XIII Media Forum of 34^th Moscow International Film Festival

Media Forum 2012: "The Immersions. Towards Tactile Cinema"

June 22 – August 19, 2012

Organized by: MediArtLab Centre for Art and Culture, The Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, MediaFest
Venue: The Ekaterina Cultural Foundation

Project Partners: The British Council, Mondriaan Foundation, ARTPLAY Design Center (Moscow), Museum of Cinema (Moscow), Centre Pompidou (Paris), The Museum of St. Petersburg Avant-Garde (Mikhail Matyushin's House)

Curator of the exhibition project: Olga Shishko, Art Director of MIFF Media Forum

Nowadays so familiar to viewer model of a feature film with a narrative basis and two-three hour length has been established worldwide. Presenting principally different cineforms, XIII Media Forum acquaints the viewers with the quite another cinema: a tactile one, which can be touched, an interactive one – where a viewer can take an active part or cinema viewing as a meditation experience. In the frameworks of the Media Forum presentations of various forms of cine-immersions as a basis for creating cinema of the future will be held.

At the beginning of the XXth century cinema was a space of experiments to both avant-garde film pioneers (Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Hans Richter) and avant-garde artists (Marcel Duchamp, Mikhail Matyushin, Kazimir Malevich) Later Salvador Dali came up with the idea of accompanying screening with a tactile experience, which would comment on the action on screen, videoart founder Nam June Paik worked with the film image as a meditation object. Cineforms were transformed by the most important contemporary artist.

Cineindustry of the XXth century refused the invention of new forms and technology for selling commercially more validated products. Today the new technologies of online distribution, watching filmes on workpads and YouTube resulted to "grand cinema's" revival of interest in experimental forms. The changes in viewer perception structure have at last made relevant and commercially demanded everything that artists and cinema pioneers had already suggested a hundred years ago.

The central event of this year's Media Forum - "The Impressions. Towards the Tactile Cinema" exhibition consists of several sections each belonging to a certain type of director’s approach to working with screen and viewer.

The first section "Pure Cinema" is a reaction to art for arts’ sake. Here screen is used as canvas, actually presenting cinema as an apotheosis of painting. Works by Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matyushin, Nam June Paik, Ken Jacobs, Paul Clipson, Hans Richter, Konstantin Adzher, Oleg and Olga Ponomarev are presented.

Attractions' Montage, the second section, is based on the "4D cinema" concept invented initially by Sergei Eisenstein and presents his followers: Pia Tikka, Herz Frank, Alexei Isaev and Elena Gorbacheva.

The third section, Tactile Cinema, is about filmes that can be "watched with hands", starting with Salvador Dali's ideas. Dali had quite another vision of the Chien Andalou realization. This is followed by Peter Weibel’s and Valie Export's "gripping watching" (beside which works by the TOT-ART group, Valery Ayzenberg, Ekaterina Pavlova and Constantin Semin are presented).

The forth section explores the Machine vision idea by Woody and Steina Vasulkas - a device that can replace both the film director and the viewer, supplanting individual and inaccurate human vision objective gaze of camera itself. Here Ken Jacobs, Dina Karaman and Alexandra Kuznetsova are also presented.

The Interactive Cinema that unfolds with viewers participation is the fifth section comprised of works by Zbignev Rybczy?ski, Chris Hales, Boris Debackere, Perry Bard, Mark Amerika and Olga Kisseleva.

The exhibition space of the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation became a field for courageous cine-video experiments, where reconstruction of historical materials and demonstration of the newest works of contemporary authors was followed by the creative process that involved young directors, artists and spectators. The results will help to understand the changes that have taken place in the mentalities of a viewer and in the art of cinema, the changes which might expect "the grand cinema" in the nearest future.

Apart from the exhibition, the Media Forum 2012 programme includes workshops, lectures and seminars by artists that took place at the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation and ARTPLAY Design Centre. Chris Hales, Boris Debackere and Parry Bard not only told the history of interactive, tactile and haptic cinema, but have acquainted the audience with the technique and methods of work in this sphere. They have been leading the autonomous creative projects of those who wish to participate in their session.

In XXIth centaury when as it seems, with the advent of technological progress, cineindustry reached highest technical excellence, cinema opens it's completely new, unfamiliar, endlessly exciting faces. From a passive observer a viewer become a participant and even co-author of the cinema, which carry on an active dialog with the art.

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