technology

European Souvenirs at The Mapping Festival and DOKUFEST.

April 19, 2013 By Doc Next Network Leave a Comment

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After shows in Vienna, Amsterdam, Bilbao and Seville, European Souvenirs will be staged at the renowned Mapping Festival for VISUAL AUDIO & DEVIANT ELECTRONICS (Geneva, 2-12 May 2013). Then we are off to DOKUFEST in Kosovo!

European Souvenirs is Doc Next’s live cinema performance. Delving into audiovisual materials from leading European archives, Doc Next Network brings you European Souvenirs that offer a trip down memory lane. Remixing music, photography and film, the European Souvenirs artistic group re-examines the prevailing imagery of immigrants across European communities and re-maps Europe visually, geographically and conceptually. European Souvenirs is a major live-cinema performance by artists Karol Rakowski (PL), Barış Gürsel (TR), Farah Rahman (NL), Malaventura (ES) and Noriko Okaku (JP/UK).

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The Mapping Festival is a multidisciplinary festival dedicated to audiovisual arts and digital cultures. As the sole broadcasting space of this magnitude in Switzerland, the festival is now also recognised internationally, and this with the richness of programming. Mapping Festival offers every year audiovisual performances, installations, clubbing parties, live performances, architectural mapping, as well as workshops and conferences. Thanks to this unique diversity aspect, the festival is recognised throughout the world as an major event, a real experimental meeting space, for creation and exchange with its innovative thinking in the field of audiovisual arts. Now in its eighth editions, the Mapping Festival has steadily grown and has become one of the leading events of its kind in Europe.

European Souvenirs will be staged at The Mapping Festival on Thursday 9 May. Tickets here.

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After the performance in Geneva, European Souvenirs continues their tour to Pristina and Prizren in Kosovo, where the show will be part of the special Europe Week programme. On 10 May, you can see the show in Club Punkt in Pristina at 21:00 and on 11 May, the European Souvenirs team will give a workshop in the framework of the festival Dokufest in Prizren.

Do you want European Souvenirs at your own festival, seminar or event? Yes you can! Book us here.

Filed Under: Network Activities, Remapping Europe Tagged With: European Souvenirs, history, immigration, media, migration, remix, technology

Expanded Education – The English Edition

March 19, 2013 By Doc Next Network Leave a Comment

Somewhere between a fork and a spin-off, the notebook Expanded Education – The English Edition compiles a series of materials that revolve around the notion of expanded education and are related to the book that Doc Next Network hub partner ZEMOS98 published on the subject.

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Education has always been one of the core themes of the ZEMOS98 project. Not just any old education, but the kind of education that is inseparably bound up with communication and that connects to and networks with other concepts such as audio-visuals, art and experimentation. Education as an element of on-going personal growth, that is not limited to one particular stage of life. Education as play, a way of unravelling the media theatre. Education as an open source operating system that turns us into critical citizens. Education as a game played by all individuals, from all eras. Education as a utopia for a culture-sharing society. When we talk about expanded education, we are not talking about a new concept or something that has just popped out of the blue.

Some of the contributors to this very book have been talking about expanded educational practices under different names for a long time now, and if we trace its genealogy – the history of the discipline known as ‘media literacy’ as well as other contemporary practices, projects and concepts (media education, edupunk, invisible learning, p2pedagogy, etc.) – we can see ‘expanded education’ as simply an umbrella term for “educational practices, ideas or methodologies that are ‘out of place.’” But even so, it remains a paradoxical term. As a concept, ‘expanded education’ may well be doomed from the start, because: what are the limits of expanded education?

In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct piece of software. The term often implies not merely a developmental branch, but a split in the developer community, a form of schism.

In media, a spin-off is a radio program, television program, video game, or any narrative work, derived from one or more already existing works, that focuses, in particular, in more detail on one aspect of that original work (e.g. a particular topic, character, or event). A spin-off may be called a sidequel when it exists in the same chronological frame of time as its predecessor work. (Wikipedia)

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If it has limits… wouldn’t it then cease to be ‘expanded’? It may be nothing more than a catchy, evocative term, but the essential thing remains: expanded education is about transforming society, re-thinking relational systems, questioning mass communication paradigms, and constantly experimenting with formats and methodologies for training and education. At the same time, if the term does catch on and its usage continues to grow as much as it has over the past two years, we should make one thing clear from the start: it is common property. ‘Expanded Education’ invokes an idea, and every organisation, individual or collective can activate or deactivate it as they see fit. In any case, it will be necessary to make a distinction between those who use it with political and/or critical intent, and those who use it as a marketing strategy to attract ‘new audiences’.

