Organizers: «Interfest», Information and Research Center for Media Art and Culture «Media Art Lab»
The sites of Media Forum: Russian Filmmakers' Union,  Central Manege, "Alibi" club.

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Media Forum is now in its second year which is certainly no anniversary. However, this brings its organizers both a great happiness and some significant difficulties. We are happy because the pilot issue of the Media Forum 2000 programme claims now in 2001 the status of an event that has asserted its rights to its own aethetics and its own audience. Media Forum 2000 mainly aimed at apprising both professionals and audience of the very fact that media culture actually existed. We have placed media culture into the official concept of new screen culture within the terminology of contemporary cinema.

Realizing that behind this concept there is a cultural phenomenon probably not known to the general viewing public, we nevertheless expanded the field of our experiment. Taking a certain risk, we decided to test the viability of experimental art in the environment that makes no allowance for age or the radicalism of ideology, aethetics and technology.

First of all we have put the emphasis upon the communication technologies. While the film industry production is targeted at the “passive” audience (whose inner activity awakens only at the moment of catharsis, i.e. of empathy and purification) we deal with the “active” consumer, with the new generation of art opponents. This generation plays an active role in its perception of cultural products. Participation or interactivity in the sense of contributing to the structural logic of a work is most important for them.

The following significant distinctions of the Media Forum 2001 should be noted: the presentation of the three International Festival programmes in video, TV and Internet respectively. Every festival programme has to deal with the chance factor so the important thing is that the festival expands art’s habitat. Last year’s Media Forum featured the classics of video art from prestigiousWestern collections together with Russian video art classics. This year there is going to be much more... The programme includes art works produced in 2000-2001 from the USA, Western and Eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, Australia and the Commonwealth, as well as such exotic places as Hong Kong, India, etc.

There is more to Media Forum 2001 than just showing unique programmes from the largest Western collections and thus causing a sensation in the cultural life of the country. It is the Moveable Feast, with meetings between interesting people, with the interaction of art and “active” audience.

Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) is held since 1959 and year by year it has been becoming one of most respectable and prestigious film-forums in the world. In 1973 MIFF was registered by international Federation of Film-producers associations (FIAPF) as the «A» class alongside with film festival in Berlin, Cannes, San-Sebastian, Karlovy Vary and Venice.

This is the second year when Media Forum is organized in the frame of the Moscow International Film Festival, and, as the result of the acceptance of the role of new media in audiovisual art and culture, it was immediately introduced in the official program of MIFF and offers special accreditation to the guests, participants and journalists who are over 300.

This forum is the first event of such a scale in Russia, and it reveals a new sight at the world of new media culture and new screen technologies to the professionals, viewers and critics.

The Forum includes a unique opportunity to see the works of famous video artists, that has become that classic of contemporary culture. The task of Media Forum is to show the connection between traditional and modern branches of screen culture, the impact of technological innovations on visual arts.

Contacts
Tel.: 007 095 959 17 05
Tel./Fax: 007 095 959 09 92
E-mail: mediaforum@mediaartlab.ru
URL: http://mediaforum.mediaartlab.ru/