces that determine what materials, and therefore which pasts, we can access and remember, and, conversely, which pasts get erased and forgotten.
MULTIFILE
This repository is based on the media art and research networking conference MetaForumX - PermaCrises, co-organized by Flóra Barkóczi, Geert Lovink, Áron Lődi, Diana McCarty, Zsolt Miklósvölgyi and János Sugár. The event was held from October 25-26, 2024, at Trafó House of Contemporary Arts in Budapest and the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts.
LINK
This Professional Doctorate (PD) project explores the intersection of artistic research, digital heritage, and interactive media, focusing on the reimagining of medieval Persian bestiaries through high dark fantasy and game-making. The research investigates how the process of creation with interactive 3D media can function as a memory practice. At its core, the project treats bestiaries—pre-modern collections of real and imaginary classifications of the world—as a window into West and Central Asian flora, fauna, and the landscape of memory, serving as both repositories of knowledge and imaginative, cosmological accounts of the more-than-human world. As tools for exploring non-human pre-modern agency, bestiaries offer a medium of speculative storytelling, and explicate the unstable nature of memory in diasporic contexts. By integrating these themes into an interactive digital world, the research develops new methodologies for artistic research, treating world-building as a technique of attunement to heritage. Using a practice-based approach, the project aligns with MERIAN’s emphasis on "research in the wild," where artistic and scientific inquiries merge in experimental ways. It engages with hard-core game mechanics, mythopoetic decompressed environmental storytelling, and hand-crafted detailed intentional world-building to offer new ways of interacting with the past that challenges nostalgia and monumentalization. How can a cultural practice do justice to other, more experimental forms of remembering and encountering cultural pasts, particularly those that embrace the interconnections between human and non-human entities? Specifically, how can artistic practice, through the medium of a virtual, bestiary-inspired dark fantasy interactive media, allow for new modes of remembering that resist idealized and monumentalized histories? What forms of inquiry can emerge when technology (3D media, open-world interactive digital media) becomes a tool of attention and a site of experimental attunement to cosmological heritage?