ZEMOS is part of Doc Next Network

This project – translating and reissuing an existing book in English – emerged in response to the work that we have been engaged in for two years now as part of the Doc Next Network. It is also a contribution to our work within the network, and we hope that it will be a springboard from which to continue to imagine new educational and training processes that allow us to invent and adopt practices from the informal world and take them into the formal sphere, and vice versa.

Go to the website of ZEMOS98.

Filed Under: Network Activities, Uncategorized Tagged With: education, generations, history, media, technology, workshop

Download report ‘Learning To See’.

March 4, 2013 By Doc Next Network Leave a Comment

How is the function of film/photography changing and their working methods?
How to use the visual tools in a conscious, critical and thoughtful manner?
How to follow the technological change wisely for the sake of promoting social change?
How to apply pictures in social and cultural projects?

Questions like the above made us organise a Visual Seminar – an opportunity to meet for persons working with pictures, practices of looking and the contemporary culture in the broad sense: practitioners (animators/educators, authors) and theoreticians (anthropologists, sociologists, researchers) operating within the field of visual culture.

Where did the idea come from?

We met to examine changing forms of education, the reasons for using visual tools, the discourse devoted to the circulation of pictures in the modern world and the meaning of gaze as the instrument to make visible what was marginalised before.

One of the objectives of the Visual Seminar was to reach beyond the habits we follow during our everyday work of animators/ educators/ coordinators. We are often so absorbed in implementing the subsequent steps of our projects, we find it difficult to ask oneself questions not included in grant application forms. We decided to provide some time for reflexion and critical reassessment of our work and methods, the meaning of which is rarely called in question.

What happened?

The Visual Seminar was held on 27-30 September 2012 in Oczyszczalnia (Regowo, nearby Warsaw).

We invited seventeen practitioners to work together with – persons who educate, animate and coordinate projects featuring photography, film, art or network. The participants were both members of large institutions, founders of small non-governmental organisations, as well as „freelancers”. What they all have in common is the fact of applying tools and practices related to visuality in its broad sense and the readiness to reexamine the concept and the meaning of “visual education”. Additionally we invited visual culture anthropologists, sociologists, new media researchers, education theoreticians, artists and curators. During our four-day intense and important work packed with challenges and questions we listened to stimulating lectures, involved in fierce debates, participated in workshops focused on constructive criticism of „good practices”, examining pictures from the Internet and film clips from YouTube, developing conceptual experiments with the use of a photo camera and the Net. Finally, we summed up our experience in a way that would give rise to questions and new unexpected conclusions.

What is the website?

The Internet publication has come to life thanks to the practitioners’ willingness to share their experience and thoughts and the theoreticians’ readiness to present their research perspective in the context of visual education. It is pieced together from particular texts – it is not the index that structures it, but the questions tackled by the authors and authoresses in a variety of ways.

The form of the publication is intended to encourage the visitors to use it in an active and participatory way; moving from one question to another you can mark your own path and the order of reading, whereas the tab “Attach” makes it possible to offer your own topic of discussion or your own original text to be published on the website.

We wish to thank our authors and authoress for collaborative work on the concept and the content of the publication!

Texts in English

The website „Wizjonerzy” is arranged round questions. It is intended to inspire reflection, questions concerning one’s individual work and sharing observations related to changing reality focused on the visual. The texts written by practitioners and theoreticians constitute attempts to search for answers – not necessarily homogeneous or final.

It is therefore questions and quotations that make moving on the website possible – fragments which lead to full versions of texts.

We are planning a full, English version of the website. At the moment we can provide only an excerpt. We invite you to read chosen texts and learn the questions and quotations that structure our publication.

Download the report “Learning to See – Visual Seminar the Manual”